About Foxhay

Foxhay began as an annual project to produce good cider from apple to juice to cider at the scale of a few thousand bottles in the Cambridgeshire village of Rampton.

We made cider for the first time in 2020 on a very small home scale, a few dozen bottles. It was fun and it worked out OK. So we wondered how tricky it would be to scale up a bit – to produce something that other people might like to drink. So for the next growing season, we turned up the gas and went for about 2000 litres. For our cider making experiment we decided to use a mixture of apples grown locally in East Anglia and apples grown in the west of England where cider apple varieties are traditionally grown. We wanted to see what a cider blend between these two regions would turn out like.

This part of Cambridgeshire has always been a big fruit growing area in the past and there are quite a few old orchards with some interesting varieties that are mostly dessert and cooking apples. Together these will make a lighter cider – both in colour and in taste. Fortunately neighbours and local farmers were very supportive in offering apples that they didn’t need. The 2021 growing season was fairly good near us so we were able to get together a pretty hefty quantity of local apples to go into our cider experiment, enough for about 800 litres of juice!

To source the west Country apples, we turned to Herefordshire close to the border between England and Wales. At first, we were intending to buy apples from the farm and process them ourselves but when they offered to supply the juice directly (saving all of that pressing), we jumped at it – saved loads of time. One day in early November we drove over and came back with 1200 litres of freshly pressed juice from Dabinett apples.

That 2021 vintage turned out to be a real success and from there we have carried on the annual project cycle producing Foxhay English Cider – our pure homage to English cider making tradition.

For the latest growing season we are producing about 4000 litres so (in the scheme of things) it is still a tiny enterprise but that gives us lots of time to get it right and make no compromises to ensure a pure and beautiful product.

We hope you enjoy it!