Fowey Valley are makers of a range of exquisitely crafted fine spirits and ciders.

Fowey Valley is a cidery and distillery in Cornwall that manufactures ciders from fresh West Country apples.

What makes us so different?

​Once upon a time the Fowey valley was bedecked with blossom. The Victorians would take special boat trips just to marvel at the blooming. Today Fowey Valley are one the few orchards left. We keep busy upholding the tradition of cidermaking in the valley and producing award winning spirits. All our ciders are made solely from fresh West Country apples and our spirits are all created from scratch- none of the usual industrial alcohol.

​25 years ago, Barrie Gibson started making Cider. Barrie and his wife Geraldine, only had 6 trees and the apples that had friends brought to them. They pressed the apples by hand and paid helpers with bottles of cider.  In 2012, confident that they had crafted the process, they went commercial and established Fowey Valley Cidery in a beautiful orchard in Golant, on the banks of the river Fowey in Cornwall. Working in an old out-building, with a small and dedicated team, they took three years to perfect their flagship product; a multi award-winning, dry 7.5% champagne-style cider.

Today, our product range has expanded, the team has grown, and we have moved into bigger premises.  A lot has changed since those first bottles twenty-five years ago. But Barrie’s pride in producing great cider and distilling exceptional spirits is just as strong. Everyone at Fowey Valley is confident that whichever one of our products you buy, it will live up to the excellent reviews and deliver on taste and total satisfaction.

​We’ve been masterfully crafting the best Cornish cider available for 25 years, and we plan to keep our place as Cornwall’s favourite cider.

Mass market ciders aren’t often real cider at all – as in made solely from freshly pressed apples. It’s very common for commercial cider to be made from two thirds sugar water and one third reconstituted apple concentrate with added chemicals and flavourings.

​We only use fresh apples from our own orchard and others close by and nothing else. We wash the apples three times and reject any we wouldn’t eat. We mill the apples into small pieces and then press this ‘pomace’ in our new belt press.  About 65% of the this is juice, which is then pumped into our 1,500-litre tanks. At the end of each day we add yeast and put it under an airlock and it is pretty much left to its own devices for the best part of a year.

When we need the tanks back for the next year’s cider we send some off for bottling, our Castledore, and we bottle the rest in Champagne bottles with a small amount of sugar. This is left for another year, for a secondary fermentation to take place. The yeast works on the sugar to make alcohol and carbon dioxide, gradually building up pressure.

The magic happens!

During the third year, the bottles are inverted in what the French call ‘pupitres’ and every day or so, they are twisted to encourage the sediment to creep down through the bottle and come to rest on the inside of the crown cap. When that happens the bottles are chilled to 2C. The cap and about an inch of the neck are then put into a freezer, which runs at -27C. We open the bottle and the carbon dioxide created by the secondary fermentation forces out an ice plug containing any remaining sediment.