Why don't beer breweries also ferment cider?
- Thread starter Conners
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It makes more sense to make beer as its far more popular.
Beer
The British beer industry is worth £18.4bn, more than a third of the booze market. At last year’s World Cup, 14 million extra pints were drunk during the group stages alone.
Cider
Though well behind beer, the cider industry in Britain is worth £1.9bn. Sales rose 4 per cent last year, with more than 200 million glasses now drunk in our pub gardens every summer.
https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/a29572864/beer-versus-cider/
Beer
The British beer industry is worth £18.4bn, more than a third of the booze market. At last year’s World Cup, 14 million extra pints were drunk during the group stages alone.
Cider
Though well behind beer, the cider industry in Britain is worth £1.9bn. Sales rose 4 per cent last year, with more than 200 million glasses now drunk in our pub gardens every summer.
https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/a29572864/beer-versus-cider/
But that doesn't explain why you don't see breweries fermenting cider. If it were just down to sales figures then cidery's wouldn't open in the first place.
Let me put it another way, all those breweries with their own tap rooms. They often have a guest cider on because they don't make one themselves. That's evidence of demand. Are they not tempted to make their own or is there a technical reason why they don't?
I thought it was spot on so will leave it there.
Well why don't cider makers also make beer then, then if that's the case?
![BREWING THERMOMETER STICKERS ACCURATELY MONITOR FERMENTING BEER & WINE LIQUID TEMPERATURES 5PCS HOME BREW SPIRITS WINE LCD ADHESIVE [US]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/311DDjo2X3L._SL500_.jpg)
Do you know if they use the same equipment?
I'm trying to work out whether there's a potential for cross-contamination that might prevent this from being a feasible idea.
Sadfield
Landlord.
Different schedules and process. Cider is seasonal, and fermented in larger quantities at one time of year and then requires storage to ensure constant supply to customers over the year. Beer is brewed on constant rotation. The two aren't really compatible as you can't ferment beer if your vessels are all storing cider. Sure, a brewery could do one beer sized batch of cider when the apples are picked, but isn't worth having the pressing equipment.
Could a beer brewery ferment a cider from concentrate to get around this? Or, are we looking at a rubbish end product?
Sadfield
Landlord.
Possibly, but it would be like a asking a chef to used tinned ingredients out of season. They could do it, but most likely wouldn't want to. Far easier to leave cider production to the people with a passion for the product.
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Probably the biggest single thing is just the difference in philosophy - cider is primarily a seasonal agricultural product of the countryside, beer an industrial product of cities. People just tend to be interested in one or the other, and both need experience and skill to do well, certainly at a commercial scale. Not many individuals have that combination of skills and interest.
There's also a whole different set of paperwork wrt HMRC etc, the tax system works differently and so on.
And there's not too much overlap in equipment - beer is about making lots of hot water for a mash, cider needs fruit presses.
Yes there are some contamination issues with bringing apples covered in all sorts of fungi and bugs into a brewery that is trying to keep things fairly sanitary.
But mostly it's just about people. It always comes down to people. And money (or lack of it, in the case of most small breweries/cideries - heck, even Cloudwater are rumoured to be making redundancies at the moment).
I don't know how it is done in Britain, but I know how it is done in France.
"Cidreries" all have their own apple (and most also pear) orchards, with different types of apples, which they harvest at different times after summer, and then let them ripen further, until December. Then they press them, gather the juice and start fermenting. Probably unlike Britain, most also keep a part of the cider for distillation into Calvados, and have a bunch of special barrels to condition it.
Like people said before, it is indeed seasonal. And it is also on the country side. You need an orchard for a special selection of apples for cider. There are probably also family recipes.
While brewing, barley can be harvested in different seasons, and stored and malted, and this gives a constant supply throughout the year.
"Cidreries" all have their own apple (and most also pear) orchards, with different types of apples, which they harvest at different times after summer, and then let them ripen further, until December. Then they press them, gather the juice and start fermenting. Probably unlike Britain, most also keep a part of the cider for distillation into Calvados, and have a bunch of special barrels to condition it.
Like people said before, it is indeed seasonal. And it is also on the country side. You need an orchard for a special selection of apples for cider. There are probably also family recipes.
While brewing, barley can be harvested in different seasons, and stored and malted, and this gives a constant supply throughout the year.
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Surely all the fermenters in the breweries are full of beer.
I worked for ABInBev when we launched Cidre. It was looked at doing it in house but there were a couple of drivers to contract it to a specialist.
First, the investment in pressing and core fruit processing kit was huge for something that was a bit of an unknown quantity at the scale we would need to work with the existing brew lengths.
Secondly, and more critical was then processing through filtration. With beers you can generally run most of them back to back with little more than a short water interface that was pushed to a recovery tank to reclaim the alcohol or reblend into the base beer. If you introduce cider into the mix there's a need for at fresh filter bed and likely a full CIP / chemical clean between the two liquids. There are generally only one or two filter streams in a brewery so the capacity loss relative to throughput is huge.
There are breweries that do both but they will more often than not have dedicated kit for each.
Hope this makes sense for a Sunday morning!
First, the investment in pressing and core fruit processing kit was huge for something that was a bit of an unknown quantity at the scale we would need to work with the existing brew lengths.
Secondly, and more critical was then processing through filtration. With beers you can generally run most of them back to back with little more than a short water interface that was pushed to a recovery tank to reclaim the alcohol or reblend into the base beer. If you introduce cider into the mix there's a need for at fresh filter bed and likely a full CIP / chemical clean between the two liquids. There are generally only one or two filter streams in a brewery so the capacity loss relative to throughput is huge.
There are breweries that do both but they will more often than not have dedicated kit for each.
Hope this makes sense for a Sunday morning!
An Ankoù
Landlord.
If I had a brewery and wanted to make cider I think I'd start another plant for it. My brewery would have equipment for mashing, boiling and fermenting and while the cider is fermenting, two thirds of my equipment would be standing idle. Also, a brewery has a limited number of sources of infection and filling it with apples and all the wild yeasts and bacteria that would bring in would imply a serious decontamination after the cider season. On the other hand, these wild yeasts would probably be welcome in the cider shed. Said shed would also double up as the outlet (shop) during the rest of the year. It could also serve as tap room.
I make cider, pressing my own apples and apples I nick from roadside trees. I keep my cider equipment and fermenters separate to my beer-making kit.
I make cider, pressing my own apples and apples I nick from roadside trees. I keep my cider equipment and fermenters separate to my beer-making kit.
Back in the 90's I worked in at one of the big cider companies. It wasn't a seasonal business for sure. For a big chunk of the year the plant where the presses were was just idle. Then you had about 4 weeks of frantic activity when the apples were harvested from the orchards. From what I remember there was a big orcharding program to tie that side down. The apples used to get piled in the car park and then processed through the presses.
Commercial beer production is an industrial process and a plant (brewery) would be in constant production all year round. If they had dead periods where they've nothing to do then they're seriously doing something wrong.
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