Cranes Cider

The evolution of Cranes. Our love for Cranberries all started at a very young age. We were so undeniably sweet our mum felt it was logical to force feed us tart cranberries to balance it out.​

OK, that’s a lie.

The truth is cranberries came into the picture later in life, whilst we were at university. It was the first time we had spent time apart.

I was up in Leeds and Ben down in Exeter. As many students do, we both enjoyed a drink. Ben was in the heart of the west country and enjoying the abundance of ciders they had to offer.

Whereas I was drinking anything I could get my hands on.

Cranberries being notoriously healthy, led me to those beautifully tart berries. In a bid to try and compensate for all the unhealthy drinking.
Daniel has mentioned the birth of Cranes, so I’ll enlighten you to how it all started.

After graduation, we started fermenting cranberry cider in 5 litre demijohns. I couldn’t say how many attempts it took, but 8 months later the recipe was finally perfected. Now we had a product, it was time to name it.​

Full credit goes to our Dad, unfortunately this means we will never hear the end of it.

He did a spot of research and discovered that Cranberries were originally called ‘Crane-berries’ as the blossom of the cranberry vine resembled a crane’s head.

With the product named and recipe finalised we set ourselves the task of building our micro-brewery. Our uncle kindly offered his old barn rent free. (Cheers Tony!)

However, sometimes you pay for what you get and 7 months into our Micro-brewery functioning at full capacity we got flooded. Luckily, at that point our friend Sam had a vacant unit on his farm that we moved into, allowing us to dry off and expand.

​In fact, it continues to be the location of our brewery now.