The Best Cider in the World? – Meet The General

Just as parents shouldn’t have a favourite child, we cider makers shouldn’t have a favourite cider. We are, of course, very proud of every single cider that bears the Sandford Orchards label. We wouldn’t let them out of the mill if they weren’t top notch, authentic ciders. However, secretly, there is one that holds a really special place in our hearts. We were brimming with pride when we created it and then it went on to be named ‘best cider in the world’! We could hardly contain ourselves! If you haven’t already met our number one son, let me introduce you to The General.

Creating a Vintage Range

In 2017, we started a project to create a new range of vintage ciders. To use the term ‘vintage’, as with wine, a cider must declare the year of harvest – every year has a distinct character, with the age of the cider providing a great guide to levels of depth and maturity. But it’s not just about a great apple harvest, it’s what you do with the apples next that makes a huge impact on the final product. Just like wine, the ageing technique is key, so we spent four years getting to grips with the dynamics of wood in the cider making process. We tried everything from ferments in centuries old vats to cold-filtered long storage in fresh cherry wood. This sideline project started to become an expensive obsession to find the best cider ageing barrel and this is when we discovered the mighty oak barrel that gives its name to our award-winning cider, The General.

Roll out The Barrel

The General now sits at the heart of our barrel room. It towers imposingly over everyone and its wooden staves hold the secrets of generations of cider history. Built more than a century ago, the trees that made the staves would have been cut from oaks felled in the 1880s – from trees that were almost certainly growing in 1400 – Plantagenet oaks. When we considered the ciders that have soaked into these planks, each one adding to the sum of the flavour and richness, it truly blew our minds!

Impressive from the outside, you should see it on the inside! Because it’s kept ‘plimmed’, always wet, it’s smooth on the inside, and the way you can tell it’s made of vertical staves is that each stave is engraved in Victorian script numbered 1-94. Incredibly, this vat would have been made and filled in the vat makers workshop, before being taken completely apart back to a pile of boards and transported to the cider mill to be rebuilt.

There is not a milligram of glue or varnish, or wax used in creating The General. It is 7 tons of wood split and shaped by hand and eye, dry unions pulled tight with steel bands. The result is ten thousand gallons of beautiful cider heritage, and we’re really proud of it. It is the centrepiece of our cider works and you can meet it and marvel at it on one of our tours. You won’t be surprised to hear that having bought The General, the most expensive barrel possible for ageing our best vintage ciders, the results were award-winning!

The General

Our ‘Vintage project’ resulted in a shortlist of over forty different potential new ciders which we whittled down to three distinct and very different drinks that we launched in 2021.They were all a great success but The General was the leader of the pack from the very beginning. The product of our eponymous mighty oak vat, it is big, bold and super rich. We think of it as the Imperial Stout of our range. At 8.4% ABV it’s a little more than half the strength of wine, but with twice the body and flavour of many grape fermented paler imitations. It has fabulous marmalade tannins and a juicy apple pie aroma. It has a wonderful warmth on the finish, perfect for banishing the winter blues. It is a superb complement to gamey meats or a fully-laden Sunday roast. We love it and so do cider experts from around the globe!

The Trophy Cabinet

We thought we had created something special when we launched The General but it wasn’t until the results of some pretty important cider competitions came in that we realised that the rest of the cider world thought so too. In the year of its launch, The General won gold at the World Cider Awards. Then, in 2023, it won gold and the category trophy at the International Cider Challenge, making it officially the best tannin led cider in the world. We certainly enjoyed a few pints to celebrate that day!

But it’s not just the experts who love The General. Take a look at the reviews on our website and you will see five stars across the board! Everyone loves The General! If you haven’t already, you really need to get a bottle and try it for yourself. Don’t drink it like a session cider though, enjoy it as an alternative to wine, with a hearty meal. Don’t forget to let us know what you think because, at the end of the day, we don’t make cider for competitions, we make it for you to enjoy.