- Bottoms Up (RSS)CIDER: An interview with a Magners Irish Cider scientist
By William Brand
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 7:01 am in Uncategorized.
Have you ever wanted to really like something, but you just don’t? It happened to me this week with Magners Cider. This is an Irish cider that’s been imported to the U.S. since 2000, but has only recently been distributed here on the West Coast.
I’m a fan of good cider – and let’s get one thing straight, by “cider”, I mean the alcoholic product, fermented from either apples or pears. No alcohol? It’s just juice and calling that sweetish stuff “cider” desecrates a fine product with a long history.
It was a fascinating conversation and I now look at Magners with new eyes. It’s still just TWO STARS* cider for me. But the next time I visit Ireland, it’s going to be at the top of the list.
Sinead (don’t you just love that very Irish name?) explained that the Magners cider we drink here in the U.S. is exactly the same as the Magnes in Ireland. The difference, she said, is Magners in Ireland has a carbonation level 50 percent higher. Higher carbonation in bottles sent here would put Magners in a much higher tax bracker, she said.
I guess, it would be taxed like champagne, which explains why some very excellent ciders from French Normandy cost $15 and up. “Unfortunately, because of the lower carbonation it doesn’t come across as well; it comes across as weaker, but the base product is the same,” she said.
Wow. They’re caught in a dilemma. I, the cider lover, would pay $15, but it would knock the hell out of mass sales, wouldn’t it.
Then, to break my heart a little, Sinead told me how Magners is made. It’s a blend of juice from 17 different apples, mostly cider apples, she said. The list reads kind of like something out of Harry Potter, some of the names are so exotic:
A total of 17 varieties of apples are grown in the company’s orchards in Clonmel to make Magners. They are Michelin, Dabinett, Yarlington Mill, Bulmer’s Norman, Tremlett’s Bitter, Breakwell Seedling, Taylor’s Harry Master’s Jersey, Medaille d’Or, Reine des Pommes, Ashton Bitter, Bramley’s, Grenadier, Brown Thorn, Brown Snout, Vilberies and Improved Dove.
Apples are graded according to sharpness and range from the lowly, but best-selling dessert apples like Delicious at the sweet end to sharps and bitter sharps with crab apples on the extreme bitter end.
Magners cider masters blend the juice to be sure each year’s product tastes the same, Sinead said. “We store cider up to two years and the batches are blended,” she said. The mix includes dessert apples as well as cider apples. Malic acid, a natural ingredient found in apples, is added for tartness. (The label also shows sugar is added to the product sold here.)
Manges was founded by William Magner, a cider maker in Clonmel, County Tipperary in 1935. It’s now part of the C&C Group, the largest wholly Irish-owned drinks company.
Before Magners expanded internationally, the fruit was milled, then the puree was squeezed through layers of muslim, using a hydraulic cheese press. Fermentation of the juice was spontaneous in wooden barrels’ apple skins have wild yeasts on them.
But the modern world rushed in. “By 1999 cider sales were increasing and we knew eventually we would have to change production methods,” Sinead explained.”We had a team of scientists and we sponsored someone to do a PhD project, identifying all the different strains of microflora that went into the fermentation process,” she said.
“It took us five years to identify which ones really contributed to the fermentation process, we identified several hundred,” she said. Now the yeast, the bacteria, are cultivated. Fermentation occurs in stainless steel.
“Now we have two sites, traditional and modern. “At the traditional site we still press juice and put it in wood. In the modern, we add the natural microflora. Everything is blended; every batch of cider has a portion of the traditional,” she said.
She has one last piece of advice about Magners. Go for the pint bottles, not the draft version. It’s the way the company likes to sell it. It comes to America in draft version because cider sells well in bars and pubs.
Summing up: I’m impressed with the company; wish I could get some of that traditional cider, before the blend and carbonated like it is in Ireland. I’d pay $15 for that.
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June 18th, 2008 at 7:04 am
[...] I’m a fan of good cider – and let’s get one thing straight, by “cider”, I mean the alcoholic product, fermented from either apples or pears. No alcohol? It’s just juice and calling that sweetish stuff “cider” desecrates a fine product with a long history. Read the rest of this entry » [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
This comment comes from my mirror site:
Zythophile Says:
June 18th, 2008 at 2:14 pm e
“Sinead” is just the Irish pronunciation of Janet, respelt as if it were an Irish word – quite ordinary, really, just like Magners, which is a triumph of marketing over reality – it looks great, poured into a pint glass with all that ice, buit despite using genuine cider varieties it tastes very ordinary. In the UK it did very well at first thanks to the gimmick effect, but sales are now diving, which is what happens with something that really offers little long-term satisfaction.
June 18th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Thanks for the info on the name. You’re right on the cider. Wonder what the traditional cider they also make tastes like?
September 15th, 2008 at 3:01 am
My wife and I originally found this cider when we visited Ireland. An FYI for anyone looking for Magners in Ireland. It’s not called Magners, It’s called Bullmers. I was told there was an issue with the name Bullmers in the states so they had to rename it to export it. It does have a slightly different taste but it is very very close. Both the wife and I love the stuff and searched for months trying to find a distributor in the US. Finally found one and am greatfull to be able to get a great drink.
September 15th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Hi Craig, Bulmer’s bought Magner’s a few years ago. But the cider under the name Magner’s is still sold in Ireland and most of the rest of the world. At least that’s what the folks at Magness tell me.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Magners/Bulmers is a great story, but rather convoluted.
Magners was an Irish cider maker from Clonmel. In 1937 they formed a partnership with Bulmers of Hereford in England, (Bulmers was, and still is the largest cider producer in the world).
In 1949 the partnership was dissolved but Magners retained the right to use the Bulmers name for their cider in Ireland. They were bought by Cantrell & Cochrane who made Irish Bulmers Original cider into a hugely popular brand in the last few years. They cleverly sold it in pint bottles which could be poured into a pint glass full of ice.
The iced cider idea was so popular they thought they could sell it to other countries but they only had the right to call it Bulmers in Ireland. In the rest of the world the English Bulmers owned that name. So they decided to resurrect the old Magners name and introduced it to Australia, America and Britain under that name. It was initially hugely popular and raised the profile of cider as a drink with many new bottled ciders being produced off the back of its sales.
Obviously English Bulmers were not going to take this lying down and produced their own Bulmers Original cider with an almost identical bottle label.
To recap, we now have Bulmers Original cider made in Ireland and sold in Ireland but sold as Magners in the rest of the world and Bulmers Original cider made in England and sold as such to the rest of the world including Northern Ireland.
This leads to the bizarre situation I found myself in last summer where I was in a pub in Donegal selling Bulmers Original (Irish) and then took a 15 min ferry ride across the Foyle to drink in a pub selling Magners Original (the same cider but with a different name) and Bulmers Original (a completely different cider made in England.)
Confused! I was. But it didn’t make much difference as they are both fairly chemically and poor ciders.
Stick to Westons or the smaller producers like Gwatkins or Olivers if you can get them.
September 25th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Thanks for the info.IKe. Unfortunately, they both are not very good ciders. I wonder if the original Magner’s was better?
October 27th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
To Zythophile,My understanding is that when the english occupied Ireland they banned use of the Native language including native names,a standard procedure along with raping local women used by imperialist countries to strip the natives of their culture and make them less hostile to their occupiers,beautiful unique Irish names and words, were randomly assigned english translations that have no bearing on pronounciation or meaning.I bet you think theres a town in Ireland called Londonderry.