The last cider-making families. Heritage apple varieties that exist in no nursery catalogue. The knowledge is in the grafting, the pressing, and the blending - and it passes from parent to child or it dies.
The Vale of Taunton Deane is the heart of Somerset's cider country. The orchards here contain apple varieties - Kingston Black, Dabinett, Yarlington Mill - bred specifically for cider over centuries. The families who maintain these orchards represent an unbroken tradition of cider making that predates any commercial brewery. Their knowledge is not in recipes but in the relationship between tree, weather, and press.
The Archive documents the cider families of Taunton Vale as Makers and Rememberers. The making is craft - hand-pressing, natural fermentation, blending by taste. The remembering is the accumulated knowledge of which trees produce in which years, how frost affects the tannins, why this year's Kingston Black tastes different from last year's. This knowledge passes within families or it vanishes. There is no cider-making school, no textbook, no apprenticeship scheme. The daughter who takes over from her father inherits a body of knowledge that took generations to accumulate.
The cider families of Taunton Vale have pressed apples for generations. Now a daughter carries the tradition forward - with the same trees, the same press, the same knowledge.