My first memory of cider was as vivid as it was wretched.
A fat, plastic bottle of warm Strongbow, gulped with a friend in a hedge beside the river. It was flat by the time the bottle was empty, but we were well beyond caring.

 
Blimey it's cold! No wonder, it's December already. And along with the beginning of a new month comes the first of a series of regular monthly newsletters. Our previous missives have been a bit ad-hoc, so we're trying to be "all adult" and disciplined about it. So as long as we can see through the cidery haze, we'll try to get a newsletter out somewhere near the beginning of each month.

We are delighted to announce that Roger Wilkins, possibly Somerset's most famous cider maker, or perhaps that should be infamous, is shortly to join us, selling his wonderful cider on our site.
 
Roger won this year's CAMRA Pomona award, a prestigious prize awarded "to the person, people, place or thing who has done the most to promote real cider or perry over the previous 12 months or for ongoing work to promote cider and perry", according to the CAMRA website. This is how they described him:

Here at CiderPunk.com we sell Cider vinegar, produced from real Somerset Cider. Its main use in this country is as a salad dressing, due to its exquisite flavour and low acidity. Indeed, even celebrated chef Rick Stein visited John Harris at West Croft cider to sample some.
 

 
I found this definition of real cider at the Slow Food Somerset website
 

Cider is an ancient and powerful drink, and its production is not the prerogative of Somerset, though the county has long been famed for it.

The word has come down to us from the Hebrew 'sheker', the Greek 'sikera' and the Latin 'sicera', all signifying strong drink. In Wycliffe's fourteenth century Bible translation the passage (Luke 1,15) which appears in the Authorised Version as "He ... shall drink neither wine nor strong drink" is rendered "He schal not drynke Wyn and sydir".

 
The reason we are here

"Real cider is a long-established traditional drink which is produced naturally from apples and is neither carbonated or pasteurised. However real cider is in a similar situation to that which faced real ale some 30 years ago with the number of outlets for real cider is diminishing, even in the West Country...

 
In the US, as we know, "cider" refers to unfermented apple juice, and "hard cider" is used to refer to the alcoholic version. Nonetheless, the alcohol content of our good old farmhouse cider is usually removed when cooking, so you can safely use any American recipes, substituting our artisan ciders for the cider mentioned in the recipe.
 

The Somerset Cider map has been retired.
 
The punks have been working on the new Cider map - not only Somerset!
 
It's still a work in progress... as of April 2009, we've got most of Somerset, Hereford and Gloucestershire on there, and the rest of the country's cidermakers as soon as possible.
 
http://ciderpunk.com/cidermap