Cider: A snake in the grass?

When pub companies were asked on behalf of The Publican Industry Report 2008 what the biggest-selling cider was in their estates, time and again the answers came back the same: Magners or Bulmers. But not for one operator.

St Austell had not ticked the cider power houses of C&C or Scottish & Newcastle, but had filled in the 'any other' box on the form. Its 169 pubs were mainly selling Cornish Rattler, a cider little-known outside of Cornwall.

It is the result of an innovative partnership between a local craft producer and a regional retailer which realised the value of giving a route to market to a cider that hits the spot more accurately than a big national brand with its pub consumers.

Rattler, as it is affectionately known within the internet fan groups dedicated to the cider, is pressed and bottled by the Cornish Cyder Farm, a tourist attraction found in Penhallow, Truro, which produces small-batch cider for sale largely to its visitors. It is the brainchild of Joe Healey, a member of the family which runs the Cyder Farm.

Coming up with a new six per cent cider in 2005 that he thought would be suitable as a keg product in pubs, he approached St Austell.

It was just the cider the pub operator was looking for - one which made commercial sense and which resonated with cider drinkers brought into the category by Magners who had begun to experiment, becoming more interested in genuine heritage and local provenance. St Austell agreed to keg Rattler on otherwise under-used kegging lines.

Cult success

Joe came up with a quirky snake head design for the pump and a cult success was born. After a trial as a seasonal special, sales steadily increased in St Austell's managed and tied estates, and it is also distributed to around 400 freetrade customers in the South West. This year, a pear variant launched.

"Rattler fits the whole ethos of St Austell as a family brewer with a local focus," says St Austell sales director for wholesale Ian Blunt. "The makers of Rattler are a family which owns the farm, so there's a synergy there. Our sales teams and pubs enjoy it because there's a degree of ownership."

Now, as it is being rolled out to the freetrade, Blunt says St Austell has to be vigilant against devaluing Rattler's local heritage. "We don't want to lose its quirkiness. It's going to be hard to sell it outside of Cornwall. Once you go north into real cider country, you face tough competition and risk becoming just another generic national brand," he says.

While Rattler slithered through the grass at a time when Magners' apples were ripening on the trees above it, St Austell and the Cornish Cyder Farm maintain that it was not just an effort to cash in on the cider craze.

"We didn't want it to be just another four per cent cider," says Joe. "It's cloudy, six per cent ABV and bang in the middle of sweet and dry."

The links between St Austell and the Cornish Cyder Farm have recently been forged by Healey working on a secondment with the pub operator.

He says he has a few ideas for new Rattler variants and other on-trade cider products, inspired by the experience.

Watch out for Rattler rearing its head in new formats sometime soon.