Apple growers in Northern Ireland are continuing to ride what’s been termed ‘the Magners wave’, as demand for regional cider booms in Ulster.
But for one grower, the Magners explosion threw up a chance to buck the trend. Carsons Cider was started after Kelly Troughton and her father decided to produce their own fizzy nectar from the apples on their orchard in Ballinteggart House, County Armagh. “One of our biggest buyers was Magners,” Kelly Troughton explains, “and so my father started to explore the possibility of us breaking out on our own.”
“We’ve marketed ourselves very much as a ‘niche brand’, attempting to emphasise the small, local nature of the product. We can’t really compete with the big boys in terms of ad spend, so we’ve had to be smaller and smarter. It’s quite a dry cider, what with it being mainly Bramleys.”
The company has been in existence for two years now, and is seeing strong demand, having taken a bit under five percent of the local market. In April of last year, 25-year-old Troughton made it to the finals of the Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.
While the distilling of their predominantly Bramley orchards presently takes place in ‘a small [secret] brewery in Worcestershire’, the team are looking to get closer to the present mania for products-of-origin by constructing their own on-site brewery.
They have managed to tie-up deals with the major Northern Irish supermarkets, and have their product labelled as ‘regional produce’ in the shops
“The potential’s definitely there,” says Troughton, “It’s just a matter of positioning yourself to tap into it.”
