History
The founder, William Thatcher, first started making cider for his own farm workers in 1904. His son Stanley Thatcher, born in 1910, began selling draught cider to pubs in Somerset and the company’s presence in the area grew. The company is still family owned and employs around 75 people. The current managing director is Martin Thatcher, which is the fourth generation in the family to run the business.
It has 360 acres of its own orchard in Somerset, as well as using apples from other growers in the area. Alongside its bush orchards, Thatchers has pioneered a method of growing its apple trees in a hedgerow style. Trained on wires, this enables easier harvesting and also helps to ensure the fruit has the optimum combination of sunlight and rain. It has also led to the development of a new bespoke harvester. Over 25,000 tonnes of fruit are pressed each year. Thatchers also maintains a special exhibition orchard in which over 500 different varieties of apple tree are grown. Many of the traditional ciders produced at Myrtle Farm are matured in 100-year-old oak vats, which gives the cider a distinctive taste.
Read more about this topic: Thatchers Cider
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)