"Craft Cidermaking" Book - Third Edition available now!

These pages belong to Andrew Lea. I'm a retired chemist / plant biochemist / food scientist by profession, and I was the former Head of the Beverage Research section in a contract food analysis and consultancy company.  I''ve also worked in tea and chocolate chemistry, for what it's worth!

But I'm also an amateur cider maker. This all started when I worked at the Long Ashton Research Station near Bristol, where I took my Ph.D in the 1970's. When Thatcherism forced the closure of the Research Station's cider research programme after 83 glorious years, I moved with my family to South Oxfordshire and was lucky enough to be able to plant a small cider orchard of my own. It's not very big - just a dozen trees now of 11 different 'vintage' varieties on dwarf rootstocks which produce just a few hundred litres a year. Not enough to sell or anything, but fun to do and an interesting way of combining a personal and professional interest!

After 40 odd years in and around cider I've picked up a fair bit of background. So I've slowly been decanting it to this website in case anyone else might find it useful too. The idea is to create a free and I hope authoritative resource for small-scale cidermakers, to replace in some small part what went missing when Long Ashton was closed.

• My professional publications
• The company I worked for
• About the Wittenhams (where I live)