Hand-picked apples harvested at Boyne Grove Fruit Farm outside Drogheda make up the sole ingredient of Dan Kelly’s, a popular new Irish craft cider. Olan McNeece tells us more about the family run enterprise.
Olan, tell us about the making of Dan Kelly’s Craft Cider.
We’ve made cider here over the years on a very small scale, mainly for ourselves, but I suppose we’ve been thinking for a few years about developing it more commercially and producing something that people might like. This is our third year trading now and I’m still very loath to describe it! One person will tell me that it’s lovely and dry and somebody else will tell me it’s lovely and sweet, but I think it’s really down to the individual palate.
The market classifies it as a flavoursome medium cider with a medium body. It’s 100% apple juice, there’s nothing else in there, so no additives, sulfites or sugars. Whenever I’ve given people samples of a very dry cider their face puckers up, so our way of giving it a little bit of sweetness is to press some sweet apples and add the juice back into the cider. Then we pasteurise it in bottles or sterile-filter it in kegs so we don’t have to add chemicals. From the very beginning, even though we weren’t required to, we always put ingredients on the label. We said apple juice and water, but actually our ciders don’t have water in them. I just leave the water on the label in case we ever need to balance the alcohol and the sweetness in it.
How did the name come about?
My great grandfather, Dan Kelly, was a steam train driver from Belfast, the airline pilot of his day I suppose, responsible for moving people around the country quickly. He drove the original Enterprise service, past where the orchard is now. When my father came here as a young man he bought the farm from the Cairnes family, who coincidentally were on the board of directors of the Great Northern Railway. At the time plenty of other families would have wanted this farm, and they thought my father was crazy when he first started planting apple trees, because it just wasn’t the tradition in this area. After Ireland joined the EEC the price of land went up and everybody wanted to buy it from him, but he stuck it out.
Did you always work on the farm?
I was quite young when I finishing my Leaving and at the time my father would have encouraged me to go and work for someone else, but in the early ’90s in Ireland the place was in a heap, so I spent a couple of years studying accountancy. I hated it and eventually came to work on the family farm at 19. When I first suggested that we do cider 20 years ago my father was very against it. Looking back, that was probably a good thing because a young man with unlimited supplies of cider could have ended up completely different! When we revisited the idea again a few years ago he saw that it made sense and I think he’s quietly proud of it now. It’s great to see product being made in Drogheda again, be it Jack Cody’s, Boyne Brewhouse or ourselves. I think people are beginning to appreciate their food and drink a little bit more and if they can support a local business at the same time then they’re happy to do it.
Does it help that you have your own orchard?
People think you have a natural advantage because you’re growing apples, but because we grow for supermarkets our costs of production are actually quite high. It takes a fair bit of capital investment to get something like this off the ground. You need a lot of tank storage space so it’s not without its challenges. On the upside, the market is very willing to try new products right now, buyers and off-licences want to give you a chance and encourage you to have a go and we’ve been very well received.
What else do you have in the pipeline?
We won a bronze medal for our apple cider vinegar at the Blas na hÉireann awards last year. There are people who swear by it because it’s not filtered or pasteurised. We also grow other things such as elderberry flower, sloes, quince and gooseberry, which we’ve tried to incorporate into our juices, vinegars and ciders. We’d like to develop that more, but our next product will be a whiskey barrel cider. Usually the varieties in that cider wouldn’t produce a huge amount of alcohol, but it’s drawing a lot of whiskey and spirit out of the casks, so at 6% the alcohol content is quite high.
We’d also like to get people doing tours of the orchard and the cider-making facility. It’d be lovely to be able to throw a few cider marinated pork ribs into a stone oven and serve them up with a glass of cider. I think that would be really nice!
Dan Kelly’s Irish Cider is available on draught in Against the Grain, the Black Sheep and Alfie’s, and in bottles from independent off-licences such as Deveney’s, Molloy’s, Redmond’s of Ranelagh and Baggot Street Wines. For more details and a full range of stockists see dankellyscider.com
Words: Martina Murray
Image: Olan McNeece
