Hello and welcome to Alex's Ty Gwyn Cider Blog

Hi,

my name is Alex Culpin and I run a farm cider company with my brother Ben in South Wales.  It's called Ty Gwyn and it's really good cider.  We make it all ourselves from 100% juice and then we ferment it for about 8 months (a lot longer than any commercial ciders and a lot of 'craft' ciders.  We started the business about six years ago after my stepfather, who grew cider apples for a living, decided to try his hand at making a batch of cider.  It turned out to be really good stuff so we kept going with it.  Both Ben and I had backgrounds in indie music in London but we left all that behind for the country life of cider making and we've never looked back.  When journalists write about Ty Gwyn they tend to go for that Alex from Blur on a smaller scale-type angle which is fine by me if that's what it takes to get Ty Gwyn Cider known.  We can certainly explain to you how we make our cider and what it is that we do that we think results in great cider.  Without giving all our trade secrets away. 

Hopefully there will be lots of exciting stuff to come with my blog.  I'd like to go way beyond our cider and talk about about many other things that feed into our cider.  Things like music, how I came to be a bystander as Joe Strummer pinched Chrissie Hynde's arse, how my brother Ben managed a band who got played by Huw Stephens, what happened to me when I arrived on the North Shore of Hawaii with my surfboards, how I ended up in the Indian Ocean on a beat up yacht with no toilet and fresh water for washing for five weeks.  Things like that, as well as about our daily lives here in the Monnow Valley, a stunningly beautiful and tucked away part of South Wales.

But for now that's it.  It's my first time writing a blog.  I'm going to try to stay interesting and I'm going to try be honest and I hope anyone reading it finds it worthwhile and entertaining.  If you like your cider then please come and visit us, you'll find all our details on Facebook and on Google, Ty Gwyn Cider....