Cider-man's legal fight was blessing in disguise

A CIDER maker who was threatened with legal action by a drinks giant says it has turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

James Pearce, who lives in Stoke Row, was sent a cease and desist letter by Red Bull after he tried to trademark his drink Red Cow Cider.

He thought about challenging it but didn’t want to lose out financially even though he was confident of winning.

Mr Pearce, 54, changed the name of his drink to Kicking Goat Cider and it is now available in five counties.

He said: “Where I live in Stoke Row is called Red Cow House and my father bred a herd of Montbéliarde cows, which are red and white, so that is where Red Cow Cider came from.

“I came up with the strapline ‘All apple and no bull’ and last year we made an application to trademark it.

“Lawyers for Red Bull then sent a note to say cease and desist. I couldn’t believe that Red Bull, an energy drink company, would go after a small craft artisan cider company suggesting we were riding shotgun on the back of their firm’s branding, even though our house has been here since the 17th century.

“I thought about challenging it. My lawyers didn’t feel they had a case and I wanted to defend my little red cow.

“But then, having done some research, I found that Red Bull had gone after a number of other drinks companies.

“There was one brewery that had ‘red’ in the name that was named after the street it was in and another that had ‘bull’ as part of its name. There was a small brewery in America that managed to defend a claim but it still cost them £75,000, even though they won.

“We had just launched the brand, meaning there was no real value in it, so we had nothing to defend.

“It would have been different had we been going five years but we didn’t have much of a brand to fight Red Bull, which is worth $23 billion.”

Mr Pearce, who is married to Natasha, 52, with five children between them, decided to change the name to one based on a story from the family farm, which is in Somerset.

He said: “We have had the farm for 50 years and it had a small orchard there. There was a goat which kept kicking down the fence that surrounded it at harvest time to get to the apples and that just stuck with me.

“From that I came up with Kicking Goat Cider with the strapline ‘All apple, no kidding’, which is, in fact, better than what we had before.

“We have only been in business a few months and we have had strong sales, even though you would say they were not cider months. I have been struck by the number of people who drink cider all year round.”

Mr Pearce was brought up in Bath and attended Monkton Combe School, as his father Malcolm had done.

He said: “One of the houses was Farm House, which was the original farm to the school and my father used to milk the herd of cows that provided milk for the school, which is how he got into farming.

“He ended up lecturing in bovine studies for the Government and he would go out to Asia to lecture and run agricultural stands for UK trade and industry.

“My mother, Judy, would nick a bit of the farm for her garden every time my father went away. We have 180 acres in all and she ended up accumulating 14 acres, which she opened as part of the National Garden Scheme and would have 1,000 people a day. Readers of the Daily Telegraph voted it as being in the top 10 farms to visit. I was dropped off at the school aged eight and picked up again at 18 and went straight into the family business, the Johnsons Group, and sold advertising space for magazines.

“Then I went on a management training programme for about a year and worked in the different wholesale operations the company operated. We had depots as far north as Rotherham and as far south as Weymouth.”

At the age of about 23, the company went into in-flight operations at Heathrow and on the Eurostar. In 1998 the wholesale operation was sold followed two years later by the in-flight operation. Mr Pearce set up his own company, Gold Key Media, in 2001, supplying newspapers and magazines to hotels and clubs. He sold this in 2008 shortly before the banking crisis to focus on property development.

He said: “Where we had our old offices in Bath, the road was regarded as light industrial but it was virtually in the centre as, over the years, the area around it had been developed.

“I spent two years working on the planning and eventually got consent to convert it into flats for Bath University students.”

In 2013, his father launched a cider in Cambodia which gave him the idea of doing the same in this country. Mr Pearce said: “You can’t grow apples without a frost and a lot of Asia doesn’t expect frost so it is not a drink that is produced there.

“My father couldn’t find a decent cider when he went out there, except maybe something that was expensive and only came in small bottles.

“He launched Bruntys, which was named after the master cider maker Brian Brunt. Asians found it difficult to say the name and pronounce the ‘R’, so it was known as ‘Buntys’. It is now sold in six different countries. After building a few housing developments, I went out to Cambodia with my father.”

When he returned to this country he suggested to his father that it would be easier to make cider here, especially with the family farm being in the heart of cider country.

Mr Pearce said: “We teamed up with a guy who has an orchard next door to our farm. We harvest it and he gets paid in cider. We also have apples from my brother-in-law’s farm in Tenterden in Kent and we use some from the community orchard in Dunsden.”

Between them, the farms produces 180 tonnes of apples a year, which will make 110,000 litres of cider.

Kicking Goat is made using freshly pressed juice that blends 17 varieties of cider apple, including Yarlington Mill, Michelin, Bulmers Norman, Stoke Red, Somerset Redstreak, Dabinett and Stembridge Jersey.

There are three ciders, which vary in sweetness.

Mr Pearce said: “They all crop at a different time, making harvesting tricky, but that creates the most intriguing and complex blend.

“For a beautifully consistent liquid, we quality check at regular intervals over seven months.

“Having 17 different varieties means it is not as commercially viable because you have to go back and keep harvesting.

“The big guys would plant a single variety orchard, maybe two varieties.

“With dessert apples you pick them once they are ready but with cider apples you let them fall and that’s why the grass in a cider apple orchard is reasonably long so they have a soft landing.

“Once they fall you can’t leave them there for too long so we have a machine that picks them up.

“We harvest the apples in November, later than the dessert apples, which you pick in September. We have six of our own fermentation tanks and everything goes in there once the apples are pressed and it stays in there for seven months before we bottle it.”

Mr Pearce said it took weeks to get the blend right.

“We got there in the end and it was great fun,” he said. “I wanted a full juice cider that was easy drinking, refreshing and smooth. It is a craft cider but with quaff-ability.

“Originally I had suggested it should be a 5.5 per cent ABV but was told to reduce it to 4.8 per cent because people are looking for lower alcohol cider.

“A lot of craft ciders are seven per cent ABV and people don’t consume anywhere near the quantity that you would want them to do.

“To be called a cider it needs a minimum of 35 per cent apple juice so the cider produced by the big boys is not real cider like mine. Thirty-five per cent apple juice does not give the same flavour that we have.

“When I ask people what they think of the taste of my ciders they say ‘it tastes so apply’.

“I believe the public are looking for better quality and are becoming more discerning. They want something different and less mainstream and I think we are proving that with our sales.”

Kicking Goat is available in kegs in Berkshire and Oxfordshire while bottles can be ordered online for delivery.

Mr Pearce said: “I am not looking at making a profit for the first two years but I am not doing it just because I like cider. I am doing it because I genuinely believe that there is space in the mid-market for it.

“Eighty-two per cent of sales are done by the big six but we have the ability to scale up as quickly as sales grow. I would like to be in the position to make one million litres in five years.

“I know the sales spike will come in the summer months but the sales will keep going. People have said that it is nice to have cider over Christmas, when you have had turkey and red wine up to the eyeballs, to cut through all the food with a refreshing drink.

“The other thing we have become aware of is to extend the cider season by pairing it with food. We already have a restaurant in Bath using it in a dessert.

“I have been drinking cider from a young age and have created a cider that the majority of people will like.”

Mr Pearce is now in the process of making a low alcohol version as well as a “Henley cider”, using apples grown in the county, which he hopes will be available next year.

He said: “Seeing that I live here I wanted to produce something associated with the town. Everywhere has their own gin, so why shouldn’t Henley have its own cider?”