Healey's Cornish Cyder Farm

One of the things we always try to achieve is to build memories, answer questions about what we do and more importantly, why we exist?
  We would like to think, if we are able to help in creating fond memories or perhaps just enhance someone’s day, even if it’s just a pint in the pub, if that person was positively impacted because of something we have done or created, then we like to think we have succeeded.    

If you like to take a step back to the very beginning, the art of cider making, and fermentation started with the monks. It is very much a traditional process taking you through extracting the juice and fermenting it to produce different products.
 
There is absolutely a craft element to cider, no batch is the same and that is where the art of cider comes in, with the blending. We love to craft and innovate, such as how we take our cider, then mature it in various spirit barrels, which once aged and matured for long enough, can give you a fantastic array of flavours and aromas.
 
We have Cornwall’s oldest distillery as well, making a range of brandy, whiskey, gin and most recently, a brand-new rum! Everything we do is in small batches, crafted and perfected and then produced with a huge input from our team and our customers.

We make England's oldest whisky, which is probably something people don’t expect a cyder farm to do!

My brother and I are now joint Managing Directors and principally, he makes it, I sell it and it works really well, with a strong team dynamic. Dad (David Healey) is Chairman, we’ve got a Board of Directors which are great people to be around and help keep us in check. Mum was also very hands-on in the early days.    

The original farmhouse, which is the family home, is a Grade II listed building and the rest of the curtilage of the courtyard is very much traditional stone. So when we restored it, it's keeping it within that character. Even the farm shop, which was only built in 2000.  It’s built with stone from the quarry here, the wood is sourced from the woods here at the farm and as you walk through the whole complex, it feels like the new buildings we have added have been here just as long as the original farmhouse.    
 

We make our brandies from Cornish apples; they are single estate apples. So the apple is grown, pressed, fermented, double-distilled, matured and bottled all here on our farm, which is brilliant.
 
Also, we’ve got our jam kitchen, which is a lovely addition that Dad introduced 15 years ago, because we saw there was a market there for it. We use local strawberries for our Strawberry Wine too, they’re brought in from Cornish growers and then pressed on site, with most of it going into our wine.    
 

Our Cyder Festival for example, it's a great opportunity for the locals to get together for a slightly different themed weekend to just a standard music festival. We really try to incorporate the apple or tractor rides around the orchard, and certainly for the immediate local area we provide free tickets to the event. 
 
 We’ve also started the Healey’s Charitable Trust fund which is facilitated by Cornwall Community Foundation, providing fundings and expertise for those startup entrepreneurs that don't have those opportunities elsewhere.