Henry Weston, a Herefordshire farm and a neighbour who championed cider.

Westons is the trading name of H. Weston & Sons, a cider and perry maker in Much Marcle, a village in Herefordshire about seven miles north-east of Ross-on-Wye. English Wikipedia describes the company as family-owned and founded by Henry Weston, and says it has made cider on the same site since 1880.

The founding story is told in more detail by Herefordshire Through Time, the county council’s local history site. It says Henry Weston moved in 1878 to The Bounds, a farm of about 100 acres in Much Marcle that he held as a tenant of the Homme House estate, and that in 1880 he began making cider to sell. His neighbour at Hellens, the Herefordshire MP C. W. Radcliffe Cooke, encouraged him; Radcliffe Cooke championed cider so keenly that he was nicknamed the “MP for Cider,” and the same history says he helped Westons become a supplier to the House of Commons. The Morning Advertiser, reporting on the company in 2017, likewise gave 1878 as the founding and 1880 as the start of commercial cider making.

The railway helped the farm reach buyers further away. Herefordshire Through Time records that a line opened at Dymock, about two miles from the farm, in 1885, and that most of the firm’s output then travelled by rail. In 1922 the family bought The Bounds and two neighbouring farms from the Homme House estate, and in 1930 it opened a cider house on the Harrow Road in London, which closed in 1970. In 1952 the mill gained quality-control laboratories, and a vat installed that year was named Vat 52 for the coronation of Elizabeth II, the history says.

The business has passed down the family. Herefordshire Through Time traces it from Henry Weston to his sons Hubert, Leonard and Stafford and on through later generations, and the Morning Advertiser reported in October 2016 that the managing director, Helen Thomas, a fourth-generation member of the Weston family, had been named chair of the National Association of Cider Makers.

A navy-and-gold logo with a county, a date and a trade.

The company’s current corporate identity dates from 2017. The Morning Advertiser reported in October 2017 that Westons had unveiled a redesigned logo after a process that began in August 2016, created by the Cheltenham agency Brand on Shelf. The paper described the new mark as carrying four elements — “Herefordshire,” “Westons,” “Cider makers” and the date 1880 — in a premium dark blue with gold foiling, and said the stated aim was to “premiumise, energise and modernise” the brand. Gemma Evans, then the corporate brand manager, told the paper that the county needed to appear on the logo as the heartland of cider making, and that keeping the 1880 date mattered. The roll-out began at the end of October 2017. The new identity writes the name without an apostrophe, as Westons.

Individual ciders carry their own identities. Design Week reported in September 2011 that the London agency Pearlfisher had renamed Westons’ organic cider Wyld Wood and drawn a W logotype built from two tree trunks. Food Manufacture reported in July 2025 that Stowford Press had been given a “bold new look” that kept the brand’s press motif and added a message that all of its apples are locally sourced.

The best-known name in the range has a story of its own. English Wikipedia says Old Rosie, a cloudy cider matured in oak vats, is named after a 1921 Aveling and Porter steam roller owned by the company, which was itself nicknamed after Laurie Lee’s 1959 memoir Cider with Rosie. Stowford Press began as someone else’s brand: Herefordshire Through Time says Westons first made it as a keg cider for Cameron’s Brewery in Hartlepool and bought the name after Cameron’s was sold.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all cider and spirits names: Westons, Aspall, Angry Orchard, Moutai, Wuliangye, Kavalan and Amrut. Cider and spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar list.

A cider or spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its cider or spirit is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its cider or spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Oak vats, Three Counties orchards and a mill open to visitors.

Westons still presses at Much Marcle. English Wikipedia notes that the company uses a large collection of oak vats, and that its ciders range from perry to organic and low-alcohol ciders. Drinks Retailing reported in October 2025 that the company has about 350 acres of its own orchards, 45 of them organic, that it sources around 90% of its cider apples from growers in the Three Counties of Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, and that its ciders are sold in more than 44 countries. The range listed on the company’s site has included Henry Westons Vintage, Stowford Press, Old Rosie and Wyld Wood Organic, alongside perry.

The mill is also a visitor attraction. The company runs tours, a shop and a restaurant at The Bounds, according to its website as cited by English Wikipedia. During the COVID-19 pandemic the Morning Advertiser reported in June 2020 that Westons would give away about 1,800 kegs of Stowford Press to pubs as they reopened.

In November 2023 the company pleaded guilty to health and safety offences at Kidderminster Magistrates’ Court and was fined after a farm manager was killed in 2020 by a security barrier at its site, the Health and Safety Executive and BBC News reported.

The name needs care in searches: Weston is a common English surname and place name, and the cider maker’s own site is westons-cider.co.uk.

For a design guide, Westons shows how a family cider maker can put a county, a trade and a founding date into one mark, and let individual ciders — a steam roller here, a pair of tree trunks there — tell their own stories. Compare Aspall, the Suffolk cyder maker founded in 1728, and Savanna, the South African dry cider. For this guide we use cider-maker navy, foil gold and orchard red with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Westons’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.