About us

We’re Sam & Julian, from Middleton in the southeast corner of Lutruwita/Tasmania. We make cider from fruit grown in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and Huon Valley, on Melukerdee country. Our ciders contain nothing but fruit, fermented using naturally occurring wild yeast. We never fine or filter, and we never add sulphites.

Sam is a writer and Jules has spent the better part of the last decade in the wine industry, working in vineyards. We share a deep love and respect for the place where we live. We started Capella Cider in 2025, hoping to make a drink that expressed this love.

Our first release, ‘Trefoil’, will be available in November 2026. 

Our philosophy 

Making our cider takes time, care and attention. We do almost everything by hand, from harvesting and processing the fruit to riddling and disgorging the finished cider. We believe cider made in this way, when the fruit is of the highest quality and free of any chemical inputs, produces the finest drink.

And we find this method of making cider extremely rewarding. We work with the seasons and our senses, becoming more in tune with the rhythms of nature to produce a drink that captures a snapshot of a time and place. It feels like what humans are meant to do!

How we make cider

The apple harvest starts at the end of summer. We ground harvest our fruit as it falls from the trees, usually from March through to June. Harvesting after the fruit has fallen means we know it’s completely ripe. We store the harvest in our shed at ambient temperature to let it cure, sometimes for up to 6 weeks. Curing allows some of the water in the fruit to evaporate and the sugars to develop, creating more concentrated flavours. It only works with high quality fruit, so harvesting is a careful process.

Our cider is always a blend of several varieties. We choose the blends based on where we are in the season and the qualities of the apples we’ve picked. So far, all of our blending has happened during the milling process – meaning we choose the apples we think will make a balanced drink and mill them together, rather than blending during fermentation.

After we mill the apples, we macerate the pulp from 4 to 48 hours, depending on the characteristics we want to extract. The pressed juice then ferments slowly over winter in stainless steel tanks and/or neutral French oak barrels. Our cool climate means we don’t need temperature control: the season helps guide the rate of fermentation.

We track the sugars as fermentation ticks along, and bottle with enough residual sugar to make a naturally sparkling drink. The bottles then rest in the cellar for at least a year, gaining complexity. If needed, we riddle and disgorge the bottles to clarify the cider. All of this is done by hand.

Our farming

All of the fruit we use in our cider is organically grown as a bare minimum. Most is from old, spray-free orchards. Our home orchard, planted in 2024, is bio-dynamically managed and is currently in conversation with the Australian Demeter Biodynamic association. The only external input we use on our farm is prepared 500, the foundational biodynamic preparation.

We are passionate about giving back to the land that we live on and that provides us with the incredible fruit we use to make our cider. This passion drives all our decisions on the farm. We use no herbicides or pesticides. We grow and plant for biodiversity and longevity. We pay attention to what the land might be asking from us, and we try to give it what it needs.