We skipped uni to visit the SeaCider brewery

Goldstone Brewery make East Slope Ale and SeaCider, two of the most popular drinks in Sussex


If you have ever visited the campus bars, you may have noticed a fancy skull resting on one of the bar pumps. This gem is SeaCider, a locally brewed juicy cider which can creep up on you if you’re not careful. The alcoholic apple juice is quite a high percentage and is legendary among us at Sussex, so we set out to track down the origin of this legendary drink.

Goldstone Brewery, the microbrewery in charge of creating SeaCider and East Slope Ale, is located in Ditchling, which is only a hour away from Brighton. Here, we expected to see a brewery reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory but what we found was something just as impressive. Located in the Ditchling Industrial Estate, we find the brewery manned by two people. They are Mark Francis and Matt Billing.

Matt and Mark pose by their van

The two founders of SeaCider met a year and a half ago and decided to make cider together. Matt had been making cider since he was 15 and Mark has  been involved in the beer brewing business. The two hold down the fort in Ditchling where each day they toil to create the SeaCider we drink in Falmer bar.

Each batch of SeaCider takes four weeks to create and the brewery creates over 2500 litres a day. They go through around 11 bins of apples each day and their presses go through each bin in 25 minutes. Sounds like a lot of hard work, especially for just two blokes. The remaining pulp from the apples are collected and given to local farm so that nothing is wasted.

SeaCider go through 11 of these bins a day

The pair have experimented with all types of flavours, from infusing the drink with mango to brewing SeaCider with brandy in a cask barrel for a year. Mark revealed they were working on a cinnamon flavoured SeaCider and had experimented with honey, however he wasn’t too impressed with the result.

The pair told us they have hardly taken part in any marketing over the years and have only relied on word of mouth to spread their brand.

The apples go through this press to make SeaCider

Speaking to Mark, there was a humble sense he was unaware of the popularity of the pair’s brand and drink. Not only is SeaCider distributed to local pubs around Sussex but go all across the country from London all the way up to Scotland.

Mark also told us that the reason the drink is just so juicy is because two days before a batch is complete, they add a bunch of apple juice from the huge number of Bramley apples they go through every day and leave it to settle.

The warehouse in Ditchling would be no bigger than our student bars yet the amount of work and product these two create is absolutely astounding. We says cheers to Mark and Matt for creating one of our favourite drinks.