THE CIDER
Sobremesa's quintessential farmhouse cider made with a combination of Welsh grown cider apples.  Dry, Sparkling and moreish with a definite kick of acidity reminiscent of Basque-style ciders.
 
THE PEOPLE
Sobremesa is a small husband-and-wife-style outfit at Lower Porthamel, a working livestock farm between the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains near Talgarth. Founder Adrian Morales Maillo brought a beer background that ran from Wales to Spain and back, and the project leans into that mixed heritage: wild-fermented, single-orchard ciders made from fruit grown on the farm and pressed in a converted barn, alongside a young acre of soft fruit planted at nearby Hay-on-Wye. It's a young venture, with cider-making only since 2021,  but a deliberately rooted one, trading scale for a strong sense of one particular patch of Welsh hill-farm ground.

THE PLACE
Wales's cider heritage is quieter than England's "three counties," but arguably just as deep;  apples and orchards ran through Welsh culture, folklore, and place-names (farms still called "Ty'n y Berllan," house-in-the-orchard) for centuries, with Monmouthshire, bordering Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, holding the strongest commercial tradition. That heritage nearly vanished in the twentieth century, until a handful of enthusiasts began rediscovering old trees, most famously the Bardsey apple, found on a remote island off the Llŷn Peninsula and dubbed "the rarest tree in the world." A Heritage Lottery-funded project by the Welsh Perry & Cider Society later DNA-tested around 200 trees across the country, uncovering 73 previously unrecorded varieties with names as evocative as the fruit itself, like Gwell na Mil and Bitter Owen bringing the recognised Welsh total past 100. These varieties are now preserved in "museum orchards" at sites including Aberystwyth, Erddig Hall, and the National Botanic Garden of Wales, feeding a craft cider scene that, from having almost no commercial producers a few decades ago, now employs over a hundred people across the country.