Hey everyone! Wow - time flies when you have a kid and you’re also in your first few years as a business. I apologize for neglecting our blog for the last year and a half and will commit to doing better moving forward!
Since so much time has passed, let’s spend a bit of time catching up with each other. What have we been up to since *checks date of the last blog post* February 2018? Here are some headlines:
We released our cider in cans in February 2018 and that….changed everything. I’ll write a blog post dedicated to this in the next couple of weeks. As a summary, though, we started by using a mobile-canner and realized after about a year that we should get our own (tiny, used) canning line. At the moment, every can is filled by hand, which is NOT going to cut it for much longer, so we’re already on the hunt for a bigger canning line.
We reached our cider-making capacity and had to get new equipment! First, we bought a new 60 bbl fermenter (on top of the three 40 bbl fermenters we already had). Then, when we maxed our our capacity again, we bought three used 30 bbl fermenters at an auction, which was both exhilarating and anxiety inducing.
The big tank is the 60 bbl fermenter we bought in February, 2019. We just bought three new 30 bbl tanks a couple weeks ago.
3. We decided to move our retail storefront to a bigger spot. Given the size of our current space and the lack of ability to expand, we decided to move our tasting room to a new development about half a mile down the road. We’ll at least double our seating capacity and will also have the ability to increase our food menu. Our target opening date is summer 2020, and you can bet there will be a lot of A-grade blog content coming about this over the next 6 months.
4. We made our most popular seasonal, Fleeting Youth, into a permanent flagship cider, and that has ALSO really affected our business in a big, positive way.
5. We hired a new quality guy, and he’s a real task-master.
Of course, a lot has happened in between these big headlines, but if I shared everything at once, this post would be too long and boring for anyone except my dad. :) So, stay tuned for more frequent blog posts and we’ll get into more of the nitty-gritty soon!
