Growing Pains Part 2

The last blog I published was in June, called Growing Pains Part 1. In it, I described some of the big projects we’d undertaken in 2021, which led to serious growth and serious growing pains (namely, always being on the verge of running out of cider).

In that blog, I promised to write a second part that was less of a report on what was causing the growing pains and focused on more how businesses can manage big growth phases. Of course, we’re a relatively young and small business, so this blog about big growth is coming less from the place of ‘this is what other businesses should do’ and more from a ‘this is what we’re trying to do’ place.

Here are some of the pitfalls of big growth and how we’re attempting to manage them.

1. Growth costs a lot, and usually it costs a lot before you’ve actually grown revenues.

   In late 2019 (let’s just forget 2020 happened, because we remained at a static state for most of that year), we were flirting with the edge of maxing out our production equipment. That meant that we couldn’t really make much more cider without having to make major investments in our infrastructure and equipment. Over the years, Joseph had come up with work-arounds and tricks to squeeze more cider out of what equipment we had, but if we wanted to make any more cider, we’d need to put hundreds of thousands of dollars toward it. This was because we couldn’t just buy a new tank. If we increased our tank capacity, we’d have to cut a new concrete pad that could handle the extra weight. If we did that, our glycol chiller wouldn’t be able to keep up with new tanks, so we’d have to get a second chiller. But if we did that, we’d have to upgrade the electrical service and the power to the building. And if we did all of those things and could make more cider, our bottleneck would be Pasteurizing it all, so we’d need a better solution there.

   A lot of small businesses find themselves in similar situations. You either have to stop when you’ve maximized your equipment, or you practically have to double everything at once, which costs lots of money and is based on the general ~vibe~ that you’ll be able to grow your sales enough to cover the added expense of this growth. If you are able to find the money to do a major expansion, there are still several possible outcomes. You might find out that it’s going to take longer for sales to pick than you expected and you might run out of cash or even go out of business because your debt burden becomes too much. You could adapt and start offering other services to cover that gap in revenue until sales pick up, like making cider for someone else, or canning cold brew coffee for a local business. In the best situation, your gamble that the demand is out there turns out to be true, and you’re very grateful you had the equipment to handle it.

   We are really fortunate to have a lender we’ve worked with since we opened who believed us when we said we needed money to capture this anticipated interest. Luckily, we were right that the demand was there and that the sales would be there on the other side. PHEW. But these major growth periods present a super risky phase for any company, and it puts of lot of promising companies out of business.

2. Growth means a lot of new people, and potentially, a change of culture. One thing that’s been really important to us since we opened is our company culture. We have a short mission, vision, and values statement as a company, and one of the few values that made the cut was ‘Be nice.’ We want to provide excellent customer service. We want to provide good wages and a good work environment. And we also really want our employees to be nice to each other; to assume the best of each other and give the benefit of the doubt when there are conflicts. To say, “Hey, how are you?” when you see each other instead of, “Did you do this yet?”

   We knew, as we were on the verge of opening the restaurant, that we were about to hire a bunch of new people and that our culture could change pretty quickly if we weren’t on top of it. We had a very intentional meeting with all of our manager-level staff to reiterate what our values were, how we expect managers to behave and handle conflict, and how we want lines of communication to flow. This meeting definitely helped remind everyone of what our expectations were.

   A couple months after we opened the restaurant, we started to sense some tensions rising in our staff, both within small teams and across teams. It happens - any time you double the number of people in your company and ratchet up the stress several notches, the culture is at risk. We had to model ourselves the kind of conflict management we want to see in our managers in a few tough conversations. We had to let some people go who just didn’t fit into the vibe we were trying to cultivate. And we had to publicly acknowledge some of the ways we needed to do better.

   This is the kind of thing that we’ll have to pay close attention to for as long as we’re in business, but a strong culture of people who support each other is worth the effort it takes.

3. Growth means most, if not all, systems have to get redone. We have never been the best at creating replicable systems, but we were managing. Then, we added 8 farmers markets every week, a new full-service restaurant, a huge cider subscription program, and grocery sales onto our tenuous-at-best-processes, and most of our systems buckled under the pressure. We’re doing our best, gritting our teeth and holding on as we get through this extremely hectic and stressful busy season (people love cider in the fall!), but we know that we have a whole lot of shoring up to do during our down season this winter. We’ll (hopefully) have some time to review what worked in 2021 and what didn’t, and to create new systems. So while 2020 was the year of Pandemic Pauses and 2021 was the year of Big Growth, we hope that 2022 will be the year of Replicable Systems and Delivering on 2021 Promises. It’s not so catchy, but it will be pretty important if we want another growth phase in the future (2023??)

Thanks for hanging with us as we’ve grown this year; without customers who are passionate and involved, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to take these big steps.

Behind the Scenes Highlights of our 2020 Cider of the Month Gift Box

Did you hear the news? We just released a gift box that features the 12 unique Ciders of the Month that we released in 2020! We wanted to review 2020 through the lens of this gift box in the blog today. This is from my perspective (Andrea) - if you want a LOT more information on how the ciders were made and how they should be consumed, you need to get one of the boxes to access to some awesome behind-the-scenes content written by Joseph, our Cidermaker. :)

The Background: Though we’d done the CoTM program for four years, we had never canned the releases. We decided in mid-2019 that we wanted to go that route, and had spent the latter half of the year designing the label, picking the flavors, and brainstorming how to make the program even more successful. In fact, we’d already decided to save some back and release a gift box at the end of the year!

This gift box is a great walk down memory lane, as each cider is tied to a specific time in a really wild year. Here are a few behind-the-scenes stories from some of the releases.

February, 2020 - Blueberry Lavender - Every year, Aaron and I and several of staff members go to CiderCON, which falls over the first weekend in February. This year, Devour Indy, a city-wide dining event and the Blueberry Lavender release both fell on February 1st, which happened to be a Saturday, and also happened to be when a lot of our staff would be in Oakland, CA. Now that we’ve done this for four years, I get a bit of a spidey-sense when a release is going to be big, and Blueberry Lavender was going to be BIG. In preparation, I even sent out one of the rare Facebook messages to people who were interested in the release, telling them to NOT come on the 1st if they didn’t have to because we were going to be so crowded. We opened up our warehouse and added tables and a second layer of staff to ease the pressure. I compulsively checked the sales from my phone and texted our tasting room staff for status updates from San Francisco. Apparently it was a well-controlled zoo and everyone loved the cider! It’s one of our most popular releases from 2020.

April 2020 - Mango Lassi - This was our first post-shutdown release. We offered carryout cider only from mid-March through the end of May, and we were running things with limited hours and staff. We had no idea what to expect of a cider release during COVID. Luckily, there was a lot of community support for small businesses in April, and our fans really showed up! It was so fun to have our team here, busily getting orders ready, answering the phone as people pulled for curbside pickup, and running cider outside. It felt great to be busy and gave me a sense that maybe we could make things work during the COVID shutdowns after all. Little did we know we’d be doing these same things for the rest of the year!

May 2020 - Margarita - We always try to do a fun cider that could pair with Mexican food for our May CoTM because of Cinco de Mayo, and this year we thought a Margarita cider would fit the bill. But BOY did we underestimate how popular this cider would be!

A little peak behind the curtain on this one: when we process a finished cider, it goes from a Brite tank, through our canning line (which at the time was a manual canning line that did 8 cans per minute), into a hot water bath for 20 minutes, cooled in a cold water bath, and then for the CoTM brand, run through a manual labeling machine and finally hand-stickered.

For some reason, we thought it’d be fine if we canned Margarita starting at 10am on the morning it was released. We’d have the first batch of cans (8 cases worth) out of the Pasteurizer by 11, and they could be labeled and ready to go by the time we opened at noon. We were still carryout only, so how hard could it be to keep up?

Just what we needed during one of our most stressful releases ever - a huge, expensive, long-awaited piece of equipment to be delivered!

WRONG. As often happens, it took a little longer to get started than we thought, and then things didn’t run as perfectly as we hoped once we got going. Meanwhile, the number of online pre-orders climbed over 100, most of which included at least a 4-pack of Margarita and several that wanted an entire case. We were behind before we even opened. Our meticulously lined-up pre-orders were sitting on the bar, but as customers popped in without a pre-order, we stole cans from the pre-ordered pile to keep the lines down. But then someone who had ordered hours before would come in and we wouldn’t have their order ready! Or in the heat of the moment, we’d forget to mark an order as picked up and we’d re-make an order that wasn’t necessary. It was just a mess the entire day. Bartenders who had been furloughed but came by to pick up some cider were immediately asked to help run orders outside, or label cans as they came out of the Pasteurizer. Customers were calling asking if it was okay that the cider they just picked up was still hot.

The whole time it was happening, I was thrilled that we were making money and getting people a cider they were excited about, but I was STRESSING about the lines outside.

Oh, and did I mention, right as we opened and started to realize how nutty the day was about to be, a freight truck with our new canning line arrived, which pulled three of the production guys from canning into one of the most intricate, time-consuming, and stressful forklift removals we’ve ever had?

Yeah. It was a wild day that I will never forget.

Watermelons coming in fresh from the fields! They were in the cider within 12 hours.

August 2020 - Watermelon - This was a fun one! We try to use local fruits as often as we can, and hoped to do so for our watermelon cider. I found out that Hackman Family Farm was doing their first watermelon harvest on July 27th, 4 days before the cider would be released. I drove down to Seymour, IN in the morning, and arrived when the first truck of watermelons was being brought in on a tractor. They were hot from the sun. I could tell that everyone at the farm was excited to get the watermelon season started, as one of the workers ran a watermelon over to a table and the Hackmans cut it open, chopped it up, and handed it around for everyone to taste. It was SO GOOD. I’ve never had a warm watermelon before, but it was still so refreshing! Truly the best watermelon I’ve ever had.

They loaded up my car with 37 watermelons and I headed back up to Indy. I didn’t realize how heavy my car was, and at the very first stop on the way home, a rogue watermelon came flying into the front and smashed my hand a bit. I drove a lot more carefully after that!

I got back to the cidery around 1, and the production team quickly unloaded my car, started chopping up the watermelons, and running them through the juicer. The fresh watermelon juice was added to the cider that night. From field to cider in 12 hours!! You can really taste the freshness in this cider - I think it may be my favorite one.

December 2020 - Cranberry Rum - We didn’t realize until after we’d announced our that our gift box would be released on Black Friday that it meant we had to have Cranberry Rum finished in enough time to can it, Pasteurize it, sticker it, and put it in the box several days before the official release date. Luckily, our production team was able to switch some things around and make it happen for us, so Cranberry Rum is the first Cider of the Month that was done DAYS EARLY. It made the release in the tasting room really smooth, which was great because this one had a lot of traction on social media. Thank goodness we didn’t have a repeat of Margarita!

I hope you enjoyed some of these stories as much as I enjoyed telling them! Part of what makes supporting a small business worth it are stories like these - you get to know the people that make the cider, the team in the tasting room, and the customers you see every week. We hope that 2021 brings more in-person gatherings and shared stories, but for 2020, this is about the best we can do. We hope you get one of these gift boxes and create some stories of your own too. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Business in the Time of COVID - Part 2

It’s hard to believe that five months have passed since our last blog about what it was like as a business owner in the early days of COVID-19. A lot has changed, but, sadly, a lot has remained the same. We’re still fighting the pandemic as a country, with higher rates of infection than there were in April. We still don’t have any sense of how the future will play out. Government support (for both small businesses and individuals) has ended in spite of still not being able to fully function.

I wouldn’t choose to go back to April of 2020 again, ever, but at least it felt like everyone was working together and doing their part to work their way out of a really tough situation. Now it feels like the hard work and sacrifices we all made didn’t really achieve anything, and the only way to navigate our business forward is to pretend things are back to normal and hope our customers will do the same.

Most every small business owner I work with in Indianapolis (which is a small sample of mostly brewery, restaurant, and other hospitality-minded folks) feels the conflict of trying to capitalize on local support, pent-up demand, and extended patios for the time being while looking a couple months into the future and seeing the dreaded winter months barreling toward us. January and February are bleak, not just because of cold weather, but because folks are dieting, giving up alcohol and spending less after over-indulging during the holidays. Most bars, restaurants, and breweries rely on busy summer and fall months to create a cash cushion to sustain losses in January and February. Part of what made the timing of COVID so bad is that we’d just all just gotten through the tough months and were low on cash and then had to shut down for the months that usually help us build back our reserves. Now, we’ve mostly made it through the best parts of our year with limitations on dining and operations, and are headed back into the bleak winter days.

Who wants an ice cold cider?

Without big changes and improvements, we’re in for many more permanent closures in the coming months. I don’t want to end this by saying, ‘So support your local small businesses if you don’t want them to go under!’ because I feel like the government should be stepping in with either a solid plan to get us out of this mess quickly OR with support for families and small businesses (ideally both) and they’re doing neither, but…if you have the means and you care about your neighborhood businesses, they will need help.

Once again I’ve written a blog very different than the one I planned on writing! It’s a much more macro versus micro view, so I’ll get off my soapbox and share some information about how we, specifically, are doing as a business and some of the interesting things we’ve had to manage over the last 5 months.

1. Our team is mostly back and we’re all healthy. First and foremost, we’ve been able to hire most every full-time staff member back that we had to furlough, as well as the part-time staff who have expressed an interest in coming back. We’ve had to navigate how to handle employees with fevers or coughs, but for the 15-20 COVID tests taken among our staff over the last several months, no one has tested positive. We’re very grateful for a staff full of people who have taken our COVID precautions seriously and have been relieved every time someone’s cold turned out to be just that.

2. We were really lucky to receive government funding, but it’s gone now. We were truly lucky in that we received PPP funds as well as an Economic Injury Disaster Loan. We used the PPP to keep our production staff and tasting room part-time crew paid and to cover a couple months of rent. We used the EIDL funds to cover other operational expenses. Without both, things would have been MUCH more difficult for us, and we are grateful that we received them. I’m not sure how other businesses who received only one or neither of these funds will be able to navigate the next few months.

3. Our loyal customers showed up in droves! We’ve always felt like our customers are some of the best around, but the last few months have proved it. When some segments of our revenue dropped to near zero in March, April and May, (distribution sales), other revenue streams increased greatly, especially carryout package. We sold four times the amount of packaged cider out of our tasting room from March to May than we did in those same months in 2019, and it was all one-by-one as customers came in to stock up their cider stashes. We were able to keep from using too much of our cash cushion because of you guys.

4. Sometimes getting a breather is a good thing. Right before the pandemic, we were anticipating big growth in 2020 (see…DOMINATE). We had paid for 50% of a new fully automatic canning line that would help us quadruple our canned cider output with the goal of expanding into other states regionally and into more grocery stores. We were able to get the canning line delivered to our cidery in early May, and because so many of our revenue streams had ground to a halt, we actually had time to get the canning line up and running smoothly. We moved everything out of the space, treated the floors, installed new plumbing and electrical work and air compressors and CO2 tanks, all in between cider batches, because we had TIME to do it. If we hadn’t had the pandemic, it is truly possible that the canning line would have arrived, we’d have set it up quickly without the right tools because we needed to use it, and we’d still be running it rough-shod today. Having a moment to breathe in the midst of our usually-busy schedule really helped get us into a good place by the time June rolled around. Which is a really good thing because….

5. We’ve had three of our biggest months ever all in a row. I almost feel bad talking about it because I know that this isn’t really the norm, but we’ve had bigger revenues the last three months than we’ve ever had before. Part of it is making up for our worst month ever in May. Part of it is that when every restaurant and bar and liquor store is opening again for the first time in months, they all need your product at the same time. A big part of it is that we were already on a serious growth curve and with a semi-return to normalcy, we’re simply catching up to where it would have been without the pandemic. And I think another part of it is that we’re making some of the best ciders we’ve ever made - our Cider of the Month program has blown up this year with great flavors like Mango Lassi, Margarita (so popular we had to apologize to our customers for how nuts things went, we ran out a few times, and we’re doing a re-release next week!), Strawberry Lemonade, and Watermelon.

So here we are. We’re doing okay. Our team is doing okay. We are optimistic about our growth as a business and what the future holds in the short and long term, but the medium term is still murky. Support your local small businesses, take care of each other, and don’t forget to VOTE in November!

Business in the Time of COVID - Part 1

I’m currently sitting on my couch, crying. I’ve been texting with one of our employees, who we had to furlough shortly after Governor Holcomb’s closure of in-person dining for bars and restaurants in Indiana. A couple weeks ago, I let her and a few other key employees know that we would be able to bring them back because we were approved for the Payment Protection Program. But as time passed, the funds didn’t come, and when they finally did, it was less than we were approved for. Since finding out about the fund reduction, I've been kicking myself for mentioning anything about returning to work in the first place. Why did I make promises to people about their livelihoods before all of the details had been clarified? Why, as a business owner, was I regularly frustrated with my previous self for saying too much, promising too much, being too transparent, when it consistently meant I had to come back and say, “Well, actually, things have changed and that’s not really the case any more.” In one of these hard conversations over the years, I told the person that I have a problem of falling in love with people when I talk to them and I want to give them everything in that moment, and instead of thinking it, I say it out loud. It’s a bad trait for a business owner, and a person. When would I learn? 

I finally worked through the self loathing and started to break the news to each person that we actually wouldn’t be bringing them back as soon as we hoped. We had to keep our production staff working, and that plus staffing our bar for limited carryout hours would exhaust the PPP funds. Without a date for reopening on the table, it felt foolhardy to spend more than absolutely necessary right now. She let me know that she’d just gotten her first unemployment check and that she and her family would be fine. And then she thanked me for all the hard work I was putting into trying to do the best thing for our employees and to make sure we’d be there with a good job and steady pay on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when I started crying. She couldn’t know what a relief that was, to know that she could see I cared, even though I was delivering bad news.

As a business owner, I’ve really struggled with decisions that mean choosing between profits and people. I want everyone to make a truly liveable wage, even in an industry where that isn’t the norm. I want to give people raises who work hard and have been loyal to us. I want our employees to get to do work that is meaningful and exciting, even if it isn’t exactly what they were hired to do. But it’s really hard to do that when your company still isn’t making enough of a profit to upgrade needed equipment, for example. It’s really hard to do that when you yourself haven’t taken a salary in 5 years. The most stressful moments of owning a business can all be tied to moments like this. I want to be seen as a competent leader who knows how to navigate the realities of starting a business and who is caring and generous with our employees, but sometimes it is truly the wrong decision if we want to keep operating. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has really brought these kinds of decisions to the fore, with an added layer of uncertainty about the future that is unprecedented and fully out of our control. When the noise about COVID-19 started to pick up in early March, I felt like I was making life-altering decisions on behalf of our employees every day. In early March, before mandated shutdowns were announced, I read articles chastising people for going out to bars. They blamed the people, yes, but they also blamed the bar owners for not shutting down. I have a Master’s in Public Health and a concentration in Epidemiology. I actually know more than the average person about the spread and mitigation of diseases. From that perspective, the answer was clear. But as a business owner, it was murky. Should we shut down? Should we reduce our hours? Is it fair to ask an employee to deal with the public, even if I wouldn’t be comfortable doing so myself? Is it fair to tell someone we’re prematurely closing and effectively fire them, even though other bars and restaurants in our city are staying open until the bitter end? They have kids, and bills, and they want to keep working. How do I, a measly person who opened a small business a few years ago, have this kind of power over someone else’s life? 

So far, all of our staff understands that the circumstances we’re under aren’t normal; of course we wouldn’t have chosen to have a pandemic just as our business was starting to really take off and make some important strides. They’ve been kind and understanding about how complex and difficult these choices are, and graceful when we’ve had to give them bad news. I wouldn’t wish this situation on others, but the silver lining, at least for me in the present moment, is a renewed gratitude for our team, our customers, and our friends who have been so kind even in the midst of their own stresses. 

This wasn’t really the COVID-19 blog I set out to write, and I hope to do another one that’s a little more objective and business-focused, but this is the blog that came out of me today. Thanks to everyone who has supported us over the last 6 weeks, especially our employees who keep showing up to work and have thanked me for a continuing paycheck, and those who have stayed away and reassured me that they will be happy to return once we are ready. It has been one of the few things keeping me from losing it and I can’t be more grateful, no matter what the future holds.  

How Canning Changed Our Business - Part II

In the last post, we talked about how there were some unintended consequences of releasing our cider in cans. After a year of canning - exposing more folks to our cider and growing our sales - we realized that we’d been losing money because having our cider available in a package format affected people’s purchasing patterns.

After taking some time to check our work and make sure it was really true, we had to jump into action to stop the bleeding. These are the steps we took to turn things around (and, spoiler alert - we did! Things are going great! Phew!)

1. We bought a canning line ASAP - I mentioned last week that canning lines are super expensive. That’s for the big guys that do the work for you. If you get an old, used, manual canning line, you can find them for a lot cheaper. We found one of those canning lines for $10,000 from Northern Indiana and snapped it up quick. Once we cleaned it up, replaced some parts, and got it running, we made twice as much on each can of cider than we did before (remember, before was a negative number. So…this sounds wildly better than it really is. But, from -$.05 per can to +$.10 per can is a huge swing when you sell a lot of cans!).

   This was the biggest and most important change we made to fix our situation. However, a manual canning line is exactly what it sounds like: a human being stands in one spot and literally fills each can by hand. In one minute, it takes two people to package 8 filled and sealed cans of cider. It takes three people a full day to package 100 cases of cider. For comparison, when we had the mobile canning people helping us, it took three people one hour to package 100 cases.

   Around the time we started using our new canning line, we had a big, organic jump in sales. A great thing! But instead of using that canning line once a week or so to maintain our supply, we use it 2-3x more often. So, while getting it was transformational and 100% the right choice, it is a temporary solution. We need a bigger line already so we can keep pace with our growing sales.

2. We adjusted our pricing structure. Introducing our cider in cans led to several of our accounts switching from our cider on draft to carrying it in cans. In an effort to encourage folks to keep buying draft cider we actually lowered the keg price so it would be the better deal.

   As a quick aside about that point I just made - it wasn’t as simple as just saying, ‘Hey, we’re lowering our prices!’. We had to think really carefully about how to send out that message and what unintended consequences it might have. It might make an account feel like they were getting ripped off the previous few years and leave a bad taste in their mouth. It might make them think we’d secretly switched to lower-quality ingredients. Plus there’s the whole thing about leaving money on the table - if people were willing to spend this before, why accept less? We finally decided honesty was the best policy - we told folks that instead of pricing our cider per ounce regardless of the vessel, we are adjusting our prices to hit a specific profit margin. It seemed to go over well and made them feel like they were getting a great gift (which they were! Cheaper cider!)

3. We Released Draft-Only Options. One of our mistakes on the distribution side was putting everything we offered on draft into cans. In other words, for every possible cider available to a bar or restaurant, they could get it in either kegs or cans. But one thing that we knew and somehow didn’t think about enough is that bars like to rotate their tap handles ALL. THE. TIME. Even if they have a draft line dedicated to cider (not that common), they never want to put the same one on twice. I suppose we thought that having 4 flagships and one seasonal at all times would cover our bases for the rotation issue, but it turns out that bars really love limited edition, specialty kegs that ONLY THEY can get. Which…I don’t blame them. But we didn’t prepare for that. So, looking to 2020, we are going to be continuing our very popular Cider of the Month Club, where we put a new cider out in our tasting room for one month only, and set aside 5-10 kegs for accounts that want the special stuff. We’ve dipped our toe into this already, and have started getting more and more requests for these specialty ciders, so we’re making it an official thing next year. If an account wants a special cider they can get it! But only on draft.

These three changes really worked. We still sell way more cans than draft cider to accounts, but we aren’t losing our draft accounts any more. We’re selling way more cider in cans, and now, instead of losing a bit of money each time, we’re making a decent profit margin each time. We also have a path for how to continue making upgrades to our production equipment that will continually bring the costs down of getting our cider out the door, so our profit margins will continue to go up without increasing the price.

Owning a business has been a really interesting experience, and I’m sure it will continue to be. What seems so obvious at the time (buy the dang canning line!) takes a lot of waffling to get to. And what seems unimaginable (lower prices to make more money!) can be the ticket to profitability. We’re still figuring it out, but this experience was really helpful. It was a chance to do some real-time, high-stakes problem solving, and at least for now, we’ve solved the canning problem. Onto the next!

How Canning Changed Our Business

Almost two years ago, we decided to put our cider into 12 oz cans and release them into the wild. We wrote about why this was a complicated decision and how distributors work. We also talked about the decisions we made leading into the release. We put a lot of thought and effort into the decision. But, even with our over-the-top spreadsheets, calculations, and forecasts, there were still effects on our business that we didn’t anticipate. Here are some of the biggest changes - both expected and unexpected - that came about as a result of canning our cider.

Is it worth risking your business to have cans this beautiful? Maybe.

1. They exposed us to new people and accounts. This is the whole point, right? We put our cider in cans so that we could sell it at liquor stores and restaurants that have limited draft options. We put our cider in cans so that, someday, grocery stores and sporting venues could carry them. And with each new store or venue that becomes an account, a new batch of people see the name Ash & Elm Cider Co. and become aware of our business. And all of this happened! Yay brand-awareness! Yay new fans!

2. Traffic to our tasting room declined. We anticipated this a bit, but it was still a bummer when it happened. Before cans, if someone wanted to drink our cider at home instead of at a bar, they had to come to the tasting room and get a growler fill, which would last them for a couple nights, max. Now, they had a more options: they could come to our tasting room and buy enough cider in cans to last them for a month or two. They could go to the liquor store next to their workplace and never step foot in our tasting room at all. We expected a dip in sales in our tasting room, but we hoped that the greater exposure (see #1) would eventually lead to more people finding out about us and checking out our tasting room. That did happen eventually, and tasting room sales recovered, but for those first six months or so, the difference was hard to miss.

3. It changed our product mix. This one was a biggie, and we should’ve seen it coming. We’ve talked before about profit margins. Our best margins come from draft cider - filling kegs has a much lower labor and equipment cost than canning cider, but the retail price is about the same. If it were up to us, every bar and restaurant would carry our cider on draft (heck, multiple draft lines per bar! CIDER FOR EVERYONE!!).

   One thing we didn’t anticipate is that a lot of our draft cider customers didn’t do what we thought they might - keep carrying our cider on draft and add new styles in cans. Instead, they took all of our cider off of their tap list and replaced them with cans. While we’re definitely happy to be in more bars and have more of our styles represented, we didn’t expect to lose so many draft positions when we offered our cider in cans. In fact, our draft sales have been about level year over year: our draft cider sales were up 18% this year and 23% last year. Cans, on the other hand, are increasing rapidly: our canned cider sales are up 119% compared to last year.

   Similarly, our growler sales (that precious high-profit-margin liquid) are down since we started offering cans to go in our tasting room. We anticipated more sales overall with cans, but we didn’t adjust our draft options down, and we should have.

4. It didn’t make us any money... We used a mobile canning service for the first year that we offered cans. We did this because canning lines are SUPER expensive, and we wanted to test the market first. The trade off, of course, is that we’re paying someone to perform a service for us, which eats into the profit margins. We already knew that using a mobile canner would make our profit margins razor thin, but that was with the assumption that draft sales and tasting room sales would continue to grow at the same pace instead of decreasing in velocity.

   At the end of 2018, we did some number crunching and realized something sobering: we were losing money on every can of cider we sold. OUCH. We were working harder, longer hours, putting stress on ourselves and our production staff, and we had less to show for it! How could our calculations have been so off? Well…see points one through three above. Each account that took off a draft line and added in cans cut into our profit margins. Each customer that bought cans instead of a growler did the same. Multiply that by every bar and every customer for an entire year, and you end up working harder for less money. Not a sustainable business strategy.

   This blog is already creeping up on length, so I’m going to stop it here and will write another blog soon about what we did to stop the bleeding that canning introduced into our business model. Stay tuned!

It's Been a Minute! Here's an Update.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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!

Confessions of a Cider Agnostic - Guest Blog by Nicole Cesare

As a 20-year-old studying abroad in Seville, Spain, I found myself enchanted by the flamenco music, the cobble-stoned streets, and the hand-poured café con leche available even in gas stations. However, when it came time to order a drink at a bar, I was overwhelmed, having never done so at home because of my underage status. After a few thoroughly misguided attempts at urbane sophistication (cloying, 80s-era cocktails like Grasshoppers and Piña Coladas), I finally settled on a go-to order: cider.

Spanish cider was crisp, dry, and refreshing, the perfect post-siesta libation. And while sangria gets all the press, cider is something of a Spanish institution, with the sidrerias (cider houses) offering cider straight from the barrel much like you might get wine at a more rustic venue.

Spanish cidra is often poured from a distance to aerate the cider on its way into the glass.

When I took a spring break trip to Oxford, I discovered Strongbow, an English cider that hit similarly clean notes. Somehow, the beverage that worked so well in the Spanish heat also worked in the British damp.

However, after returning to the U.S. (and turning 21), I wasn’t able to find cider that worked so well. Most of the mass-marketed brands I tried were sweet and faintly chemical tasting, closer to soft drinks than wine. I stopped ordering cider, preferring instead to check out craft beers and work on developing a palate for wine. This continued for years; having lost my taste for the drink, I described myself as a cider agnostic.

Recently, though, I’ve been excited to hear about the craft cideries springing up around the country. Having had the opportunity to taste some of their offerings, both from cider-exclusive operations like Commonwealth Ciders to well-known brewing companies that also produce ciders, like Cigar City Brewing Company, I’m learning that there’s a whole world of quality cider out there. There are champagne-like, slightly sweet offerings to full-bodied, apple-forward brands. I’m eager to try them all.

Should the opportunity present itself, I’d love to return to Spain or England and really immerse myself in the cider culture that stretches back centuries. In the meantime, however, I’m glad to know that craft American cider is on the rise. Slowly but surely, I’m becoming a believer.

What's the Hold Up?

 Things have been a little quiet around here lately. Every time we talk to friends and family who are interested in our business, they ask us what we’re doing all the time. It’s a good question. Here’s what we’re working on, and what we need to get done before we can open.

Priority Number 1 – Location

We’ve been looking for a location pretty much non-stop since November. It’s hard to find a space that’s perfect. We've fallen in love with locations only to find out they won't work over and over again. Often, we feel like we’re on a never-ending episode of HGTV's “House Hunters”.

<Insert narrator’s voice>

“Aaron and Andrea have been looking for a location for their new cidery. Location #1 is on an accessible road with downtown views, plenty of space, and falls well below their budget, but can they handle a building that’s needs so much work? Location #2 offers room to expand in a convenient location in an up-and-coming neighborhood. But the lack of a private entrance and signage opportunities could cost them. Location #3 has everything they’re looking for – rustic character, functional space, and a busy street, but it’s a short-sale. Are they willing to risk their business future by letting the other locations go in their pursuit of this risky venture? Stay tuned to find out!”

<Fade to black>

It would be funnier if it weren’t so accurate.

So anyway, the location is a big issue. We think we’re close to having our location figured out and a lease signed, but until the paperwork has been finalized, we can’t move forward in any of the other areas.

Priority Number 2 – Permitting

Once we have a lease signed, we’ll be allowed to apply for our Federal Tobacco and Trade Bureau (TTB) permit. The application is comprehensive, and once it’s been submitted, it takes roughly 110 days (that’s 3.5 months!) to get our permit granted. Only after we have the TTB permit can we file for our state alcohol permit, and then after we’ve received that, we can apply for our city permit. All in all, the permitting process will take about 6 months if things go smoothly, and remember, we can’t start that process until the lease is signed.

Priority Number 3 – Build Out

Another item dependent on the lease. Once we have a lease and have our permit applications going through the Federal rigmarole, it’ll be time to start building out the space. Some of it will be un-sexy build-out, like getting the HVAC systems up and running, the plumbing and electrical requirements covered, etc. After that, the fun stuff will start and the cidery will really start to take shape. It’s hard to estimate how long this will take because we don’t have access to the building yet to see just what all needs to get done, but it will take at least several months to go from beginning construction to being able to open our doors to customers.

In the Meantime…

So a lot of the above issues are outside of our control. But, we’re still making gobs of cider and would love to share it with anyone who is interested! If you have an event coming up or if you’d like to throw a cider party at your house or business, send us an email and we can talk! So far we’ve provided cider to a nonprofit fundraiser, a wedding, and a medical office grand opening gala.

We also continue to make connections and contacts with people in the industry in Indianapolis so that we’ll be able to hit the ground running when we open.

So if you’re anxiously awaiting updates on our progress, please know that we’re awaiting those updates right along there with you, and probably more anxiously. :) 

Thanks for hanging in there with us and we’ll see you soon!

Where Will We Get Our Apples?

A lot of people ask us where we’ll get our apples from. When we started working on this project a year ago, our plan was to work with local orchards to source apples for our cider. We met with an old friend whose family owns an apple orchard, and she dropped some wisdom on us that was a bit surprising: Indiana sells all the apples they grow, and in fact, we have to import apples from Washington state and China just to supply everyone with enough apples to eat! In other words, while we have several orchards sprinkled throughout the state, we don’t come close to having enough extras laying around to fuel a large cider company.

Another issue: the great majority of apples grown in Indiana are considered dessert apples - the kind you can pick up and eat or use to make an apple pie. Historically, those aren’t the kinds of apples that are used in traditional cider-making. Now, lots of cideries in the States use dessert apples to make their cider. We plan to, too, for a lot of our products. But having traditional cider apples available can bring a complexity to cider that is hard to get with dessert apples alone. Can’t we have both?

Luckily, our friendly neighbor to the north, Michigan, is an apple powerhouse. They are usually tied for second place in the nation with New York (behind Washington) in apple production in the States, and they also have the infrastructure to package, store, and ship their apples. They have a seemingly endless supply of dessert apples, but they also have a lot of folks growing traditional cider apples as well plenty of apples that are good for cider-making as well as eating, like Northern Spy, Jonagold and Gold Rush.

So, what’s our plan? For the majority of our ciders, we’ll ship juice down from Michigan. We can get different blends to fit with the style of cider we’re making and get a good mix of sweet, tart, and bitter to make a flavorful cider with a lot of complexity.

We’ll also work with those Indiana orchards as much as possible. The busy season for apple orchards usually runs from Labor Day weekend through Thanksgiving, but come December 1st, people aren’t thinking about apples anymore. Unfortunately, plenty of apples are still on trees in December, so orchards end up pressing the juice to stock their shelves throughout the winter or having an excess of apples that they can’t sell. This is where we hope to come in and help them extend their growing season by buying up those late winter apples so that we can showcase the orchards around the state and make a truly local cider. We can’t wait to share it with you!