Growing Pains Part 1

Hey everyone! It’s been a few months since I last wrote a blog about how things are going at the cidery, so I thought we might be due for an update. I want to share a bit about some big projects we’ve been working on so far this year (Part 1), and then wax poetic about growing a business and the ups and downs that big growth can bring about (Part 2 - coming soon).

With no further ado, here’s what’s causing some of our current growing pains (but GOOD growing pains).

1. Our Cider Subscription Service. After we started shipping our cider in early 2020, adding a subscription service quickly became the next goal for that segment of our business. During COVID, so many people bought cider to get shipped to their homes; it was really heartwarming. Because we’d furloughed most of our staff in March/April/May, I was the one who would go in and fulfill these orders, and I can’t tell you how many times I saw an old friend of mine from college, or a friend of my parents, or a cousin or aunt or uncle buying our cider. It truly meant so much to me, and I’m so glad I got to connect with these people, even in a small way like putting ciders into a box and writing a quick thank-you note, during the tense early days of COVID.

   We started working on the subscription program a few months later. There were so many fine details to figure out; Jackie, who is running the subscription program, spent so much time on the phone with VinoShipper, asking how to make it possible for someone to gift a subscription, or to change their address, or to swap out a cider that they didn’t want. We had a goal of getting 250 subscribers in our first year.

   In February, before we had even sent out our first box, we went to a panel discussion at CiderCON about how to make a successful subscription service. Two of the presenters were other cideries who were best in class - they each had roughly 250 members. Jackie and I were surprised - we hadn’t sent out our first box and we were getting close to those numbers.

Fast forward just a couple of months and friends, we have OVER 400 subscribers! We’re truly shocked and so happy that people around the US are getting a chance to try our Ciders of the Month. We pour a lot of effort and love into those ciders, so seeing the Instagram stories of people excited to open their boxes in Alaska and Maine is so wild!

2. Farmer’s Markets. Another thing we learned during COVID was that Farmer’s Markets are a good way for us to reach new customers. We signed up for the Fishers Farmer’s Market in early 2020, before the pandemic hit, and we were so glad that we did - we were able to exceed our regular event sales in a year when literally every event was canceled.

So, in true Andrea fashion, I decided we should expand on the program in 2021 and signed us up for 5 markets throughout the state. And then Jackie signed us up for three more. That’s right. Every Saturday, we are at 8 different farmer’s markets, from Fort Wayne to Bloomington. We had to hire about 30 part-time event staff. We had to buy a cargo van to transport cider every Saturday. We had to get six new branded tents and POS systems and a couple storage units and just after we finish one Saturday and take a breath, we have to get ready for the next, for TWENTY-TWO WEEKS IN A ROW!

To be honest, we may have bitten off more than we can chew here. It’s going great, we’re selling tons of cider to tons of new fans and I couldn’t be happier. But we’re literally running out of cider, even though we just upgraded our equipment and added on staff so we could grow our cider production. We’re having to make some hard choices, like who gets cider first (our tasting room customers, our farmer’s markets, our subscribers, or our many wholesale accounts throughout the state). When I try to prioritize that list, I come up with 5 different groups as our number 1 priority and then decide we just have to make more cider, somehow.

3. Moving our Tasting Room/Opening a Restaurant. Oh, this little thing? The one we’ve been working on for three years now? Yeah, it’s happening, and it’s happening FAST. Everyone hates moving, and with good reason - you have to decide what you want to move and what gets trashed, it’s messy and dirty and sweaty and stressful. When it’s a business that’s moving, you have to add on the layer of closing for a couple of weeks, pulling staff who are already busy to help with moving/painting/building stuff, communicating with your customers that soon, they’ll have to go somewhere else to get your cider, updating all of your business paperwork with a new address…on and on it goes.

Part of our move includes majorly expanding our kitchen - from the literal space and equipment, to the staff and the menu. You may have heard, but there is a major crunch in the industry right now for kitchen and front-of-house employees, so finding the right staff is tough. But the new space is going to be SO GREAT! It’s big a beautiful and light-filled and spacious, and our food is going to be amazing, and we truly can’t wait to have the move finished and the space open to you all because it’s a major upgrade. Please visit us!

I’m going to stop here. As you can see, we’re working on a lot. And there are a few BIG things we’re still holding back on sharing from you, so stay tuned for those.

But, I can’t end without saying that this kind of growth, while challenging and tiring and a bit of a logistical nightmare, is really, really exciting, especially after 2020. We feel so honored to be in the place we’re in, representing what cider can be when it’s made in Indiana. Thank you, and stay tuned!

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!

Distribution, Part I

Folks that come into the cidery usually have a set of questions they progress through when they’re here:

1. How long have you guys been open? (6 months)
2. What did this building used to be? (A pharmacy. A meeting place for the Oddfellows. A strip club).
3. Where else can we get your cider? (Nowhere. Yet…)

That third question always leads to more questions. The answer is – of course – more complicated than it seems. Here’s our attempt to explain the situation, in a two-part blog! Today is Part 1, which outlines the difference between self-distribution and working with a distributor.

First of all, the USA’s alcohol system is a ‘three tier system’, thanks, of course, to laws set up after the disaster that was Prohibition (where most weird alcohol laws come from). For more information about this system and its history, check out this great article over on Serious Eats.

• Tier one is the manufacturer of the product – these are your breweries, wineries, distilleries, and cideries. Us!
• Tier two is a distributor. These are companies that buy product from manufacturers at wholesale prices, and then sell them to retailers. In Indiana, we have Monarch Beverage, Cavalier, Zink, etc. who play this secondary role.
• The third tier is then the retailer. This is where you as customers can come to get a drink. Think bars, restaurants, liquor stores, grocery stores, etc.

Every state has different liquor laws. In Indiana, micro-breweries can cut out the distribution tier up to a point (based on volume). If you’re familiar with Indiana alcohol laws, last year, Sun King Brewing Co. fought to raise the limit so that microbreweries can self-distribute a greater volume of beer before having to work with a distributor. So, microbreweries can self-distribute, and while most of them start with self-distribution, many of them decide to sign on with a distributor well before they hit the self-distribution ceiling in Indiana. There are some great reasons for that:

Why You Would Self-Distribute

Self-distribution sounds like a great deal, especially at the start. You can hop in the car, put a keg or two of your product in the back seat, drive to a bar, say, “Hey, want this?”, and if the answer is yes, you can pick up a check and leave the beer. Bam, you’re on tap at a local restaurant and are already growing the market for your product. You get to collect the retail price for your beer and take it home to the bank. As a startup, that extra profit can help you expand a lot faster than selling at the wholesale rate. Also, in brand new businesses, one or two people could probably handle all the distribution needs.

Bottom Line: Quick way to reach more customers, higher profit margin for the business.

Why You Would Work with a Distributor

Eventually, if things go well, you’ll need quite a team to keep up with the demand for your products. A fleet of vehicles, someone on staff who visits accounts with the sole purpose of cleaning draft lines, sales people to bring in new business and keep current customers happy, and multiple delivery drivers, not to mention someone to handle all of the logistics that come along with so many moving parts. A distributor would handle all of that for you in exchange for a portion of your profits. They will also likely expand your footprint because they have a wider reach and access to more varied accounts because of the multiple different brands they represent.  

Bottom Line: At a certain point, most breweries will end up working with a distributor because the extra reach will make up for the chunk of profits and the staffing needed to support self-distribution.

So, Back to Us…

              We tricked you – none of these laws actually apply to us because we aren’t a micro-brewery! Our legal classification is a Farm Winery, and in Indiana, Farm Wineries aren’t allowed to self-distribute at all. This explains why you can’t find our ciders on tap at bars and restaurants yet.

              Since we opened, we’ve known that we’d need a distributor to grow. We’ve met with many, sussed them out (this is an important partnership, after all), and negotiated contracts. As of TODAY, we have finally signed the all-important paperwork, which means that the time for us to start popping up around the city is near. Like…a few days away!

Next week, we’ll post a blog about what YOU as a cider fan can do to help us grow our business.

Thanks for coming along on this wild ride with us!