What about growth within the company? Obviously it started with the two of you in late 2015. Where are you now? Westartedwith two full-timeemployees andonepart-time. And that lasted about two weeks and we realized that we needed to step it up. This past summer we had 15 people on payroll. We designed the business so it could grow. And because of that, we haven’t run into any huge production bottlenecks or anything. But we didn’t realize it would happen so quickly. We put out a Facebook post the day we opened that said “at 5 o’clock today, we are going to open the back door”… at 5 o’clock there were 25 people waiting to get in. So we thought, ok, we’d better be ready for tomorrow. If you get buy-in from the locals… the ones who are going to come back… then you’ve got a good foundation. And we’re right beside the grocery store. So a lot of people get their groceries and stop by with their growler bottles for a refill. We’ve made it part of the downtown shopping experience. What’s on tap? What’s going into the growlers? What really differentiates us from industrial cider production is that we never use concentrated sugar and we sweeten with fresh- pressed juice.Wedo it a littledifferently fromthewaymost people do it. Most people ferment the juice half-way and then they stop the fermentation, and leave the rest of the sweetness in there. We actually ferment it until it’s completely dry, like a really dry apple wine. And it’s very much in a wine style. So we ferment it with a white wine yeast and we do it for a very long, cold fermentation period. So we’ve outfitted the cellar with these beautiful jacketed tanks, and we do a six-week fermentation. In contrast, most industrial ciders are fer- mented in under 2 weeks. When that fermentation is done, we sweeten it with fresh-pressed juice. That’s what really catches people. When you come to the Annapolis Valley and you want to taste fresh apples, that’s what we capture with the “back-sweetening” with the fresh-pressed juice. On the taps, we’ve got one that’s a little sweeter, called “The Classic” (at 5.6% alc.). One that’s a little drier, called “Crisp and Dry” (7.7% alc.). And then we make one every time we make a batch that’s a little different, and it’s some- thing different every time. We weren’t sure what to call it. So we called it “Something Different!”! The idea is to use fruit that is in season. So the growers often will have an overstock of another fruit available and we’ll use it in our cider. It’s what people make a special trip in for. When we announce that we have a new “Something Different” on social media, we have people coming through the door within 15 minutes. Then many of them will add concentrated sugar if they need more sweetness.
And we thought, we don’t really have a choice because the other piece of advice that we got was ‘keep your jobs.’. In fact, we still have our jobs. And that forced us to hire a full-time manager. We couldn’t be the people on the floor, serving the taps all day. Keeping our jobs forced us to work on the business and let go of things like sweeping the floor, and the other little tasks. It forces you to put systems in place to make sure all that stuff gets done. Standard operating procedures for the retail space became very important early on and itmadeus think about thebusiness as a business instead of a hobby. We didn’t start fermenting in our basement orf have one of those romantic stories about starting in the garage like the lone soldier building an empire from nothing. It’s less romantic hearing about the winemaker and the professor. But that doesn’t mean that we lack passion for the impact we want to have on local agriculture…… We are both Maritimers and we both feel strongly about it. We thought ‘we get this’ and we could probably do a good job of putting one of these operations together. We almost felt obliged, to be honest, to contribute to the cry-out for rural economic sustainability in Nova Scotia. Have sales met your expectations? The initial reaction was far greater than anything we could have possibly imagined. And our naive ideas about us coming in and helping out on the weekends have gone by the wayside. Our new motto is ‘no need to push, just satisfy to pull.’.
There’s enough people coming in the door, we just need to keep them happy.
Our original goal was to make 18,000 litres in our first year, and we made 60,000.
Over three times the amount we were planning on making. In our first year of operation, we purchased over a million Annapolis Valley apples!
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • DECEMBER 2017
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