because we didn’t necessarily want to get into the wine business. We didn’t feel it would be wise to compete with my wife’s colleagues in the wine industry. And honestly, a winery wasn’t the way to go for us since they are capital intensive up-front and you only see returns after 10 or more years of operating. We have two small kids now, they’re 6 and 4 years old, and we wanted to feed them, so we started thinking about a brewery… while we were exploring that, we costed out making cider. Then I thought, wow, what an opportunity. There is an almost endless apple supply here, and here’s my wife working in the wine industry, there’s 6,000 acres of apple orchards nearby, and nobody in the local cider industry had a place you could visit, go into a tasting bar and have an explanation of how cider is made. We live in a small
town called Wolfville, and when the brewery idea kind of faded, we decided to run with the cider idea. It was a lot more favourable to us for many reasons, one of which is that cider-making is essentially winemaking. It’s almost the same. You don’t brew a cider like you do a beer. You get juice, you ferment it… it was very comfortable for my wife, with her winemaking history. It’s a very ‘small-town- friendly’ attitude you portray. Is that by design or did that just happen organically? I think the key to our success so far is that we put a lot of homework into the plan. It was really important for us to have this retail space, and to make sure that it isn’t disconnected from the production space. So as a customer, when you come in, you can look
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