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B U S I N E S S

THE BIG BOOK OF CIDERMAKING

B O N U S C H A P T E R

Christopher Shockey and Kirsten K. Shockey

best-selling authors of Fermented Vegetables

ß Storey Publishing storey.com

Supplementary content to The Big Book of Cidermaking © 2020 by Christopher Shockey and Kirsten K. Shockey (Storey Publishing). All rights reserved.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” -Simon Sinek Looking Deep

You probably expected this chapter to start with something like how to create

a business plan for a small craft cidery, or maybe some charts and graphs

tracking cider’s meteoric rise in market size and share. Both are important,

but there is something we believe is far more important for you to do first:

ask yourself why you want to grow into a business. We feel strongly about this

because we didn’t ask that question in the beginning, and now we wish we had. We went

down the traditional start-with-a-business-plan road that everyone advised us to follow.

Then one day, when we got that big order that would bust it all wide open, our souls said

Enough while our brains were busy figuring out how to ramp up production.

We launched our on-farm fermentation company after we had spent most of our savings

building a commercial kitchen attached to our farmhouse. That kitchen was going to be a

micro-cidery for our tree-to-bottle operation. From a financial perspective, we needed to

build it sooner rather than later, but it would be a few more years before our small grafted

trees would produce enough apples to make the quantities of cider we wanted.

At our core we are dreamers, which explains why our cidery came before our orchard.

We could have simply purchased juice or apples from another farm while we waited for our

trees to mature, but instead we started brainstorming what else we could produce in the

facility in the meantime. To be fair, when we built the kitchen as part of a years-long dream

to have a family food business, we were pretty sure we would make cider, but Kirsten was

already making and selling cheese. This led us to build the cider house to the code of a

creamery — just in case — even though our land couldn’t sustainably support a herd suit-

able for a full cheese operation. But Kirsten’s talent for making sauerkraut had become

well known, and there weren’t any great brands available in our region, so we started a

lacto-fermented sauerkraut business.

We downloaded a business plan template, read some books, and struggled to answer

the authors’ questions until we had something of a plan. So far, so good. We produced

sauerkraut for other farms for a year, which helped us get the kinks out of our processes.

The following year we launched our own brand, and we were off. It was mostly fun; we

quickly became cash positive and even profitable, and our customers were more than loyal

and complimentary. That year Kirsten let her creative flag fly, taking more than 40 different

varieties to market.

Then someone from a national natural grocery store chain picked up a pint of our

ferments while visiting the local Shakespeare festival. The next thing we knew, we had a

customer who would buy more in a week than we produced in a month. There should

have been high-fives in the kitchen, but instead, there was dread. That’s when we faced it:

we couldn’t make a living without getting much bigger, and while this was our chance to

do just that, neither of us could think through the next steps. Our souls created a mental

roadblock in protest.

Going from Hobby to Micro-cidery

What do you do when your hobby gets out of hand? When friends follow your Instagram account so they know when to drop by and taste your latest batch of cider? You embrace your passion and talent and go big(ger) to turn your hobby into a small business.

Supplementary content to The Big Book of Cidermaking © 2020 by Christopher Shockey and Kirsten K. Shockey (Storey Publishing). All rights reserved.Supplementary content to The Big Book of Cidermaking © 2020 by Christopher Shockey and Kirsten K. Shockey (Storey Publishing). All rights reserved.

The truth was that we weren’t interested in producing the same products over and

over again, yet buyers and consumers want consistency. People smile and maybe even

get a little envious when you describe your days spent in the kitchen, experimenting

with the different flavors that led to the product they are lovingly clutching in their

hands. They don’t smile when you tell them you won’t be making any more of what

they love — and neither do the stores or the distributors. Our passion was in exper-

imenting and discovering new flavors, not in determining the most efficient means

of production. Within a year we had disappointed 100 percent of our customers by

closing the company to focus on teaching others to make their own ferments.

Our lesson is this: when you make something that’s really good, people will want

it and they will tell their friends about it, who will also want it and tell their friends.

Demand expands and keeps expanding, and you have to stay out in front of it. It’s a

rare person or company who produces at the level they want, even if that level is far

below what the market demands. Stores don’t like empty shelves, and distributors

don’t like turning down new accounts. Maybe you see yourself as an artisan cider-

maker who will produce only two thousand bottles of the finest heritage cider per

year. That’s very cool — the world needs more of the finest heritage cider. Your

challenge will be to optimize your business plan so that you protect this goal from

the siren call of making more.

This is the time to truly ask yourself if you really want to grow a cider business.

Ask yourself what your own personal reasons are for wanting to branch out. Why would

you want to do this instead of keeping your cidermaking a hobby? Again, the point is to

get to your true why. Let’s run through some potential reasons you might have.

Because I love drinking cider. If you are making cider because you love drink-

ing cider, you can make a lot of it legally without going commercial. The Founding

Fathers of the United States guaranteed us all a pretty generous 200 gallons per year

per family without taxation, which is still the law today. That’s 1,600 pints, and with-

out the aid of friends and family, that totals an unhealthy daily clip of over four pints

a day. Do your loved ones and your liver a favor and rule out starting a micro-cidery

just to have more cider to drink. On the other hand, if you love making a consistent

product that is truly dialed in, your passion for the drink might keep you going

through the grind of producing the same styles and flavors day in and day out.

Because cider is hot right now. It is true that cider is on a big run right now,

and unlike with craft beer pubs, good local cider pubs aren’t saturating cities — yet.

The same could be said for store shelf space devoted to cider: it’s expanding, but so

are the number of cider labels vying for that new real estate. In other words, there

seems to be plenty of room for growth, but no market remains that way for long.

Because I want to make a living doing something real. Our world seems to be

increasingly filled with abstractions of real things. Americans now spend more than 5

hours of their day staring at the screens of their phones, with a third of that time spent

on Facebook, Snapchat, and other social messaging apps. Many earn their livings

staring at slightly larger screens while they “build” applications or content. What if

you made something real that was totally unique because of the choices you made and

the effort you put into making a specific flavor? It sounds enticing and gets beyond

the polished tasting room, and you will see just how much true work it is. If you are

making cider from fruit and not juice, your routine will change with the seasons,

which might be attractive.

Because I have a lot of apple trees. This might be one of the best reasons to

make cider: to add value to fresh eating apples. Apple varieties typically ripen within a

window of a few months, but with cold storage you can bank all of those apples

at harvest and chip away at them for months at a sustainable pace. If you love your

orchard and want to keep it financially viable for years to come, adding a cider operation

might be a good way to keep your orchard in your life. Then again, if you have an

orchard full of old Red Delicious apples, you have a lot of work ahead of you, because

that variety is not great for cider (and arguably not great for eating, either). If you do

have eating apples, will you change your focus to specialty cider apples, and if so,

how will you make that migration? Or is it better for you to migrate to eating apples

that also make a decent cider? Are you an orchardist who sees an opportunity, but you

have no time or inclination to learn another skill as a cidermaker? If so, it’s possible

to hire cidermakers or contract with wineries to custom-produce your cider. Lastly,

think about how your orchard plays a part in your branding and your marketing.

Many of your cider competitors are purchasing their apple juice and don’t have the

story you do.

Hopefully all that soul searching uncovered something that stuck with you. Did

you decide that you want to make a go of it? If so, it’s time to run it by some people

you trust. Even if you plan to go it solo for the foreseeable future, find two or three

“thought partners” or people who are good listeners, know you well, and would be

supportive in a brainstorming session. Find a quiet place with a whiteboard, flip-

charts, or a big piece of paper and appropriate scribbling instruments. It might be a

good idea to supply healthy snacks and, of course, a few of your homemade ciders

to aid the process. Your goal is to see if the why of your new cider business resonates

with others.

Go into this exercise with flexibility in mind because you might have thought

you wanted to start a business for one reason, but after hashing it out with trusted

people you realize you’re doing it because of something else. No reason should be

off the table in this exercise. If you believe in the importance of nature’s pollinators

and the plight of bees keeps you up at night, and you believe that healthy orchards

help keep bees healthy, then go with that. If you believe there are too many


It’s a Business, So Have a PlanIf you have been making cider in 5-gallon buckets or glass carboys tucked

away in your garage, basement, or spare bedroom and bottling in

the kitchen late at night, you have probably gotten this far without a

plan. Things change when you start to sell your cider legally. You are

going to have to keep good records, because you will have to pay taxes

of different kinds, and you’ll have to pay them often. You are going to have to play by

the rules of your country, your state or province, perhaps your county, and certainly

your city or township. It’s quite likely that these are not coordinated in any way, and it’s

up to you to put them all together. To do that, you are going to need to get organized,

and a business plan can help you.

This plan will tell the world three things: your cider company’s goals and how

you plan to reach them, the problems you are likely to meet along the way and

how you plan to solve them, and what people and financial resources you will need

to do all of this. That’s it, really.

Business plans have been around for a long time, and they contain certain information

for a reason. Save your creative energies for your cider and don’t spend a lot of time

trying to come up with something original here. You need to cover three basic sections.

“A key feature of a business is that people do it to make a profit. People engage in a hobby for sport or recreation, not to make a profit.”

-Internal Revenue Service

B U S I N E S S C O N C E P T In this section, you want to explain the cider

industry, your cider company’s structure and

products, and what success looks like and when

you think you will achieve it. As you are writing

this, picture yourself presenting the plan to your

local bank branch manager, who might be the last

person you would expect to see in a cider pub or

at a fermentation festival. Maybe this person has

never tasted cider, let alone knows how it is made.

Don’t assume the bank manager knows anything

that you and your craft cidermaking buddies take

for granted.

Executive SummaryThis is the first thing someone is going to read

and the last thing you should write. Summaries

are great to read and hard to write because

everything has to be distilled down to only a few

simple, concise, and motivating sentences. While

we may not be the best people to demonstrate

this skill — all of our books have been over the

contracted word count — we do know some tricks

that we employ when necessary.

First, as we said, write the summary last, after

you have completed the other sections. When

you see the rest of the plan laid out before you,

it will be easier to write. Second, remind yourself

of your purpose — your why. Read through your

plan and highlight the sentences that speak to that

purpose. These are the important parts you want

to bring to light in your executive summary,

because this is why you will work hard to make

your cider business a success. Finally, storytelling

and extra detail can’t live here.

grains in our diets and switching from beer to cider is a healthy choice that

more people should make, then go with that. If you believe your neighborhood

community needs a place to come together around good food and especially good

cider made from local apples, then go with that. Don’t be satisfied with the

first answer; keep digging. When you have something, ask yourself and your

team “But why?” until you distill it down to its bare essence — the brandy of your

apples, if you will. And not unlike fresh brandy, it needs to age. Once you have

your why, put it away for a week or two and go about your busy life. Then get it

out and share it with your network. How do you feel sharing it? Does it resonate

with people? You know you have something when people say, “Now that’s

something I could get behind” or if they volunteer to help you get it off the ground.

This is your mission, and it becomes the mission statement in your business plan in

the next step.

One last thing we must say before moving on to the business plan: Protect

your newfound purpose with everything you have, because it can suffer death

by a thousand small cuts in the form of multiple decisions you have to make to

keep things running. That’s how you’ll find yourself one day, struggling to get

out of bed, and we don’t want your cider business to become that for you, ever.


Remember that busy and cider-clueless bank

manager as your audience. Summarize the key

points of the other sections so the manager can

understand it as a business.

Your operational plan details how you are going to

run your cider operation efficiently and effective-

ly. Finally, getting back to that big pie, what are

your strategies for growing your slice? Unless you

plan to only bring in new cider drinkers (making

the pie bigger), you’ll have to take cider drinkers

away from other brands.

Market StrategyIn your business description, you talked about

who your target consumers are and how you

would win them over. In this section you are going

to count those consumers to figure out how many

will become loyal consumers of your cider and

when. By thinking of them this way, you will be

able to see them in logical groupings with like

characteristics.

For example, maybe one group is loyal

beer-drinking millennials and your strategy is to

appeal to them with a message that cider is even

cooler than beer. You research where millennials

like to get together and learn that there are a

number of festivals around the country featuring

craft brews and live music. You decide upon a dual

attack: you sponsor several cool, up-and-coming

bands that play these festivals, and you pay for

vendor booths at half a dozen festivals that are a

reasonable drive from your operation. This strategy

is centered around switching a consumer from one

fermented beverage to another by appealing to

what they like about their current choice.

Your market segment strategy drives many of

the decisions you make in other sections of your

business plan, such as product development,

branding, pricing, and distribution channels. In

the case of your craft beer market segment, you

want to make switching to your cider easy, and

that means matching what craft beer buyers are

used to. Your cider should look familiar to

them, so you want 6-packs of 12-ounce bottles

or cans. It should also be priced in a similar

range, so forget the higher wine prices and stick

to what a good craft beer demands. You will

want to go with distributors that already cater

to craft beers to ensure you can get your cider

on the same store shelves.

Business DescriptionStart by describing the status of the cider industry

in your country. Think of this as describing how

big the pie is that you plan to take a slice of. In the

United States, because of some arcane rules that

have been in place since prohibition, it can be

illegal to ship your cider between states and even

between counties in a single state. Often it is

easier, from a red-tape perspective, to ship cider to

Japan than it is to ship it to another state.

Describe your state’s cider market as best you

can if you plan to distribute within the state.

Next, talk about the target consumer of your

cider. Bring these people into focus as best you can

as you describe what you will deliver to them that

they can’t get from other cider companies.

It could be that you are targeting craft beer

drinkers who are looking for something new and less

heavy. Maybe you are targeting new cider drinkers

who have only tasted the big, sugary commercial

ciders. Or maybe you are going after the largely

untapped 65-and-over crowd, the majority of

whom report never having even tasted cider.

Next, describe how these target consumers

will learn about your cider and either switch from

their current favorite beverage or become a new

cider drinker after tasting your cider. What kind of

advertising, social media campaigns, or distributor

promotions will you do to acquire these customers?

Speaking of distributors, how will you deliver your

cider to your customers? Perhaps you want to sell

only through an on-site tasting room, or maybe

you plan to self-distribute if that is possible in

your state. Or maybe you want to go with a

distributor. Once you have customers, how will

you keep them from switching to other brands?

Finally, it’s a good idea to wrap up this section

with a discussion of how you plan to use your

financial resources to fund this business.

MARKETPLACE You have described the big cider pie and the slice

your cider business represents. Now it’s time to

get more specific. How will you come up with

your ciders — everything from sourcing fruit to

developing recipes to bottling your product?

Let’s look at another market segment. As you

dig through your research, you discover that

men and women over 65 years old barely drink

cider. You decide that you want to target this

group, but how? Your market strategy might

revolve around switching them from what they

predominately drink today — maybe a nice

rosé or pinot gris in the summer and a heavy

cabernet or zinfandel in the winter — to cider.

You’ll find a wide variety of prices in the wine

market — everything from $60 bottles to gallon

jugs and box wines that are the equivalent price

of $3 a bottle. While the thought of selling a

750-mL bottle for $50 is exciting, you realize that

to break into that market you will need to enter

every fancy wine contest that allows lowly cider

to participate. You will need to take out advertise-

ments in wine magazines and bear the weight of

switching these expensive–wine drinkers to your

expensive cider. What if you switch them but they

choose a competitor’s expensive cider that has

already won an armful of impressive awards? That

would suck.

You decide that the box wine crowd is more

your kind of market and it aligns pretty well

with the marketing you are planning to do for

the craft beer drinkers, since that group likes to

pick up a box of wine for parties on the beach or

camping trips with friends. To go after this market,

you probably need to look at your product

development and make sure you have adequate

plans to produce your ciders in a bag-in-a-box. You

still need to fine-tune your marketing message to

the 65-and-over crowd; many of them buy boxed

wines because they are on fixed incomes and

boxed wine is a good value. You realize you will

need to develop a relationship with a distributor

that can get you into grocery stores, and specifically,

on the shelves next to those boxed wines. You then

develop branding that calls to mind a simpler

time, when people climbed wooden ladders and

placed their picked apples in canvas bags; you want

customers to see how the fresh apple taste has been

preserved all the way through to this, well, bag

hiding in a box.


Competitive AnalysisIf this were 1985, your competitive analysis would

be very easy — there would be no cider competitors.

At the time, beer and wine drinkers were busy

falling in love with a new product from Ernest

and Julio Gallo: a combination of premium wine

and fruit called a wine cooler. If you’re the first

in a new market, you have few, if any, competitors.

Once you start seeing success from all your

market building, the competitors start popping

up, with not so much as a thank-you for all your

hard ground-laying work. Today, regional cider

brands like the Northeast’s Woodchuck (which hit

the million-cases milestone in 2007) have already

done the heavy lifting for you, developing the market.

No matter where you live or what market

segment you have decided to target, it is highly

unlikely that a few cider companies aren’t there

already. If you really don’t believe you have any

competitors, it could be because you have found a

group of people who have never been considered

cider consumers before. Follow a modification

of Simon Sinek’s advice and ask why? Why aren’t

there any cidermakers trying to address this

market? If you realize there is a barrier that also

applies to you, abandon that market and move on.

More realistically, you will uncover both direct

and indirect competitors, and you will take time to

understand how they are marketing their product

to the consumers you want to be loyal to your

brand. Doing what your competitors do likely

won’t do the trick — remember, the majority of

us don’t switch to new things until a lot of our

friends, family, and “influencers” on social media

have made the switch. Look closely at who your

competitors are, what they are saying to consumers,

and why those consumers are buying their product.

Remember your purpose for starting this cider

business — your why. How does that purpose

resonate with these target consumers? Are any of your

competitors saying the same thing, or would this be

unique to the market? Ideally, what makes you unique

is also what your target market can get behind.

SWOT Analysis PrimerIf right now you are picturing guys in black tactical armor dropping by in the early morning, you’re think-ing of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), not what we are talking about, thankfully. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is a simple two-by-two grid that can help you think through your market competitiveness. Begin by creating a chart like this and filling it in:

Strengths

Opportunities

Weaknesses

Threats

Strengths: Think of the ways your cider operation will do better than your competitors and list them. What unfair advantages do you have over your competitors? Weaknesses: Write down what your competitors probably do better than you or where they have the ability to do something better if they learned about your new product. Opportunities: Brainstorm ways you could grow your market that you aren’t doing right now. Are these opportunities your competitors already know about, or are they things that only you see coming? Threats: What is going to keep you up at night? Consider the various parts of your operation, your competitors, and the laws and regulations at all levels. Look at your Weaknesses box for inspiration.

Share the finished SWOT analysis with your team and get a sense of their general impression. Does it seem positive, or does it seem pretty iffy?

O P E R AT I O N S

Products Development PlanThere is a good chance at least one of your products is going to be a

tasty cider, but it’s just as likely that you are going to need more than

your best cider to survive. How will you package your ciders — bottles,

cans, kegs, boxes, or something new and unique to the market? How

will you develop your branding, or, if you have done this already, how

will you evolve it as you learn more about what is working and what

is missing with your target market? Maybe you are planning a service

that features your ciders. Tasting rooms can provide excellent sources

of cash flow once established and frequented by loyal customers. Make

no mistake, customers are loyal for more reasons than just your cider —

like how they feel when they visit your tasting room and the joy of

hanging out with other cider lovers. How will you develop an environment

that pulls people in? Here, it might be a good time to check back in with

your company’s guiding purpose and ask yourself the big why question.

Cidery Operations PlanWhat does a day in the life of your cider operation look like, from the

time someone unlocks the door and turns on the lights until the last

person turns off those lights and locks the door behind them? Brain-

storm with your team. For example, maybe you are renting a section of

a building in an industrial park for your cider operations. It’s concrete

and steel and mostly unheated, perfect for cider but not for those who

are sitting all day in front of their laptops to design labels, provide new

copy for the website, grow your social media community, or make sure

everyone is paid and that your company gets paid on a timely basis.

Just because they mostly work from coffee shops or their kitchen tables

doesn’t mean the daily routines of your employees or contractors

shouldn’t be part of your operations plan. Be sure to include them

when you are fleshing out this section. Finally, what roles do you

anticipate and what types of people do you see filling them? Will they

be employees with benefits or with the promise of benefits at some point?

Will they be contractors or maybe fresh-faced interns from the local

university? Maybe volunteers who believe so strongly in your purpose

that they are willing to give you some of their life to make it happen?

This is a good place to lay out exactly what regulations you are

dealing with, given your market and operation. Don’t forget that if you

are in the U.S., you should look for every regulation that applies,

not only from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau

(TTB) at the federal level, but also from your state (or multiple

states if you plan to distribute to more than one), your county, and

your city.


F I N A N C I A L S According to the IRS, the difference between

a hobby and a business is profit. If you want to

make cider and give it away, that would be a hobby,

and we think it would be a fine one at that. If you

want your cider passion to be a business (as defined

by the IRS), you need to make a profit, and not

in just a good year here and there but in three of

your first five years.

In this financial section, you are going to use

three different views to peer into the future of your

cider business and make some educated guesses.

Let’s be honest: that’s really all you can do at this

point, because unexpected things happen all the

time, both good and bad. Income statements, cash

flow statements, and balance sheets each provide

a slightly different view of how cash will flow in

and out of your company over the next magic five

years. All of them are considered standard for the

financials of your business plan and can usually

be generated pretty painlessly with accounting

software. If you load your expectations, run your

reports, and discover you aren’t profitable in at

least three out of five years, don’t worry — it

isn’t game over before you’ve even started. It just

means you need to tweak the other sections of

this plan to find more market share, spend less on

producing and selling your cider, or diversify into

other products and services that will help bring up

that bottom line.

Looking at the numbers, what are your funding

requirements and in what years? In this section

you should identify how you are going to bring in

funding to your cider company. There are three basic

choices. Let’s look at the pros and cons of all three.

Funding It YourselfBootstrapping a start-up of any kind means that

you live within your personal means of funding it.

Depending upon what you have squirreled away

to invest, this might mean starting out very slowly

or it might mean going for it, knowing that you

are all in and willing to live with the possibility

that you will lose everything. It also means that

you won’t be getting your investment back any

time soon, as you will need to plow all the profits

you can generate back into the company until you

have achieved your goals and still have enough

money in the bank to start paying yourself.

Focus on the greatest capacity you can afford,

because you can only sell what you have already

made. At the minimum, you will need a place for

the cider house that complies with all regulations.

If you can’t afford to buy or lease your own space,

look into leasing time from another operator

that has what you need, like a winery that only

uses their press a few months out of the year or

a fresh juice company that would be willing to

custom-press apples for you and provide you with

space to ferment in your own 55-gallon wood

barrels (“blue oak” as they are affectionately

referred to in the brewing world) or an Intermediate

Bulk Container (IBC) tote. The owner of the

press will likely have a minimum pressing size, so

if you are going this way you will know how much

storage you are going to need on their premises

to hold and rack the minimum pressing run size.

Everyone we talked to about custom presses said

they had a minimum number of bins. The lowest

we heard of was a two-bin minimum, which is

about half a 275-gallon IBC or a little more than

2 barrels.

How quickly you can turn this fresh juice into

bottles or kegs going out the door depends upon

your recipe and your distribution decisions. If you

are going for a quick turnaround, then after about

a week of active fermentation, you could rack to a

chilling tank and force carbonate, then bottle. You

would want to pasteurize those bottles to kill the

yeasts that remain, and then you could be moving

cases out the door in less than two weeks. On

the other end, if you are making heirloom cider

that includes 9 months of secondary fermentation

on its lees, followed by bottle conditioning and

maturing for another 6 months, you need a

controlled environment for the secondary fermen-

tation that is accessible for your regular bâtonnage

visits and storage to accommodate all those aging

bottles. One scenario is fast but requires more

equipment, while the other is slow but could be

done by hand and relatively cheaply. They are very

different from a cash flow perspective, obviously,

so while you may dream of doing something more

like the latter path, you may need to do something

closer to the former just to keep the money flowing

in (because it certainly has numerous ways of

flowing out). When you are bootstrapping it, you’ll

face trade-offs at every turn.

You might be asking yourself why you would

ever go this route unless you had to. The pros of

self-funding are that your business is all yours,

and you won’t have investors or lenders questioning

your decisions or demanding that you change

course. You are taking all the risk, and you will get

all the rewards when they come. The con is that

unless you have several hundred thousand dollars

in your bank account to start this business, you

are going to start small, and your growth will be

limited to your company’s profits.

Funding It through InvestorsIf the growth limitations or your personal finance

limitations, make the self-funding route unappealing

but you believe your business is a good investment

for others, then you need to bring in the investors.

People usually start with friends and family and

then expand outward through their personal and

professional networks until they find a match.

Unless you have a rich relative who believes in

you and only wants to get all of her money back

in a few years so that her husband doesn’t get on

her case for bad investments, your investors are

going to want a percentage of your company in

return for their currency. They are the ones taking

the risk, after all. Everyone agrees to the value of

their money, but how much your company will be

worth is another thing.

Focus on having a solid business plan that

clearly lays out both the opportunity and the

strategy, and know that plan inside and out before

you approach your first potential investor. You

should believe what is in it and remember your

purpose for starting a cider business. Let your

purpose come through clearly in your investor

conversations. The more investors can relate to

that purpose, the easier it will be to come to terms

that you both feel comfortable with.

The pro of investor funding is that it’s likely

you can start much bigger than if you were the

sole investor. By considering your investors as

partners in your cider business, you also have

allies to network for you as you launch your

products. The biggest con is that your company is

not 100 percent yours, and if you continue to take

rounds of investor funds to finance growth per

your plan, that percentage will continue to

decrease. Determine the minimum ownership

level you will accept and set your plans around

that. For many, it’s maintaining a majority own-

ership in the company so that you don’t one day

find yourself on the losing end of a major decision

that results in you being forced out.


Funding through DebtThe last route is the more traditional way to go

about funding a business: through small business

loans. If you are taking out debt to fund major

equipment like a jacketed brite tank or a bottling

line, according to the classified ads on popular

sites for reselling fermentation equipment, this

equipment holds its value due to the hot market

demand. That’s great news for your lender because

it means that in the event things don’t go so well,

you have physical assets that can be liquidated to

recoup most of the original loan amount.

Focus on the repayment terms and make sure

they are doable given your income statement and

cash flow projections. For equipment that you will

purchase with money from this loan, pay attention

to the difference between new and used pricing

and the delivery dates for both. It’s possible that

prices for used equipment are close to prices for

new equipment, which indicates a strong resale

market. If used is nearly the same price as new,

why not go with something new? It could be that

the used equipment can be delivered months

before ordered new, as manufacturers can have

backlogs for the manufacture and delivery of the

equipment you need.

The pro of debt funding is that the bank

doesn’t ask for a percentage of your company.

Instead, they ask that you pay them back, on a set

schedule, and with interest. That also explains the

con of debt funding, which is that the repayment

schedule starts right away, perhaps months before

you even start producing cider and long before

you are selling to the market. MAKE IT HAPPENThere are a lot of hats to be worn in a cidery

operation. If someone were to choose to do it all,

then they would be managing the orchard

(including harvesting all the fruit), making the

cider, marketing it to customers, delivering it to

customers (which might include managing your

own tasting room), and finally managing the

books to make sure everyone gets paid — including

you. This is the point where you decide what

aspects of the operation you want to do and hire

other people to do all the other roles. Let’s look at

some of the major decisions you will be facing.

Fruit: Grow or Buy Juice?At one extreme, you commit to growing all your

fruit. At the other, you buy juice from other growers.

Most of the cidermakers we interviewed for this

book either grew or locally sourced all their fruit,

or they grew most of it and purchased juice once

they processed all their harvest. They all focused

on the fruit first.

We live on a 40-acre farm with a few very

old apple trees that had been either neglected

for decades or managed in such a way that they

would have been much better off had they been

neglected. When we bought the property in the

late 1990s, there were five apple trees near the

abandoned farmhouse — a mix of higher-acid

“keepers” and some sweet fresh eaters. In one of

the outbuildings on the property, there was an

inner room with wooden walls filled with sawdust.

That’s where the wooden crates of apples were

stored through the winter and spring, along with

the harvest from the big garden. Down near the

creek, surrounding the ghost of the original home-

stead, were four massive apple trees, each easily

at least 40 feet tall. Romantic, yes, but a working

cider orchard, no.

Cidery: Build, Rent, or PartnerWe don’t want you to make the mistake we made

when we built our cidery. Basically, like many

major decisions in our lives, we winged it. We built

a 2,000-plus-square-foot addition to our farm-

house utilizing some of the best green eco-building

methods available and with a rudimentary under-

standing of what a cidery should have. The basic

idea was a tasting room upstairs and production

downstairs on the same level as our farmhouse.

Since we were grafting our young cider tree

orchard, we had about 6 to 8 years before serious

production, so the tasting room area would serve

as mother-in-law quarters for a few years. Life

would have another path for us.

What we got right with the build of our cidery

were good drains that would manage wastewater

and really good temperature control. What we

didn’t get right was flow of product. For example,

you can’t drive a forklift carrying a bin of apples

into our cidery. That’s a problem, it turns out.

There is a lot of washing in a commercial

cidery, or Cleaning in Place (CIP), which means

washing down everything without moving it, if

you can. You should be able to keep everything

clean through every step of the process — from

bringing the apples inside in wooden bins to

shipping the cases of bottles or kegs out. You’ll

also have to be able to move the apples to

the washing station, then to the grinder, the

press, and finally, to the tanks. We didn’t plan

for bottling equipment in our floor plan, which

meant hand bottling, and it limited our production

numbers. Because our cidery was officially a

garage, from a building permit perspective (there

are a lot of rules around building onto your home

in the state of Oregon), we could set up the

cidery so that when we were ready to go into pro-

duction, we had everything in order.

Do yourself a favor and work backward from

your target output. Do you plan to fill kegs,

bottles, or both? Are you going to pasteurize your

bottles? How are you going to store your cider in

the primary and secondary fermentation stages?

How are you going to get the cider from the

primary to the secondary to the bottles or kegs?

This is where scaling from amateur level to professional

level means thinking through all the components

as you grow your volume.


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