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.