For this 2nd episode of Courage and Other C Words I go back to the beginning - Who am I anyhow? Why did I turn my whole world upside down to start a cider company? And why did we end up calling it South City Ciderworks. Here we go!
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
Hello!! Welcome to Courage and Other C Words! I’m your host, Jenn Root Martell, and I’m excited for another great episode! That last one was definitely heavy - I shared our company’s rollercoaster journey through the pandemic over the last 8 months. It brought out more about my personal struggle than I was expecting and it felt good to get it all out on the table. I did intentionally keep it pretty general in regards to our company, putting it out there as an example of one small business’s struggle through COVID this year. So thanks for going with me on that one and jumping in headfirst.
But NOW we can pump the brakes, turn back the clock, or whatever other slow down cliche comes to mind and start this story where it makes sense to start it - at the beginning, with the most common question that we get when we are in front of customers - And that is - Why cider? Why a cider company? And we will get to that, but I need to go even farther back to share a little bit about myself.
I won’t go on and on with ALL the details of growing up in Northern Virginia, in the suburbs of Washington DC, but as a child I was drawn to the world outside the US. I travelled a lot with my parents growing up, it was only the three of us, and I always assumed I would end up working internationally. It became a bit of a calling. In college at the University of Virginia I focused on degrees in foreign affairs and anthropology and after a failed attempt to join the Peace Corps after graduation, I jumped into a masters degree in Public Policy at American University with a focus on policy analysis. Through those courses, I fell into the world of non-profit grant management which would determine my career for more than 10 years. So you might be thinking - Oh my god, what did I just sign up for? However, I do have a point in bringing this up and I’m not trying to wave my credentials around. As you may have already noticed - NOWHERE in this list of majors and job descriptions did you hear enology (the study of wine), or business, finance, agriculture, cidermaking. That there is my point. So if you are considering starting a business and have that passion but keep second guessing whether you’re ready because you don’t have a degree in it or specific training - STOP IT! None of us had any background in business or cider before we incorporated the company. Having those skills would definitely have made things easier, but it was still possible. Asking the right questions and having the right answers for those questions will get you where you need to go and you can do it!
OK, cider was clearly never in my grand plan growing up, so now we get back to that fundamental question - why cider then?
And it is an excellent question. It actually took me sitting down and working through this episode to realize that cider always had a place in my life, I just never thought anything of it. While I lived in DC, I played an Irish stick sport called camogie (well, that’s the version women play, most people know it as hurling. Not to be confused with curling. It is not played on ice with brooms. It is played on a field with ash sticks) I played camogie for more than 8 years and the Irish cider Magners was always around. That was our drink of choice, and we drank a lot of it… When Alex and I moved out to Alexandria, Virginia, even our apartment building book club always had a few 6 packs of Woodchuck cider for the group. It was the go-to drink for many occasions. Especially after I started having some stomach issues in 2008 and had to give up beer, cider was there for me.
And even my husband and business partner, Alex, who you will hear from time to time as we go through our story, had a history with cider. During several business trips to the UK over the years he was introduced to cider and fell in love with it. The UK is basically the cider motherland so he got spoiled early on by some amazing ciders.
So with that in mind it doesn’t seem so far fetched now that I think of it that we both fell into the cider world later on but it was definitely never on our radar. For us, it was more of an AH HA moment. For that longer version, I would say that our formal cider story starts only shortly after we moved out to California from DC in the Spring of 2013. Can’t believe that was 7 years ago. Seems like yesterday sometimes.
In California we landed in San Bruno, just south of San Francisco, being one of the only places that was marginally less expensive than anywhere else on the peninsula. Of course we chose 1 of the 2 urban centers in the country that’s more expensive than DC…Brilliant. Once we moved, Alex went about his work at a tech start-up. I set about looking for jobs and testing life at being a temporary stay at home puppy mom to our 65 lb golden/aussie mix - Brooks. Attempted to learn to cook. Mostly burned things. That sort of thing.
One irony about 2013 was that basically as soon as we moved across the country, a bunch of our favorite people decided to have weddings that year. On the East Coast. A few months after we had moved, a wonderful friend from UVa was marrying the love of his life at a winery in central Virginia. It might even have been our first one back from moving… Not sur
As we were planning the weekend, we notic that there was basically a full day of free time between the traditional Korean ceremony on Saturday morning and the more Western wedding ceremony and reception that night. A bunch of us looked around for ways to spend the time. We were all pretty tired of wine and I was still nursing that gluten free diet I mentioned earlier. So one of us landed on the idea of a cider tour! Sounded perfect. (I wish I could take credit for this but I’m pretty sure it was not my idea.)
So after the morning ceremony and requisite pictures, the small group of us headed off to Albemarle Ciderworks. It is a beautiful estate cidery just south of UVa that nurtures heritage Virginia apples and also makes some amazing ciders. We snagged a table and got our glasses. It was a pretty slow morning (pretty sure it was raining). The cidermaker came out on the patio for his lunch break and indulged us with some cider wisdom and talked about his different offerings. It was such a great time and gave us some good insight into the process and the role of apples in making great cider.
We then marched on to Bold Rock Cider which at that time was a couple of small barns down in Nellysford with a rustic taproom and a super relaxed feel. We grabbed some bottles of cider and wandered around. It is unclear to me as to when exactly the ah ha moment happened but all I remember was that by the time we were finishing out the afternoon, the two of us were off in our own world of cider, already coming up with potential company names. The seed had been sown so to speak. (Yeah, I said it) We both looked at each other and said - this would be so cool to do at home, how hard could it be??
HA! Sigh…
Back home, we went back to our daily tasks but just couldn’t shake the idea of starting a cider company. We had no idea how to even make cider but making a product that we enjoyed and that others could enjoy was very appealing. Coming from DC, entrepreneurship was never on the top of my list. The culture there is super risk averse and I think I internalized a lot of that. But there is a culture of invention out here in California. That or there’s something pretty epic in the water. You want to just go, build, do, and those who we talked to about it were totally on board and excited for us. Everyone seemed to have a similar side hustle. Maybe not to the extent of a commercial product but some sort of hobby that they were looking to get into full-time at some point. I’ll get into this more in the next episode but it seemed like even the Bay Area alcohol market was ready for a new, local cider. And there was room for that. How could it hurt to start looking into the options? We started brainstorming a business plan, looking at what we could do to finance a venture of this sort. All arrows seemed to point us down the path towards cider and we couldn’t ignore it.
So while we threw ourselves into market research, we went about trying to put the right name to our potential cider company. That was really critical to us and we believed that would inform our audience, our brand, and our vision.
And this is funny to think about but the first name we came up with was Pipsqueak cider - as one name for seeds is pips and I had an imaginary pet mouse growing up - only child, don’t judge - so a mouse could be a cute mascot for something like that. I think we saw a fountain with a mouse in it on that Virginia cider tour and that initially made us think of that name. Turns out it was already taken in New Zealand I think? Probably for the best. The fact that most names would be taken will be a recurring theme over the years as we grew the company. For those of you who know our ciders.
So Pipsqueak aside, naming things has never come easy to me and what we would call the company was no exception. Since we lived in San Bruno at the time, we really wanted to make a cider that could exist in the urban space. We didn’t have access to a beautiful orchard so bringing cider into the city became a defining aspect of the company. A few blocks up from us is South San Francisco, and as you drive along 101 you will see a huge sign on the side of San Bruno Mountain that reads South San Francisco, The Industrial City. South San Francisco is also nicknamed South City to those who live there to distinguish itself from its larger neighbor to the North. That really resonated with what we were hoping to do with our brand.
We wanted a name that was relatableWe wanted to Illustrate a culture that was urban, blue collar, laid-backWanted a name that could be easily transferable or reproducible - There is a South City component to most major citiesA tagline that came out of it - Need cider? Simply head south! - Seemed to be a really organic name and an easy one to get behind. And I really liked that directionality of it. Also, it rolled off the tongue nicely. San Bruno Cider doesn’t really have the same ring to it. Sorry San Bruno. It just doesn’t have the same ring...The Ciderworks was also a nod to a more industrial brand, a little bit more so than say ciderhouse or cidery which I see linking more to an estate or orchardSo South City Ciderworks became the name for the brand and the name that we ran with. It was awesome. So with that name, the initial logo flowed really easily. We did a rebrand in 2017 which we’ll talk about in a later episode but the logo we launched the brand with was a basic one.
It was a big compass that pointed South. Easy, memorable, keeping it simple. Like the cider. We also wanted to keep the industrial feel so we settled on a 12oz silver can with the logo on both sides so that as it sat on the shelf, there was a 50% chance you could read the logo. They aren’t always set out the way you want them on the shelves.The design was our creation and then we had a local San Bruno designer tidy it up and make it pretty. It was really cool to see that come together to organically.So here we were - we had a goal, we had a name, we had a logo. What’s next? Well, what happened next is probably what should have happened first - figuring out how to make cider ourselves. We headed down to Monterey to blow a bunch of money on some home fermentation equipment. Then we headed up to Napa to blow even more money on a small hand crusher, a juice press, and some yeast. We started scouring the internet for step by step processes of fermenting apple juice. Juice was procured from local markets in gallon jugs. There was even a visit to wine country to collect 120 pounds of fresh picked gravensteins which is one of our more popular heritage apples of California. Basically we sought out anything we could get our hands on in those early days.
We spent whole days cutting, crushing, and pressing the apples in our small apartment kitchen, and learning so much as we went. It was very satisfying to see the 5 gallon plastic jug (which we call carboys in the industry) fill up with fresh apple juice yumminess. We played with a bunch of different yeasts to see if one really stood out for us. In those first few batches I have to say I made some pretty killer apple cider vinegar because A. I had no idea what I was doing and B. we didn’t have a great way to temperature control those plastic carboys during fermentation. (Which I found was a critical component to cidermaking).
For about 8 months at least the bathtub and dining room floor were completely full of bubbling carboys, bottle conditioned cider could be found hidden under the bathroom sink in 22oz bottles, and a small corney keg that holds carbonation took up the bottom half of our fridge. It was a zoo and we were enjoying it. I slowly made it beyond vinegar and into the realm of actual hard apple cider. Some batches definitely came better than others. But our confidence was bolstered and we were ready to dive into the details of what a company could look like. There was so much more work that needed to be done but we felt at that point like we had a really solid start. It was exciting, it was a new enterprise, and we had high hopes for what South City Ciderworks could become.
And I will end it there for now - there’s my answer to why we decided to make cider in the first place. Sometimes it really does come down to an AH-ha moment to get you started on the journey. Don’t ignore it! So are you a woman looking to start a cider company? Or any company for that matter? Wanting to make a drastic career shift? Send me your story at info@othercwords.com. I’d love to hear about it!
For our next episode I am going to continue this origin story and creation of the company but will be walking through all those pesky business plan questions that are so critical when you’re first starting out - how did we decide on the packaging we did? The types of cider? Who was our target audience? Did it even make sense to start a cider company in Northern California in 2014? Ya know… those details
In the meantime, please subscribe, rate, and review to help out this young podcast! 5 stars goes a long long way and I so appreciate your support. For more information about me and this podcast visit us online at othercwords.com. Talk to you soon! Thanks so much for listening.