Floral, Fragrant, with a Superior Mouthfeel

Reading Time: 12 minutes

Most years, it feels like things mostly calm down after the Christmas rush, as winter truly begins to settle in. That didn’t really seem to happen this year, both for planned and unplanned reasons. We’d been lucky through the end of 2019 with no snow days, but after the first of the year, winter decided to kick into gear with a couple of ice storms and about 8 inches of snow from a storm system that just seemed to sit on top of us for days. The kids ended up with 3 days off, including 2 Fridays, which worked out perfectly for a weekend trip to Rockford, Illinois, for my first solo Startup Weekend facilitation. Thankfully, the weather held out just long enough for me to travel to San Francisco and Oakland for this year’s CiderCon.

I wasn’t expecting to travel anywhere before CiderCon at the end of January. However, my Startup Weekend Iowa City co-conspirator Ian needed to travel to Colorado the same weekend in order to meet with investors for Nosh and he knew that I’ve wanted to get into facilitating Startup Weekends for a couple of years now. So, we made a few changes at the last minute, and I took the gig in Rockford in Ian’s stead. It was great to get back to Thinker Ventures and reconnect with the folks there who I hadn’t seen since I presented BondingBox at their 1 Million Cups back in 2017 or connected with during the 1 Million Cups Organizers’ Summit in Kansas City this past September.

Startup Weekend Rockford this year was mostly composed of local high school students who were enrolled in entrepreneurship courses at their respective schools. Because of this, I wanted the weekend to focus less on grinding out new startups, and focus more on learning the process of customer discovery, learning how to create a value proposition using a specific template, and developing a minimum viable product based on the problems potential customers are having. Focusing more on education and less on the “startup grind” seemed to work really well with most of the students attending – there are always going to be a handful of students who plod along on their own path and ignore advice. The four teams who presented on Sunday evening, for the most part, followed the template and didn’t melt down in front of the judges. I consider it a successful weekend.

Now that I’m finally on the Startup Weekend facilitator list, I’m starting to receive information on other events happening throughout the United States. I hoping to be called upon again this year to lead another event, see some of the inner workings of another entrepreneurial ecosystem, and continue to increase my collection of Startup Weekend t-shirts. My plan is to lead events mostly in the Midwest, but I’m always open to facilitating something on either coast, if the event organizers are willing to fly me out there. As a Startup Weekend organizer, I’m keenly aware of the cost of bringing someone from another region of the United States to an event – $500-1000 isn’t an unreasonable estimate for this. If we raise enough money this year for Startup Weekend Iowa City, I would like to bring in an outside facilitator. Ian and I have been covering that role the last two years, but we’ve always wanted to bring in someone else to run the event while we take care of logistical issues – it would make things easier for all of us.

Just a week after returning from Rockford, I was in the air, heading from eastern Iowa to the Bay Area for CiderCon 2020. After the absolute mess it was getting to and from Chicago in 2019, I wanted to make sure I have a bit of buffer on either side of my trip. I left Monday morning so I’d arrive in California on Monday afternoon, with plenty of time to settle in and acquaint myself with the area around the convention venue and my AirBnB. I was able to find a place to stay that was centrally located between the Oakland Convention Center and Jack London Square, where most of the restaurants were and where the ferry to San Francisco stopped on its trips around the bay. It was a great place to stay – it felt relatively secluded, but it was in the middle of everything, much like the places I’ve stayed during Denver Startup Week the last couple of years.

After getting everything settled in my headquarters for the week, I walked over to Crooked City Cider for their “steal the glass” night. When I looked at their Web site, I had noticed that they serve food in the taproom, and I hadn’t eaten anything all day – if my layover in Phoenix had been more than just a few minutes, I would have grabbed lunch there. Even if they hadn’t served food there, I would have found something to eat. The entire area around Crooked City was filled with different types of restaurants – soul food, sushi, barbecue, and other ethnic fare was just a few steps away. Over the course of the week, I didn’t have to eat the same category of food twice! At the end of the night, I ended up walking away with a stack of glassware from several different cider makers, including Angry Orchard, Ace Cider, Redwood Coast Cider, and Portland Cider Company. I also took home the “secret” Crooked City glass as well. It was a great welcome to area, and it was the first of several evenings where I found myself winding up at Crooked City, talking with cider makers and enthusiasts alike.

Tuesday was an early morning, but for a good reason. I had signed up for the Sonoma County Cider Tour as my “first day activity” at this year’s CiderCon. Of the three tours available, the Sonoma County tour looked like it was going to visit the most locations, and was the furthest away of the options. I wasn’t planning to rent a car during my week in the Bay Area, so I wanted to take the opportunity to visit several far-flung cider makers. The bus ride just to get to our first destination was nearly 90 minutes traveling in the opposite direction as most morning commuters. Since landing the previous afternoon, I hadn’t seen any undeveloped open space until we got north of San Francisco Bay. Seeing some countryside and touring a couple of orchards during the tour was a nice change from the urban setting of the rest of the week.

We visited five cider makers on the tour – four that exclusively make cider, and one winemaker that has begun producing a cider variety. Dozens of other winemakers have started to produce a cider or two, just to broaden their product offerings. Cider and wine and one in the same according to the federal government, and winemakers have much of the same equipment as cider makers, so it’s not really surprising to see some winemakers move into the cider market. We toured Ace Cider’s production facility and taproom, Golden State Cider’s orchard outside Sebastopol and their taproom in town, Ethic Cider’s orchard, Tilted Shed’s production facility where we got to take part in a Txotx line with an Asturian-style cider from a barrel, and finished the tour at Old World Winery before we took the long bus ride back to Oakland for the evening.

Most of the people on the bus were new faces, but there were a handful of people who I’d met at the previous year’s CiderCon in Chicago, including the guys from Chain Yard Cider in Nova Scotia. Over the course of the week, I bumped into many people who I’ve met in the cider community, either at CiderCon last year, GLINTCAP last spring, and Franklin County Cider Days back in November. I’ve really grown to like the cider community as I’ve been interacting with them over the last couple of years, especially this past year. I have felt welcome among them from the start, much like I’ve felt welcome in the startup community. There’s the same type of drive and ambition in both groups – building something from nothing, putting everything into the product, welcoming new members to the community and being eager to give advice if asked. I love being part of both the cider community and the startup community, and I feel like Cider Finder is the perfect marriage of both worlds.

After taking it relatively easy on Tuesday night, I had another early morning on Wednesday. I thought that I’d sit in on the seminar from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, or TTB. The TTB is the arm of the federal government, specifically the IRS, that regulates alcohol producers. I wanted to see what kinds of hoops cider makers must jump through in order to bring their creations to market. Some of the regulations seemed reasonable enough, but others really don’t make sense in a modern setting. For example, beer cannot be anywhere in a bonded winery, even unopened beer in a single bottle. If you want to have beer in your tasting room, it cannot be part of a bonded winery, and the tax implications are different inside and outside of a bonded winery. If you distrust or dislike government bureaucrats, your blood pressure probably would have been as elevated as mine by the end of the seminar.

Luckily, the Cider Share took place just a few hours later – a nice way to cancel out the bureaucratic stupidity I sat through in the morning. They held the event in the hallway outside the ballrooms – I guess we were booted out the ballroom that evening, for some reason – and it was truly a sea of humanity, from one end of the hallway to the other. Hundreds of cider makers and enthusiasts sampling hundreds of ciders from all over the world. Most of the tables were American cider makers, divided into regions of the country. A handful of tables toward the middle of the event were occupied by international cider makers, mostly from Europe and a few from other parts of the world. I mostly stuck to international ciders and the west coast cider makers. I didn’t travel all that way to have a bunch of Midwestern ciders!

The party continued after the cider share, and I wound up returning to Crooked City Cider on Wednesday evening for beverages and some dinner. Many of the other cider share attendees ended up there as well, since it was a straight shot down the street from the convention center. Over the course of 48 hours, several of the ciders available had changed, so I was able to try a few things that hadn’t been available Monday evening. It was another great opportunity to talk with cider makers and enthusiasts and get some great ideas for future versions of the app and other related ventures.

The “educational seminar” portion of the convention kicked off Thursday morning with an opening toast and some fruit and cheese trays. The small tasting glasses from the cider share Wednesday evening and the toast Thursday morning were also designed to be souvenirs, so I ended up taking those back to add to the collection of glassware I’d obtained on Monday. Over the course of Thursday and Friday, I attended several panel discussions on distribution and sales of cider – a direction I’m considering taking Cider Finder after the app is up and running, and we’ve expanded with other apps for different alcohol categories. There’s a lot more to distribution than I thought going into the seminars, mostly paperwork and money moving between different parties. The sales aspect mainly seems limited to what shelf space is available and what people are interested in buying. Most of the work in selling seems to be in educating consumers who might be willing to break out of their comfort zones and try something new.

I also attended three tastings during this year’s CiderCon; one on Thursday and the other two on Friday. The tasting on Thursday compared beers, wines, and ciders in very interesting combinations. It focused less on pairing styles with comparing different types of flavors that might convince people to cross over from beer or wine to cider. The first tasting on Friday involved pairing food and cider. I thought it was going to be similar to the food and cider pairing at CiderCon 2019, where four different ciders were paired with four different types of food. This year’s event was designed to break down different types of flavors – salty, sweet, bitter, etc. – with four reference ciders. The reference ciders were all different enough that the different types of flavors did different things when you put the flavor and cider together. It really was a fascinating experience. The final tasting on Friday was a comparison of four different pet-nat ciders – slightly bubbly, but not completely “Champagne-style.” The tasting was okay, but not great. The still cider that was paired with the first pet-nat cider had some sort of major defect that I thought tasted a bit “milky” – the person sitting to my left thought it was “mousy.” The final pet-nat cider was probably the best out of the four, and it was the closest to “Champagne-style” of the four. I guess pet-nat ciders really aren’t my favorite.

The final toast at the end of CiderCon featured three different Irish ciders, ranging from a standard still cider, to a keeved cider (my favorite of the bunch), to an incredibly potent barrel-aged cider. I may have personally finished off an entire bottle of the keeved cider. I’ve finally settled on English- and French-style keeved ciders as my favorite variety of them all, with funky farmhouse-style ciders as a close second. Keeving is a fantastic way to keep a bit of residual sweetness in a cider without adding any external sugar to the beverage. When I finally get around to making a few basic ciders someday in the future, I’d like to try my hand a making a keeved cider. It’s a difficult process, but the reward is some of the best cider you’ll ever taste.

I stuck around until they closed down the ballroom, and then made my way over to The Trappist, where I ran into several cider makers from Korea and Greg, who I’d met at Crooked City on Monday and who is making his way to Korea soon (if he hasn’t already) to work with one of the up-and-coming cider companies over there. We all then went to Berkeley to The Rare Barrel for a while to try some of their offerings, and then Greg and I traveled back to Oakland and joined a bunch of other CiderCon attendees at The Uptown for karaoke featuring a live band. It was a really fun way to finish out the week with some great new friends.

I woke up late on Saturday and made my way on the ferry over to San Francisco for an afternoon and evening of sightseeing and window-shopping. I hit some of the biggest tourist spots – Pier 39, Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown – and rode the Cable Car from Fisherman’s Wharf into downtown. I’m not sure how many miles I walked over the course of a few hours, but it was a great way to burn off some cider calories on an absolutely gorgeous day. I took the last ferry back from San Francisco to Oakland, grabbed a quick dinner, and slept for about 12 hours. It was probably the most restful night of sleep I’ve had in quite a long time. On Sunday, I got some work done, and on Monday, I made my way back to the San Francisco airport for the long journey back to eastern Iowa.

It’s been nice to be back with the family, even though it feels like things haven’t slowed down at all since I returned. The month of February has blown by, and I’m already gearing up for spring “entrepreneurial event season.” Iowa Startup Games is this weekend, and I’ll be coaching student teams once again this semester. I have a lot of fun helping students learn the entrepreneurial process, planting the seed for their future success in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Many of the student teams who enroll in the Hawkeye Student Accelerator each summer had their start at Iowa Startup Games, and it’s always great to have those teams pitch at 1MC Iowa City each summer.

Speaking of “entrepreneurial event season,” I’m also looking forward to hosting the second annual 1MC Iowa City Entrepreneurial Event Panel on March 11. Since we have so many events being represented this year, I decided that we’re not just going to have a bunch of people standing at the front of the room talking at the audience. Instead, we’re going to allow our 1MC attendees to “speed date” the organizers – attendees will have five 10-minute rounds to meet directly with event organizers and ask them questions about their events. We have organizers coming from Des Moines, Ames, and Cedar Rapids to join us for the morning, so it should be an incredibly informative morning.

2020 is off to a fantastic start. I hope your first two months of the year have been productive, and I can’t wait to see where the rest of the year takes me. In the coming months, I’ll be heading to central Iowa for the Young Entrepreneur Convention, the Des Moines Tech Crawl, and Monetery. In May, I’m making the trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition to help as a steward during the competition. In September, Denver Startup Week is once again calling my name, paired with a driving tour of the state to visit cider makers outside Denver. Then, to round things off, I’ll be visiting New England for Franklin County Cider Days in November. There might be a couple of other trips in there, depending where I’m needed as a facilitator for Startup Weekend.

It’s going to be a whirlwind moving forward. Here’s to productive and fulfilling days ahead!