Cider's Having It's Yearly 15 Min of Fame
It's Washington's Cider Week and We're Having Some Too
What’s Crack-a-Lackin’ Cider People?
Welcome back! I haven’t given up on this newsletter thing yet and neither have you! You and I are gonna accomplish great things.
Business Milestones
🍏We Bottled Our Latest 2 Ciders!
Rosé and Sage. For our rosé we added hibiscus, rose hips, and white grape. I think the color really turned out, the rose added a good level of complexity,😏 and the white grape added some sweetness. For the other we added fresh sage from our potted plant on the patio of our apartment. Totally organic and locally grown.😊 Actually, even the stuff in our rosé is 100% organic, that’s important to us. We had no clue how much sage to add and a little certainly went a long way. It did turn out refreshing and to me, kinda tasted similar to a hopped cider.
🍏We Registered the Business!
It’s official!
What a weird form. Washington State wants executives and governors listed. What in the world is a governor? We were scared to just fill in our names so we spent some time researching it. On the official Washington State website it says simply in the help section to “fill in your name.” Thanks. That explains a lot. Next we needed to get a registered agent. This is a person who is available to receive subpoenas. No PO boxes allowed. We thought about just being the registered agent ourselves but our address would be publicly listed (junk mail, scammers and solicitors say hello) and it’s actually against the rules of our apartment lease. Currently paying $125 a year for a person in Spokane to do it. (NO, not an unemployed friend, but through a law group that will know when something important turns up.) With the registration form for the business filled out, we put our credit card number down to pay their $200 fee, and it wouldn’t go through. Try again. Nope. Delete, add in names again, nope. Again. Nope. Send again. Okay! You’re a business.
What’s Up Next?
🍏🔢
POS systems. Point of sale servers, looking at small business credit card processing companies. Man, we did this research pretty thoroughly like three years ago or so, and now the top five best are totally different. Correcting researched numbers is what needs to happen now so that we have the most accurate guess numbers to provide for our business plan.
🍏🔑
An address is required to have a business newsletter (otherwise it violates spam laws). We read that people that used their own real address started getting pamphlets and people at their door immediately. Potential has a special scent. So, we bought a PO box. For some reason we never got keys to our box though, so we have to investigate that and see how much junk has accumulated.
🍏🍺
Consider starting a new batch of cider, we have to see if the weather is going to cool off or not. We ferment cold and this last batch was a real pain. No matter what we did we just couldn’t keep the juice cold enough. Nothing really bad happened except that it fermented faster which sometimes causes undesirable flavors. They were pretty hard to detect in this last batch but we want to avoid that this time around, so if it’s cooler in the next week or two we’ll start up again or just wait until October.
AND...IT’S NATIONAL CIDER WEEK!
Maybe you never knew this thing existed, but this is the 9th year of it, and it’s kinda a big deal. 😜
It starts the 5th and ends the 15th. This includes, cider festivals, tap takeovers, cider pairings, and special release bottles. Tap takeovers are fun because it means instead of your local bar carrying a couple of ciders on tap, they now may have a large array of fun stuff to try, or they might host a local cider company to do a tasting. The best thing, that we do every year, is that we go to the Seattle Cider Summit. It’s just like a beer festival only cider replaces beer and called a summit instead of a festival. It sounds smug, smart and dry, but it’s actually a drinking blast. It lasts from 3 to 8, so it’s 5 hours in the sunshine, (it used to be at Denny park but this year they have to move it to MOHAI which might be even prettier) everyone brings their dogs so plenty of dog watching, and there’s more ciders than you could ever try so you can compete with friends on who finds the best one. It is pricey. Biggest downside. Just being real. It costs $35 in advance (plus taxes and fees) or $45 at the door. You get 16 tasting tickets but pours are pretty small. That being said, I have never regretted going. Buying the tickets is a bummer, but once you’re there wandering around tables and trying some great and some bizarre ciders and getting kinda buzzed, it’s honestly a great time, and it’s 5 hours, less than $10 an hour.
The Stranger actually has a really great list of events for cider week. Check it out
And lots of your local watering holes have events for the week, they just didn’t get on The Stranger’s event list. Check-out your favorite bar’s website and see if they have something going on. One of my favorite spots is Beveridge Place Pub. They have dozens of taps devoted to cider this week and a few different tastings. Check them out
Don’t Go!
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And another song showing how monsters can have sweet sides too: