[aaronmiler]

I licensed my house as a winery, and run a hard cider company with my girlfriend. We sell to some stores in our area, and do our local Farmer's Market during the summer.

It's been very satisfying making and selling a physical product.

The profitability part isn't quite there yet. But we're working on that.

[system2]

How do you bottle your products? I see the cans with your logo, seems like a bigger operation than you describe. :)

[aaronmiler]

There was a lot of research that was done, but we were able to get into cans with a few key components.

We use a piece of home brewing equipment right now to fill our cans and bottles, the beer gun [1]. The beer gun allows us to purge our cans/bottles with CO2 (oxygen is bad for alcohol), and then fill them from the bottom to reduce foam.

I was able to find a local supplier, that wraps cans in plastic. So rather than printing them, they shrink wrap our label on to them. They're a bit more expensive than printed cans (if I recall 34¢ sleeved vs 19¢ printed). This allows us to order a single pallet at a time, decreasing our storage needs

The last key was the can seamer[2]. I found this early on, and it's been a great little work horse for us. We've put over 6,000 cans through it, and it's been one of the best purchases we've made.

Bottles are the easy one, we just use the beer gun [1] and then a manual capper to seal them.

Happy to answer any other questions! It's been a fun ride trying to figure out how to "mass produce" something on a smaller scale :)

[1] https://www.morebeer.com/products/blichmann-beergun-v2.html [2] https://oktoberdesign.com/shop/canseamers/mk16/

[mparr4]

What’s your cider company? Where are you based out of?

[aaronmiler]

We are Hood View Ciderworks (hoodviewcider.com), based out of Gresham, OR (suburb of Portland)