Description:
The owners of OK Cider Co. talk about opening a cidery in Oklahoma City.
Transcript:
SB: I’m Sheldon Beach, today is June 11, 2019, I’m from the Metropolitan Library System and I’m here today at the OK Cider Co, Oklahoma Cider Company? How do you guys say it?’
LH, TK: It’s OK Cider Co.
SB: If you want to introduce yourselves…
LH: I’m Luke Hadsal
TK: And I’m Tim King
SB: And you guys make cider
TK: We do.
SB: Anybody that listens to this will be able to hear construction going on in the background, this place is pretty empty. You guys are just opening up pretty soon, right?
LH: We hope it’s soon
TK: We’ve been waiting for a little while. As things do, they don't work the way you want them to.
LH: Yeah, nobody’s ever as quick as you want it to be.
SB: How long have you guys been making cider?
TK: My first batch of cider was made in September of 2014. I found out in 2012 I was gluten intolerant and started drinking cider. I was in Ohio at the time, found some stuff I really liked. I came back to Oklahoma, was still drinking cider and I was living somewhere where I didn’t have access to anything good so I started making my own.
LH: Yeah, so Tim talked me into making a cider. I’d been an homebrewer for a long time, making a lot of beers and he was like, “You should make a cider,” and I made a really bad cider. But undeterred I thought I’d try to make it more like a beer, something I would like better. So I started using a beer yeast and that second cider that I made, actually I made it like an IPA. So I boiled the apple juice, I put hops in it for an hour, I made it bitter as all get out, it was great.
SB: What’s normally the difference between them? I’ve done some homebrewing before so I know the process of that, but I’ve never made a cider. What’s the difference? Is there any difference normally in the process?
LH: It’s a lot simpler than making beer. With beer you’re going to mash the grains and convert starches to sugar, and you have to boil it forever and all of that. With cider it’s very simple in that the simplest ciders you just take apple juice, and you add yeast to it and let it ferment. And then you have cider.
SB: Do you all get your apples from any place or how does that work when you’re doing it on a large scale?
TK: Large scale, right now we’re working with a couple different orchards. We’re working with some people out of the Pacific Northwest in Washington State, we’re talking to some people in Michigan, we’re talking to some people in Missouri. We’re trying to find the right blend of apples and stuff that we’re going to like the flavor of. So it’s finding somebody that produces enough that you can get into… in some of these cases you have to basically set a contract. Say you’re going to use this much juice in this amount of time and you sign up and they make sure they can produce enough to supply you with that.
SB: What made you all decide that you wanted to open up a place that makes cider? What made you want to make cider professionally and what made you want to do it here?
LH: Initially we were sitting down drinking one night and I was like, “All the laws are getting ready to change. I think I want to open a brewery.” And Tim was like, “No, you should open a cidery.” And so from that standpoint, I started looking at it from the business side of it, not just the making of it, and then I started looking and the market’s wide open. There’s one cidery in Oklahoma right now, and there’s another one in planning besides us in Oklahoma City. The market’s wide open. People want cider, and so we realize that we should do this.
TK: This is where we were and we have jobs here. I moved to Oklahoma in 2010, moved away in 2012, and came back in 2014 and decided this is now home.
LH: Likewise. I’ve been in Oklahoma City since 1998 and I don’t want to move anywhere else. I kind of like it here.
SB: What do you think your “cidery?” Is that the proper word? You’re the first people I’ve talked to that make cider so I’m learning new terms here. What do you think is unique about that here. I mean, obviously it’s a different drink, but beer drinkers drink cider.
LH: I think the most unique thing that we’ve got going on is our take on cider. You get some very traditional cider makers up in the New England area and they treat their cider like a fine wine, and some of those ciders are fantastic and they drink like a wine. Because of where we’re at, and we can’t go out and grow these heirloom varieties of apples that have been around for 200 years or more we’re pretty limited on the variety of apple that drives the character so we do the beer inspired cider and we use beer yeast to drive flavor, and adjuncts such as hops and sugars to help emulate beer styles. That’s kind of like our unique take on it, and our goal really is to be a gateway for craft beer drinkers into the world of cider. Let somebody that has access to those apples make the fine ciders that somebody will eventually want to drink.
TK: There’s no cider market here. So the way we’re doing it, going at the beer drinkers, one of our ciders is called HopTransition because we’re using the hops to transition beer drinkers to our cider.
SB: That leads me to another question that I’ll usually ask the breweries I’ve gone to, the largest share of the market is like Bud Light, how do you get the beer drinkers to start drinking your beer? You all are going after people with a little bit more refined palette as far as beer goes. What do you all do to get the beer snob to try your ciders?
LH: We tell them their beard won’t fall out if they drink cider. No, our biggest push as far as getting our name out there is attending beer festivals. So we’ve been to the Oklahoma Craft Beer festival, Wild Brew in Tulsa, all of the pouring events. We’re typically there. And the draw right now for Oklahoma seems to be that the ladies want to drink cider more than the men. So they’ll come over and they’ll drag their boyfriends or husbands of whoever with them and we just talk. You know, just try it and dump it out if you don’t like it. And then once they finally taste what we’re doing and realize it’s not a super sweet cider like an Angry Orchard or a Strongbow then they’re surprised. See, you just haven’t had the right cider yet. That’s how we’re working on that approach to the craft beer drinkers.
TK: The last two years we’ve done a lot of education. We’ve been to Oklahoma Craft Beer festival three times, the Hop Jam twice, we’ve been to a number of places up in Tulsa. Most of our talking is explaining what cider is, and that it’s not this syrupy sweet sickening drink that you can only have one and you’re done. Our sugar content is about 5 grams per 12 ounce serving and there’s other commercial ciders out there that have 23 grams. So we’re doing things a lot different.
SB: How long have you been making it commercially?
TK: Officially we announced May 18th 2017.
LH: Yeah, that was the day that we said we were going to be OK Cider Co. Technically we haven’t produced anything commercially yet. Everything we’re doing is as homebrewers under the homebrew permit under the ABLE commission, but we’ve been pushing ourselves as a company since then and we incorporated in August of 2017 as an LLC.
SB: Are you all selling your cider anywhere?
LH: No, we cannot sell it.
TK: Until we have this facility done and have our ABLE licensing we cannot sell a single drop.
LH: All we do is share it with friends and family.
SB: And what kind of feedback are you getting from people at these beer festivals and everything?
LH: We’re getting great feedback. A lot of people are surprised that they didn’t know cider could taste the way we're making it taste. They’re used to something really sweet. I’d say a lot of surprise, and then there’s also a lot of “Finally. All I drink is cider and now there’s a local cider. When can I buy it?”
SB: And when can you buy it?
TK: That’s a really good question. We’re looking for late summer, or fall. We don’t set concrete dates anymore. We’ve learned our lesson there.
LH: Yeah, we thought we’d be open a couple of years ago. We make a little bit of progress and then something else sets us back. It’s a back and forth thing.
SB: How’d you get into the place where you’re opening your cider company?
TK: I was actually out at a local bar drinking one night, and the guy that was working the bar that night also does real estate on the side and knew the people that were repping this facility. We just talked to him a little bit and got out here and looked around. We looked at a number of other places. There were a couple that we really had our eyes on, but the size was just too much and it just wasn’t going to happen. And this just felt right.
LH: yeah this space when we found it, it’s in a great location, it’s just the right size building, and it also coincided with the financing coming together at the right time.
SB: You’re in Film Row. There’s a lot of stuff being built around here right now, it’s being revitalized, it’s a cool spot. How big is this place?
LH: It’s 5600 square feet.
SB: So how much cider do you… How big do you expect your operation to be once you get it going?
LH: We’re going to be starting fairly small, but we are prepared to grow quickly. The big thing is we don’t know how much volume the market wants. We’ve talked to a lot of bar owners that want it on tap, a lot of people that want to buy it in the liquor store, and the big unknown is, what is the threshold for the market, and we don’t know. So like right now we’re going to start out, in brewery terms we’re going to produce 1000 to 1500 barrels the first year, and kind of seeing where the demand goes, but we’re set up to be pretty flexible in growth that we can put out more faster if we need to. As with anything in this industry you’ve got to be calculated in your growth. A lot of breweries are going under right now because they’ve over extended themselves. We’re definitely aware of that and we’re watching out for it.
SB: Another question I do have, because I haven’t talked to anyone else in this stage, what is the process, as far as paperwork and things, what do you have to do to go from being a homebrewer to opening a place?
TK: Start off with your business plan. You need to have all the numbers and run everything, be conservative with your growth. We know what we want to do, but showing that to possible investors, if you’re realistic, I think that we’re probably underselling what we’re going to have to produce the first couple of years, which is kind of scary because right now it’s just the two of us. But you start with your business plan, find your investors, get your money lined up, then find your location.
LH: I would say that’s definitely the way to go. Figure out what you’re going to do and have it down to the dime and then find the money. We started looking for a building before we had all the money in place and it led to a lot of excitement, a lot of disappointment, because we found great buildings but then didn’t have the money. So we put that cart in front of the horse, but after that once everything’s ready it just becomes a matter of the very convoluted process of applying for the building permit, and the zoning and the overlays and everything through the city and it goes to ABLE and they approve everything and you have to post things and it’s a very back and forth three way thing between the health department, ABLE commission, and the city.
TK: And unfortunately the way some of them work you have to have finals on this and that before you can apply for this and then you’ve got to wait six weeks for that. The system needs to be fixed a little bit to make it easier for the business owner to get through things.
SB: Do you think with all the breweries opening the last couple of years, is that going to be something that’s going to start moving along more quickly?
TK: I would hope so
LH: One would hope so but it sounds a little too simple for a bureaucracy.
SB: That is one of the things I’ve notice like when I talk to the guys at Coop, they were the first commercial craft brewery in the metro and they said as they were going ABLE was kind of looking over, and they were both trying to figure things out at the same time
LH: Yeah, we’re not in that same situation, but when we say we’re going to make cider people are like, “Oh, is that beer? Is that wine?” I don’t know. We defer to wine because that’s what it is on the federal level and at the state level it is unknown. And it’s only mentioned twice in the federal laws, the word cider.
SB: I was kind of curious if it was a different process for cider than for beer.
LH: yeah, so technically it’s a wine license through the federal government that we have to get, and the taxation at that level is insane there’s so many different levels based on whether it’s just apples or if you’ve got apples and pears or if you use blueberry before you ferment it or after you ferment it. It's just like throw a dart and pick a tax class.
TK: Carbonation levels, whether you force carbonate it or whether it’s naturally carbonated, it’s sparkling here… so there it gets very difficult to transverse.
SB: You’ve said you were originally wanting to open a brewery, you’re a beer drinker, you’ve been drinking cider for a while. Do you all have differing tastes with things? How do you come up with your ideas because you’ve got several different kinds of ciders that you make?
TK: We’ve probably produced 35 to 40 different varieties of cider over the last couple of years, but if you look at them you can definitely tell which are his and which are mine.
LH: The ones that drink more like a beer, all the hop ciders are usually my recipes, and the ones that have more botanical flavors or go more fruity, sour sometimes almost leaning on vinegar, or the more fruited stuff he typically does. If there’s a specific beer style we’re targeting I’m usually the one driving that recipe and when we’re going for more fruity botanical stuff he’s driving that recipe.
TK: We’ve worked together pretty good on the stout style we’re working on now
SB: Stout like the beer?
TK: We’re trying to get a cider that has, we’ve got the color in there, we’re getting some of the flavors, but he mouthfeel is not there.
LH: We’re trying to get the body of a stout. We’ve hit like a light porter.
SB: One of my favorite things to drink, especially when I was in college, was the Guiness mixed with a cider.
TK: Snake bite
SB: That sounds good to me. Whenyou get that going…
TK: We'll find a way to make that happen
LH: We’re still talking about it. We’ve still got a little bit of the last batch that we experimented with on tap so every now and then we drink it and start thinking and take some notes.
SB: What’s your favorite that you guys have made?
TK: I’ve got a Flanders style cider that’s been aging for about four years now. The tartan is there’s lactic acid, it’s complex. I’ve got that one. I’ve also got another sour that’s been on (???) for four and a half years and it’s got plum, leather, it’s almost vinegary. I know he won’t like it, but it’s something I can only drink three or four ounces at a time. It’s a sipper.
LH: For me I would say I think my two favorites, we did a sour cider off of a yeast blend specifically for ciders that had a nice funk, a little bit of tartness to it. That one was an easy drinker. And one we called Nelson Farms that was a farmhouse yeast blend with a little bit of funk to it and some earthiness and it had some Nelson (???) hops in it. That was nice. It drank a lot like a farmhouse biere de garde sort of beer.
SB: One of the questions I like to ask is what’s your favorite beer that you make, or in your case cider, and what’s the worst you’ve ever made?
(Both laugh)
TK: I don’t know if it’s the worst, but the first two ciders I made were horrible. But I still drank them. I was like, I made this I’m gonna do it. That was a very big learning experience. We’ve dumped a lot of cider. We’ve had some sours we’ve tried to do that did not…
LH: They just turned to vinegar. You know I would say memorably, the first cider that I made I thought it tasted horrible, and it just fermented out completely dry and I didn’t use a good apple juice for making it dry, a good juice base, and that’s what I didn’t like. Plus I used a cider yeast that has a real wine like character and that did not settle well on my palette. So that’s what drove me toward the whole beer inspired thing. We’ve had some bad batches turn out as well. We tried to rush things and didn’t get a good fermentation so what was supposed to be really good, we had a batch of the hop transition once that when it fermented out it was terrible, honestly. What flavor did it have that turned out wrong?
TK: Is this the hot one?
LH: Yeah, I think it was too warm and it just has some really off flavors from the yeast, and like it was terrible and we couldn’t serve it and we dumped most of it out. And we came back like six months later and we still had some sitting there and it had gotten, it was very dry, and whatever the bad flavor had aged out and we rehopped it with some Chinook and some Columbus, the classic IPA hops, and it was just fantastic. It had a real dank quality to it and it was almost completely dry. We didn’t back sweeten that one. It drank like a good IPA cider.
TK: I’m gonna come back and say my favorite was Morning Delight, our coffee cider. We’re just using light roast Etheopean coffee and basically making a cold brew with cider. And it tastes just like coffee.
SB: I’ve never heard of anybody else doing a lot of these. Are there other places that make ciders like these? Because I just see like a raspberry or a pear, but I never see a coffee, and I’ve never seen anybody trying to do a stout.
LH: We’re not aware of anyone that’s tried to do that so keep that one on the down low. But there are a couple of other cideries out there that are doing some ciders that are more beer centric as far as the flavors. There’s one on the West Coast (discussion between the two brewers) I mean east coast, west coast is (???). Two that I know of. Keep it that way.
TK: There’s more of them out there. I’ve got friends in the Denver area that are making stuff that’s beer-esque. It’s nowhere near what we’re doing, but they’re using it to bring in the beer drinkers. But in the last seven years cider has gone from about 125 cideries to over a thousand now. So we have the explosion that the craft beer world did 15, 20 years ago.
SB: It’s cool that you guys are on the ground floor here because, what did you say, there’s one other?
LH: Yeah, there’s one in Tulsa right now and none in Oklahoma City
TK: Another one in planning so she’ll be up around the same time we are.
LH: It’ll be fun.
SB: One of the things a lot of the breweries do is collaborations. Is that even a possibility with you?
TK: We’re already doing them. About a month and a half ago we did a collaboration with Vanessa House and released it at their two and a half year anniversary party. We did a…
LH: Beer Cider blend.
TK: We took a 401k Cream Ale and blended with a Macintosh apple juice and hopped it with…
LH: El Dorado. It was pretty unique. It was pretty good. It was a nice blend. It had an apple character but it had a little more body because of the beer base that was blended with it. And it sold really well in the tap room.
TK: It was their number 2 seller for that weekend.
LH: And we’ve got some other collaborations we’re working on now as well with some of the other local breweries.
SB: And you’re in a unique spot physically because you’re right in the middle of several.
LH: Oh yeah, you’ve got Stonecloud, 8 minute walk, 5 minute walk to Angry Scotsman
TK: Another three or four minutes over to Lively, and down to Anthem, and then 150 feet away from us there will be Core Four brewing. They’ve got a micro brewing three barrel system, very small, no distribution, tap room only, so we plan on doing a lot of collaborations with those guys as well since we’re so close.
SB: Are you going to be doing a tap room, I’m assuming. I’m hoping.
Both: Yes. Absolutely.
LH: We’ll have a tap room in here. About one third of this space will end up as a tap room. Half of it production, and the rest bathrooms and office space. Yeah, that’s the plan. A place to open up the garage door and come have a cider on a day like today.
SB: You said you're hoping to open late summer, early fall, that’s a perfect time.
TK: Every time is a perfect time for cider.
LH: Here in the United States a lot of people think cider is a holiday beverage, and if you look at sales they really peak right around Christmas time. But in the rest of the world as soon as summer hits everybody’s drinking cider.
SB: It seems more summery to me. I know every place does like a saison or something like a radler. All of the beer places it seems like summer is when they sell the lighter fruit beers.
LH: Typically cider shouldn’t be super sweet and it’s nice and light and doesn’t fill you up as much as beer, so a light dry cider is great for the summer. You try and put down something with a lot of sugar on the other hand, that’s just going to put you to sleep.
SB: So what do you think the future of cideries in Oklahoma City is? Do you think it’s going to start going toward where breweries are going? I mean, if you all are successful then other people might look at that.
TK: It’s a possibility. There’s also some things going on with the laws that will allow breweries to make more cider like beverages. Some of them are already doing it now. I can think of at least two if not three apple saisons in the city. People want apple based beverages. They want something light, they want something dry. Whether or not someone is going to come in and do something else I’ve not heard anything.
LH: When you look at it nationally where all the cideries are popping up are places where apples are grown. And they’re not grown in OKlahoma. I don’t see people running around planting apple trees. But one of these days we’ll get around to that too.
SB: Do you have anything else to add about what you've got coming up? Anything you’re particularly excited about making?
TK: We’ve got a number of things we’re playing with. We’re doing a lot of hopped ciders. I’ve got a couple different yeasts we’re playing with to see what flavors we can get. When we initially started this off we were using a yeast that contained gluten so we’re trying to get our yeast changed up so we are gluten free.
SB: That is one thing I think people don’t think about is that cider is generally a lot better for someone that has a gluten intolerance.
LH: If it’s a traditional cider it’s 100% gluten free. There’s not gluten in the apples and if you use a dry yeast, there’s none in there either.
SB: I kind of wanted to ask, you say you’re leaning more toward beer ciders, and I know a lot of the flavor profile is affected by the yeast. Is cider normally a smaller variety of yeast that they’ll use?
LH: Typically yeah, there’s about a half a dozen cider yeasts available give or take, and usually ciders are driven by apple variety. It would be no different with a beer if you use a pale malt, or (???), or throw in some crystal malt. But with a cider it’s like, am I going to use Davinet or Kingston Black, or these different apples and that’s what’s going to drive the character. But like I said, we don’t have those available to us, so how can we change the flavors with a pretty generic apple juice blend from mostly desert apples? But we can get different characters with yeast so if you use a saison yeast you’ll get some of that earthy peppery flavor, use a lager yeast you're going to get a clean, light, if you use an English yeast you’ll get some of those fruity esters. That’s how we’re really driving the flavor.
SB: I feel like that’s something kind of unique because I haven't heard of a lot of people focusing on the yeast to change the flavor.
TK: In the beer world you don't have to. They can change up their grain bill and change the flavor of the beer. The yeast is going to help accentuate some of those, but they don’t have to worry about it as much as we do.
SB: So what do you all think is your signature taste or flavor? Is there something you lean more toward?
LH: I think just drink it. Hop transition is kind of our signature “beer” as far as the whole “beer inspired.” When we first made this for the craft beer festival in 2017, I brewed a pale ale and then we made a cider with the exact same hop regiment and we served 5, 6 other ciders at the same time. And we were just showing up as homebrewers at the time. I was like, “well let me make this pale ale” and it was called pale comparison ale and pale comparison cider and served them side by side. So when we had people that said they didn’t like cider “well, I’ve got a pale ale, try this then try the cider.” And that’s really what is kind of our signature for that beer inspired type of thing.
TK: The hop transition is something I’ve been working with people in the industry and we’re coming up with cocktails. We’ve done cider-mosas with this. It’s a very versatile beverage that people are really excited about.
SB: I’ve seen some hop ciders, but I’ve never seen one described as an IPA with apples.
LH: I agree. A lot of hop ciders I’ve had it smells like they threw a hop pellet in there and you can barely smell it let alone taste it. And I think nowadays more of the cideries are realizing that they need to put more hops in there, and we’re seeing some different varieties. For a long time it’s like, “Oh well we put a little cascade in there.” Well that’s in every beer. Now we’re seeing hops like citra and all the hops that are really wild for the New England IPA. We’re seeing that happen as well.
TK: We’re doing a lot more hops than anybody out there. We’ve had a couple of hop ciders that we’ve enjoyed, but the flavors you’re getting off of ours you’re not going to find.
LH: Yeah, we’re using as much hops as you’d put in a beer. So you get a little bit of bitterness from that as well, which kind of balances the strong hop flavor and cuts through the sweetness of the apple as well.
SB: Well I’m looking forward to enjoying some of your ciders and showing up and enjoying your tap room sometime.
LH: We are too.
SB: Well thanks a lot for taking the time to talk to me guys.
Both: Thank you.