Happy Lives come from happy hours

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” -Annie Dillard

This section below details how our business as a whole works. It's not just about how apples turn into the magical liquid we call hard cider. That, my friends, is really a force of nature. And while we think our craft is of supreme importance and it's what we love most to do, we think there is more to the story that intelligent customers deserve to know about.

What lurks below is more of an overall day to day actions summary of how we feel it is best to do business. You'll notice we're a little different than many craft producers. Our number one goal is to craft life-enhancing hard ciders. So we keep in-house what we feel is most important to that and partner with industry leaders on all the other bits.

step 1: watch & Learn

data harvesting, the friendly way

Hi! We’re Humans…

Just kidding we’re mega computers mining your personal data. OK just kidding again. We’re people just like you - unless you’re a robot.

We make hard cider that we like to drink and we make hard cider that you like to drink (we know, we’ve seen you at beer fests).

…we hope you are, too.

Our ciders are not computer friendly. But the humans sitting behind this computer and behind your computer might be thirsty (Yes, we are!). And if the responses we’ve gotten from you at tastings, at festivals, and under our stalky-watching eyes at the restaurant you like to go to mean anything, we’re betting you’d enjoy an Awestruck to parch that thirst

"We're watching
you at restaurants."

"We've seen you
at beer fests."

"Mining your
personal data"

Really, we’re watching you at restaurants...

...and it's helped us make some ground-breaking discoveries.

Humans are different, and they all enjoy different tastes. There are differences between two people, and different preferences within one person, just based on their mood, star sign, or current geographic status as relating to sea-level.

And since we've decided to make ciders for the purpose of enjoyment, we’ve found it good practice to make some different ciders. Different from what else is out on the market, and different from one another.

If they don’t fall far from the tree…

New York has the highest diversity of apple varieties in the nation. This gives us a leg up on other states because, when it comes to making delicious hard cider, more varieties is better.

All of our ciders are made with a freshly pressed blend of 100% NY apple cider direct from the orchard.

step 2: apples

without them our product is pretty much just air

….we think we might know where to find them

We work with growers and pressers throughout this here Empire State that focus on quality, freshness, and drool-worthy deliciousness as much as we do. All of our farm partners have centuries of orchard experience (yeah, they're pretty old) and have razor sharp focus on doing what they do best, growing apples. We think that's about as bombdiggity as it gets.

step 3: craft

no pom poms or washi tape involved

Our Laboratories…

This is where we turn up the electrohouse music, don our sexy white frocks, and get down to business. As a side note, girls are allowed (and awesome).

Cider making is an art and a science and more. It is what we do all day e’ryday, and we couldn’t even begin to sum it up here. But every part of everything that we do is for the sake of creating a delicious hard cider, time after time.

We have begun detailing our daily actions photographically on Instagram, so check it out.

…are better than Your Laboratories

While we do have a dedicated lab #qualitycontrolgoals, the world is our oyster, so to speak. The key to making anything amazing is focus and experimentation. So we try every beverage we can get our hands on. We steep almost anything in cider from black walnut powder #ick to lavender and hops #FTW! and we ruthlessly test our own cider in our executive offices, our log cabins, our moms' houses', and sometimes even a field or two.

(We didn’t mean to hurt your feelings with the laboratories thing, really we're sure your laboratories are more than adequate)

step 4: deliver

getting the product from our bottles to your mouth

…but we might love you more

Not that anyone has to compete for our love (except the Roomba, really Roomba if you get stuck under the couch one more time…). But seriously, without you, we are lifeless hulls and we have no one to deliver anything to. So we want to hear from you! We want to know what you’re up to, what’s on your minds, and what you wish for when you blow out your birthday candles. We also wouldn’t mind knowing when you blow out your birthday candles and if we can come to the party too and will there be cake?

We love our distributors…

We work with top class distributors so we can focus on our craft; making transcendental hard ciders and quickly putting them into bottles before the awe slips out (that’s the most important ingredient). But this comes at a price, the distribution houses we work with are filled with mean and scary people that live on nothing but spray-cheese and coffee.

Ok, that’s a lie. Distributors are the best people, we love them so much we keep bobble-head dolls of them in our office (our board of advisors) and they are members of and contributors to the local economy, hiring dozens of people that live and breathe in the same community you do, which is awesome as long as everyone remembers to brush their teeth.

Whether or not you invited us to your party…

Are you the type to save the best for last? Like that gigantic frosting flower on a really delicious birthday cake at a party you most likely were invited to?

Sometimes it can be hard to wait for things, but what could be better than a happy ending?

So here's the deal, we're not going to bother making something that's lame. It takes a long time and for us to make awe, and as they say, patience is a corkscrew.

…we want you to enjoy our ciders

Yes we know it sounds like it's all swingsets and ring-around-the-Rosie, but Awestruck Ciders take a lot of Force ● Displacement to make. So we've got to make sure it’s worth it. We promise, the results are mind-boggingly, jaw-droppingly good. When you have a moment to sit down with a freshly poured glass of chilled cider and take a moment to enjoy every aspect of it, that's when you’ll truly understand why we do what we do.

tl;dr

We make our ciders at 8 Winkler Road in Sidney, New York. We ferment them, steep them, and bottle them up using a combination of elbow grease and pixie dust

We use 100% fresh pressed New York State Apples from Cahoon Farms, Minard Farms, and sometimes from wild trees

You can purchase our ciders from retailers near you, courtesy of distributors near you. Or have them appear at your doorstep like a gift from the heavens via the Internet!

now that you've read all that

Please, read some more.

What did you think of that? Do you have some questions for us? Please, check out our FAQ, or if you can't stand to look through one more letter of our nonsense, get in touch.

If you're wanting to find the crazy brains that wrote this stuff (for neuroscience research or otherwise), we recommend finding some really, really dark sunglasses, putting them on, then a blindfold, then another, larger blindfold, and then visiting this page.

Step 5: Enjoy