Tag: apple-cider

Christopher & Kirsten K. Shockey – Fermentation School & The Big Book of Cidermaking

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Christopher & Kirsten K. Shockey
The Big Book Of Cidermaking

Christopher Shockey and Kirsten K. Shockey join us again to talk about their new book, The Big Book of Cidermaking.

We also talk about an exciting new project they’ve taken on called, Fermentation School!

Fermentation School has online classes from top experts to help you advance your own fermentation skills.

For more on Fermentation School, The Big Book of Cidermaking and other Books and information the Shockey’s have checkout the links below!

Fermentation School – https://www.fermentationschool.com/

Ferment.Works – https://ferment.works/

The Big Book of Cidermaking – https://www.storey.com/books/the-big-book-of-cidermaking/

Transcription

Brian: Christopher Shockey and Kirsten K. Shockey are the authors of The Big Book of Cidermaking. And award winning
Miso, Tempeh, Natto & Other Tasty Ferments, Fiery Ferments and the best selling Fermented Vegetables books that came from their desires to help people eat in new ways, both for the health of themselves and the planet.

They got their start in fermenting foods 20 years ago on a 40 acre hillside smallholding, which grew into their local organic food company, when they realized their passion lay in the wish to both teach people how to ferment and push this culinary art to new flavors.

Kirsten and Christopher lead lead experience experiential workshops worldwide and online at FermentationSchool.com. Helping people to make enjoy and connect with their food through fermentation.

They can now be found at Ferment.Works. or excuse me, they can also be found at Ferment.Works. Kirsten and Christopher, welcome back to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Christopher and Kirsten: Thanks, Brian.

Brian: Why don’t we just start out by kind of going over your new book, tell us tell us what led you to write this new one on cidermaking.

Christopher: Well this is the one I wanted to write from the very beginning, we bought a hand press on the farm 20 some years ago when we moved here. And so we’ve been making a lot of cider since that time and that’s my favorite ferment by far.

So we just had to do a few 100,000 other books before we could do this one. Yeah, and it’s cider season, we have cider apples on the farm. So all those reasons why.

Brian: Was this one of the original fermentation experiments that you guys went with or how did it come about?

Christopher: This is one of the ferments that we did for ourselves, we had a lot of apple trees and so we we made cider for ourselves. The Founding Fathers would let you make 200 gallons for yourself and we came darn close nearly every year.

Friends and family, I trained as a cider maker. And we were going to do cider instead of fermented vegetables and all that other stuff.

When I learned that to run a little cidery, the most important thing is you can repair equipment, used equipment, I can look at a pipe and it’ll start to leak. So I’m good with grey tape and after that it falls down. So I said to Kirsten, I love drinking it, I love making it, but I’m not so sure we’re going to be a good small cidery. And that’s how all the other fermentation stuff started.

But in the response back from the book so far, it’s been really positive.

Kirsten: Yeah, I think this one’s much easier lift than the last one. Most people know what cider is. Most people are interested in fermented beverages and are willing to maybe take that on as a first ferment, where as miso or, you know, fermenting a bean or grain eating stringy natto, or growing fungus around a bean, like tempeh is just asking a little more of the American general, American population.

So yeah, it’s been popular and it came out well, it was supposed to come out in June, but it came out along with Apple season, so I think we’ve gotten a lot of nice feedback.

The other thing is, it’s a very beautiful book, it was shot here in three different times of the year, but all on our farm. So it feels very personal that way too. And kind of a tour of our space.

Brian: Oh, fabulous.

So for those of you who are just tuning in regardless of when you’re listening to this, that we’re talking in November of 2020, we’ve had kind of a wild ride with 2020 with COVID-19 and all the rest that goes on with it.

How have you guys been able to serf through that?

Christopher: Well started out by canceling Japan, Ukraine, Chile, two Mexico’s plus 30 some events in the United States. So when we talked last time, we had pivoted from a small fermentation company to authors and educators going around the world teaching people.

New pivot, that was completely pulled out from under us like all other artists, and anybody that makes a living going around teaching people someplace else.

The benefit was we created a fermentation school. And the idea was to grow the reach because we have people that have bought our books around the world that we would never get to, you know, we’re just not going to be able to get the Kazakhstan or Iran or other places that they want to have us teach them.

So we launched the fermentation school and the idea was to really change some things.

So one thing is there’s a lot of very good, excellent female fermentation teachers around the world. There’s a few male teachers that get all the attention. And so one of the things that the school is about is it’s all women who are authors and fermentation experts.

So there’s two Kirsten’s and Meredith Lee, who’s in North Carolina who’s an amazing charcuterie butcher really a badass butcher, like women with knives, cutting through a carcass, just crazy. She’s so good with meat.

And then we’ve lined up, we’re going to be announcing in the coming months at least, we’ve signed at least three other women who are leaders and things like sourdough and cheeses, chefs that do work in the kitchen around fermentation. So it’s really exciting and we’ve designed it so that the artist gets the money having been through the publication world. When we have people say, Oh, my gosh, you’ve sold hundreds of 1000s of books, you must be rich?

We say, Well, that’s a lot of quarters that you can stack up, that’s true. But if you make less than $1 a book. So the publication world’s really tough, that’s the other thing that’s changing, you know, for your listeners who have published or want to get published or out there, the world’s changed in the last 10 years, 15 years pretty dramatically.

And so that’s your capital, that’s your wealth, the person that knows the information really has to figure out how are you going to reach the most people and keep the most of that capital for yourself.

We had this concept of a school where we kind of handpick these best teachers who don’t have a platform yet, besides their books and teaching, they’re in the same boat we are, designed the school so that it’s more of a cooperative, you know, you put your work in, and you get most of that back out again.

Then the school uses a small bit of that just for advertising to keep the lights on. But really, it’s a cooperative of amazing women teachers.

We launched it in May, we’ve got maybe seven or eight courses on there right now. And we have already localized into Spanish on one of the courses, we’ve got two other courses that are being translated into Spanish.

The idea is that these courses will be in multiple languages.

Yeah, that’s what we’re doing now.

Kirsten: I think the other piece also we’re going to with that operating money, if there’s extra, they’ll be scholarship funds and things that come out of that.

Brian: Oh, great.

Kirsten: Yeah.

Brian: You went from speakers and authors to becoming basically headmaster’s of your own school. It’s amazing accomplishment in be able to pivot that quickly is pretty fabulous.

Where’d you get your first students, where were the first people from?

Kirsten: Our first class, it was fun, we launched it May 1st and it was flower power. It’s just a fun little class about capturing wild yeasts for fermenting sodas or cider or you know, whatever fruit juice, you want to ferment.

It was during the time people were just at home. And so a lot of folks, you know, really loved the idea of going around their neighborhood or in their own gardens and seeing what wild yeasts they could capture and taste those flavors.

I’m going to say I think most of the kind of the students came from Instagram or social media, perhaps or newsletter as well. But you know, so far, our reach is only the people we can reach either with our newsletter or on on social media.

We don’t have any other big channels yet. Yeah, working on it, trying to figure out ways to reach people.

That’s the biggest challenge, right? You can put anything out there, but people need to find it. Like podcasts, right?

Brian: That’s right. Absolutely.

So they, the new teachers that you’re bringing on, and the people that are coming on to put on these courses?

Have they brought audiences with them as well?

Do they have followings of some sort that they can also communicate it to?

Kirsten: Yes, many of us do supplement or writing income by teaching instead of each of us kind of having our own platform that people are trying to discover if we all pull together, then my audience will find Meredith’s charcuterie classes, and her audience might find our site or class or whatever, you know.

And the other idea that I think is going to be really exciting once there’s a number of teachers and the content starts to really grow is that students could take tracks like, for example, this doesn’t need to just stick to strictly like a project where you take a cabbage and learn to ferment it, or you know, some meat and learn to make sausage out of it.

What if there’s gardening classes or composting classes, or there’s a regenerative agriculture track where it really is talking about growing the beans in no till methods to build soil and then taking those beans and fermenting them into miso. You know, you get these different teachers, these different voices to kind of take something that’s seeing, you know, we tend to see things in small bites but then kind of bringing back that whole that’s like the bigger picture right now.

There’s the classes we can get out as we get out because all of us are now teaching ourselves right Christopher’s behind the camera and has taught himself editing which is something he’d never done before. I’m just trying to learn to look at the camera, we bring our granddaughter in and for her, it’s second nature. She’s like, Oh, yeah, I can look at the camera. And I’m like, oh, man, it was so easy.

Brian: So much a sign of the times, but you’re taking such great advantage of it. And you’re finding the ways to be able to grow in a very organic manner, which is fabulous.

All of these people, these are connections that you’ve already had previously, right, in your travels, and in your previous stints with the Mother Earth News Fair, and other things, that’s how we met, is that where you’re meeting all these people and that’s who you’re bringing in?

Kirsten: Yeah, whoever’s reached out to us and gotten on our mailing list through or our website, or Ferment.Works website, that Ferment.Works website, also links to fermentationschool.com.

And so, you know, that’s where I guess the traffic that we don’t really know where folks are coming from comes in. But the rest is, yeah, a lot of folks that we’ve met over the years teaching, or just followers that you get when you’re playing that game, which, of course is also very dependent on if the algorithm gods are in your favor that day, when we’re announcing things right?

That’s a big mystery to all of us.

Brian: What other types of ways are you guys looking at marketing yourselves?

Are you looking at paid advertising or any other any other functions?

Christopher: You know, working off the free things, we still speak, everyone’s pivoting right as well. So, you know, festivals are now being held online.

We just nominated for award in the culinary world. So that’s good, great advertising for us as people are looking at those nominations. And we had the awards night about a week ago or something like that.

We were bummed that we weren’t in Pittsburgh, or New York at the award ceremony, you know, here’s the three finalists. But when we lost, we were really happy we were in our own living room and not at the award ceremony and having to do the, you know, Denzel Washington, I’m so glad you won again, and not me.

Absolutely, you guys deserve it. Thinking, oh, there’s no fairness in the world.

So those work, and then we’re using a platform called Thinkific, which is a nice platform. So we’ve really optimized SEO on that. It’s a combination of marketing, getting people to know you’re there. And then really sales once they’re there, we have a pretty high rate of, we have free lessons within a class so people can kind of get a feel for what the cadence of it.

Am I gonna like to watch Kirsten teach this class, what is this class even about people would buy blossom flower power, not even knowing what blossom culturing yeast is about.

And so get them there, show them as much as you can, so that they feel comfortable about that, and then help them make that purchase. What we haven’t done yet is then go back and look at the people that haven’t bought yet and figure out what can we do to help them make that decision?

We’re just now starting to work on bundling. So as Chris was talking about, you know, if someone has learned how to make sauerkraut, would they like to figure out how fermented sausage to go with, for example?

And then how about a cider to drink with that to you a full meal deal kind of going on there. So we’ve got that going on, trying to figure out once they’re here at the fermentation school, how to help them make the right decision how to help kind of nurture that we’re going to be launching a community area.

And so that people can share what they’ve made. Like, hey, look at this, look what I made, you know, in a place that’s safe, kind of vetted because they’re in the school.

So they’re not going to get spammy, and get a bunch of people trying to sell them other stuff. They just get to talk about their permits, and ask questions. And again, it’s about that’s what the school would be about somebody in the hallway would be talking about something like that.

Those are the kind of things I’m paid as part of it. I think the best part about paid is you got to figure out what people are searching for right?

Then own those things. And so we’ve kind of worked that out. So we’ll be doing some of that before Christmas, trying to pick that up as well and seeing kind of tracking that see how it goes.

Brian: Fabulous.

You haven’t been involved with it that long, only since May. So we’re a little less than a year that you’ve been building up this fermentation school.

So far, What do you like best about this new format and this new kind of industry that you’ve inserted yourself into?

Kirsten: I love waking up in the morning and seeing somebody in India but a class the night before. I mean, I think that’s just magical. It’s magical on two levels. It’s magical to make money while you sleep. And it’s magical to think that helping people take responsibility for their food or feel more connected with their food or feel healthier or whatever it is that brings them to fermentation and so to be able to reach people in places that that we would have never been able to reach.

You know, I mean, the books go travel without us, but to reach them in a more personal way, I think that’s pretty cool. I mean, there’s a lot that, you know, with technology that drives me crazy.

But there’s so many things that do make the world smaller in a positive way. For me, that’s it. It’s definitely not standing in front of the camera. I’m still getting used to that.

Christopher: You should talk about the fire relief, too. That was pretty cool.

Kirsten: Oh, yeah. So we also took our basic fermentation class, which is just sauerkraut and pickling, and made it very inexpensive, it’s 14.99.

And all the proceeds go to a group here in the Rogue Valley doing fire relief food, and they are serving meals, full meals. And they intend to continue it throughout the year as long as people need it.

But good food from farms, you know, not prepackaged meals, but created by chefs. And they are they’re doing it, they’re serving a lot of meals. We put that out to our audience and I believe we’re able to donate from the sale of those classes about $500.

The other light kind of neat pieces, somebody anonymously from Australia said, let me buy three classes and I want the money to go to the fire Relief Fund and also find three people that are in need that would like to take the class. So just that community building around even this local disaster that we experienced a month and a half ago now or two months ago. Cool to have that opportunity.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely, right on.

Tell everyone a little bit about your personal situation with that. We had fires here, for those of you who aren’t familiar in Southern Oregon, during the year of 2020, on top of everything else, some really disastrous fires that affect you guys personally?

Christopher: Kirsten’s sister and her husband evacuated to our house first, they were in that Talent / Medford area.

And then as the fires got closer to Jacksonville, we evacuated my mom who’s in a trailer park there in Jacksonville, she’s she’s handicapped so it takes a while to move her somewhere. And we said sooner than later.

So at one point, we had Kristen’s sister and and brother in law, my mom out here and then the Slater Creek Fire started, and suddenly now we’re the ones and the talent fires to calm down. So they all move back to their house and we prepared to evacuate here.

And we never got past stage one, but.

Brian: Oh good.

Christopher: And these valleys, it is so dry, as you know and it goes so quickly. And we live in the forest. So you know, it moves very fast and so it’s like a lot of people around the country and especially in this area, you know, in the spring, you get all of your photo albums and everything you want, and you put them in crates by the door in the fall when it finally rains, which it is yet to do.

But hopefully soon, right, we’ll put our photo albums back on the shelves. And and we’ll start over again next spring.

Kirsten: Yeah, I mean, it’s November 2, right. And it’s supposed to be 80 degrees today. And as we opened all the windows, because it’s so warm in the house. It’s really not the weather it’s supposed to be but I’m actually smelling and I’m looking out there and it is a little hazy again.

I think that the Slater fire, I know it’s still burning. Luckily, the area’s mostly been clear, but I kind of feel like maybe I’m smelling smoke again. So it’s just yeah, it’s just a whole different world that way.

Brian: I think you guys just keep rolling with it and you can keep moving along. So many people I think feel like just throwing their hands up and just saying how the heck with it doing as little as possible to keep rolling life.

I mean, you’ve built an entirely new industry for yourselves overnight. And that’s fabulous. It’s really commendable.

If you could change one thing about this new form of putting on classes online, what would you change about it?

Christopher: We both miss being in front of people. That’s the hardest part is for I even in front of people, I have no problem having Kiersten be in front of 1,000 people and be supporting her all the way.

So it’s not that part. It’s just being in that room of people of their understanding or hands on when they’re trying to learn something and seeing that face when they’ve got their hands on something, and they’re just like, wow, I made that!

And in this format, you’re reaching more people, but you just don’t see that you don’t know how they’re doing on the other end.

We get a lot of pictures of things on counters around the world, which is great, but it’s not like the human aspect of just seeing that aha moment. So I think that’s what I miss. I miss the human interaction of it.

What about you Kirsten?

Kirsten: For sure, the part I missed the human interaction.

And I mean, of course, going to these fabulous places, you know, some of them might have been really fun with the online classes that we’re doing, I really still prefer that though, than trying to do sort of a live zoom class. We’ve done a few of those and you know, you get a little more of that interaction. But it’s so awkward. And it also is, so energy sucking.

In a room, you can have so many people, but you’re feeling their energy back. But when you’re trying to monitor a screen with these tiny little squares and unless everybody’s looking at their camera, it looks like they’re not looking at you.

As soon as you’re looking at your camera, right, I don’t see you, Brian. But now it looks like I’m finally looking at you, right.

So for me, I actually enjoy kind of having the time to prepare the lesson, Christopher does all the editing, we add text with it, we make a downloadable workbook. And I feel like if we can’t be in the room with the people at that moment, if we can try to hit different learning styles by providing information that’s recorded, as well as written, that we’re hitting different learning styles, and it’s kind of the best we can do.

And it’s also curated, so that we’re not jumping off on a tangent or anything in the same way that we might on a zoom call. We’re in a room that of course is wonderful, but on a zoom call, it’s just hard.

Christopher: So if I could add the thing, I love the best. I don’t know if I ever remember if I answered that or not. But it’s outtakes.

Oh, my God. I’m the person who stays in the theater when the movies done hoping they’re going to get the outtakes. Sometimes, depending on the movie, it’s the best part.

You think, okay, I was worth the money to see that. And so, you know, learning how to do video editing, teaching myself, basically so I could have outtakes of Kirsten and I could put those in at the end when we’re rolling credits is absolutely the best part. And she knows I’m going to do that.

So sometimes when she screws up, and that’s a really good one. I’m just smiling behind the camera and you can tell she’s thinking, Oh, no, I’m gonna see that one again. That I really like, because I think it brings kind of that, you know, it can look like she’s got everything so organized and together. And when people see outtakes, it’s like, okay, she messes up sometimes, too. That’s really great, I need to know that.

Brian: Absolutely. That’s great. That’s something you wouldn’t naturally expect. But that’s a great, great perspective on it.

So if we were to get back, let’s say a year from now, and we’re gonna look back over fermentation works, where it goes from this point over the next 12 months, we look back, what would you say would have had to have happen for you to feel happy with the results?

Christopher: I think for the fermentation school, in a year we’ve got six to 10 different instructors, all with one to five classes. So somebody can go there and people really see FermentationSchool.com as the place and around the world to go.

We’ve got a process for localizing and translating those. So you know, Spanish speaking countries have been a huge one for us. And so, but also German speaking countries, for example, those are crops and things like that, that we’re also localizing and translating to the markets that really want that. So we have a mechanism to do that.

And for new artists coming in, they see this as the best place to go, a great place to go for their talent and then it just kind of runs.

I guess the other dream, which maybe this is gonna have to check in again in two years is when you say Christopher, you said it was just going to run itself?

But I’m not sure if that’s a one year or two year goal. But you know, I think every business owner would like to see a place where it’s really running itself and a lot of situations.

So you know, you got to build that up. You got to put things in place even now so that it’s not so much handheld along the way.

Brian: What takes most of your time, when you talk about it running itself, what right now would you have to have automated for, for lack of a better word?

Christopher: Let’s just talk about the process. So from the time we sign artists up, somebody has to create the video kind of layout, what the look of it is how they’re going to teach it.

For some people, they haven’t done any online stuff or very little online stuff. They’re used to being in a room.

So really just that coaching of what’s your look going to be how are you going to teach what other people are doing. They get familiar with other people that are already on the site, they have to create their own things and get it out there. Then it’s coaching and helping them with the marketing to bring their people to that place.

So I think it’s that starter kit, kind of for an artist which is you know, here’s all the things you’re going to need to do. Here are some examples exemplars from other people that have done it just like you, so how do you do that?

How do you put it together?

How do you market it?

And on the back end, there’s just the books of, you know, when we sell a class, there could be an affiliate, and there’s a percentage that goes to the affiliate, then there’s just the payment processing that takes place.

Then there’s the money that goes to the artists and some percentage goes to us. And so that whole piece should be more automated than it is.

And right now, at our scale, we can still do that but eventually we’re going to need that to be automated. Because if we’re talking about 100 or 1,000 sales a day, will no longer be able to do that by hand. So that’s another big, on my side, that’s another big thing I’m trying to figure out how to do.

Kirsten: I think on my site, the creation of the content takes a lot of time.

Each time we do a class, it gets a little easier, we learn more as the process goes. But right now, we’re always have a class in development. And we’re always we got a lot of ideas out of subjects, you know, whether they’re sort of longer form courses, or just really smaller individual classes.

But that point, I think, where there’s enough out there that we don’t feel like we always should be working on getting another class out there. There is enough rounded material and content that if we go a month or two, or three without ourselves putting a class out there. That there’s still enough on there that it’s because everything we’re putting on there anyways, evergreen, so it’s kind of like, once the course catalog is filled out a little more, it’ll feel like it’s running itself a little bit more as well.

Christopher: I also learned to sail during the pandemic. So I have my sailing certificate I am now I can Captain up to a 40 foot sailboat. So we’re just waiting Brian, now for we have two months, we don’t have to create content that’s running yourself, let’s go sail on a sailboat.

Brian: Wow, put the all these pieces together. That’s really cool. It’s great to have some personal things off on the side to apart from everything else. Not that you don’t enjoy doing all this, but I know how even the things that you enjoy doing can feel like work or drudgery, a little bit after too long. And so it’s good to have some some distant goal that’s not too distant that you can focus on.

That’s really exciting to see where you guys are going. And you have an idea of what the obstacles that are in the way and you have an idea of how to get around them. So that’s great.

What advice would you have to other business owners maybe that either don’t fit within your fermentation niche, because obviously, if they do, if they fit somewhere in there or there or something related to it, you’d want them to probably try and get ahold of you to see if they can help out with this, wouldn’t you?

Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. If they’re, if anything that we’ve talked about seems like something that they have seen, the things they know being part of, absolutely, they can reach out to us.

I’m Christopher@FermentationSchool.com, so they can just reach out to me and let me know what their ideas are. And we can see if we can make that happen, for sure.

Last week, we’re just speaking to people that are professionals in the fermentation world, we’re talking about small businesses and taking the other ones kind of taking a hobby that you have and turning it into a product.

We spoke to a group about, you know, maybe I like to make beer I make like to make cider. I like to make wine privately.

And now I want to go into a product company, I’d like to see my label out there and see, you know, what are the things that we can do.

We created a little PDF, specifically for people that want to go into site or business, just things to think about. And I’d say some of that’s pretty generic to any kind of business where you have a passion and a hobby and you want to take that to a product, you know, should I do it, or shouldn’t I?

What are the things I should think about?

And it goes all the way to specifically to product but it’s product placement, shelf placement, you know, what’s your channel going to be cider has some very specific things around because it’s alcohol in terms of state and federal regulations.

So understanding what those are that kind of thing.

So we do help people when they have because we’ve done that, you know, we we had a product company so we sometimes help people just think through if you want something on a shelf, you know what’s that look like?

And if you want to still be profitable after you get it on the shelf, what’s that look like?

And if you want to not hate your business after a year, what’s that look like?

Because it’s tough to be a product on and it reminds me all the time when I was trained and I was a product manager in the corporate world so I every time I think of a new product that, oh my God what if we built that in Kirsten will remind me that we’re not a product company in that way anymore. We’re not building things.

I almost got her there, could be something on a shelf and a couple of years that has a label on it. I’m working on that pretty hard with her but building product and selling products on mindset can be tough to figure it out.

Brian: So you mentioned that PDF and everything that you’ve worked on how would people if they were interested in that, is there a way that they can get that from you or find out more?

Christopher: Yeah, so our publishers Storey, S T O R E Y, so it’s Storey.com/Cider-Business. So again, storage comm slash cider dash business. They get there then they’ll have it in it’s a free PDF. They just download it.

They don’t have to put their email in there’s no there’s no give there. They just get it.

Brian: Wow. Yeah, thanks so much, really a great tool. So I’ll be sure to look at that myself.

What can the listener do that wants to find out more about Fermentation School?

Kirsten: Go to FermentationSchool.com It’s that simple. And they will land on the on the homepage and get to Chris through the classes that are available.

Brian: And they could find out everything else that the Shockey’s are doing over at Furmant.Works.

Kirsten: Ferment.Works. Yes.

Brian: Ferment.Works.

Fabulous.

Thank you so much for being back on. Are there any other questions that I didn’t ask you that you’d like to answer?

Christopher: Our favorite ferment, let’s do that one.

Our favorite ferment. I don’t want box Kirsten into cider even though you know I’m going to answer with cider.

So my favorite permit is a cider specifically I was last year we did 56 different kinds of cider for the book. You can imagine if this is your research, you’re getting sort of getting paid to do this for a living.

So we made all these different ciders and I wanted to make something that reminded me of a nice bourbon. So I found a yeast that could go up to 18-19% alcohol which is 36 proof. I babied along, I got some great apples made some cider kept adding sugar, so kept jacking it up. So the yeast would keep eating sugar and making alcohol until we got a pretty high octane hooch.

And then I put that in barrel and aged it in the barrel and it came out it had some okayness, it had just a little bit of burn that you’d say that’s more than a wine, you know, like a fortified wine, almost like a port. gorgeous color.

And the downside of all this is you know, it’s not ever, it’s not magical. It doesn’t just keep creating itself every night, so I drank them all. And I tried to reproduce it. It’s not quite like the first one.

So I’m still dreaming of the last bottle that I drank up that one so I’ll try again this year, we’re gonna, I’m gonna get back on that bourbon pony. To make that again, pretty sure Kirsten’s isn’t a cider though.

Kirsten: No. He knew I was going to say that.

Having fermented vegetables, we have them at least once sometimes twice in a meal because we’ve got a larger basically in our refrigerator of all kinds of preserved vegetables that are either Sauerkraut or Kimchi or various condiments or hot sauces.

So yeah, it’s just nice to have all that around. So I don’t box myself in with really any favorite.

Brian: Oh, great. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. We really appreciate you guys and appreciate your time. And thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Christopher and Kirsten: Thanks for having us.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: It’s always a lot of fun sitting down and speaking with the Shockey’s.

If you haven’t heard that original episode, I just want to recommend again, go back and listen to the first episode. It’s the audio quality had some issues with it, but it’s still very worth listening to.

And if anything else go back and read the transcript from it, because it was a great conversation gives you some background as to where the Shockey’s are today, versus where they were a year ago.

Now, I just love everything that they’re talking about here. This is really so key to where we are right now.

But also in anytime of transition, it’s so important for business owners to remain flexible.

Even to the point of changing your entire business model. And going in what seems like a completely different direction, those still plays to their same market, look at what they were able to do, they were able to take a very offline based business, that they were doing a lot of things out there at fairs and doing speeches and doing things all over the world demonstrations.

Then turn that into an online base school, who were they’re really the middleman in trying to bring together people wanting to learn more about these topics with the people that know the most about them in all different areas that is just so inspiring and so many different ways.

And it’s something that you can learn from. I know I’m going to be going back and re listening to this interview a few times because there are so many nuggets in there that they’re consciously or not giving off to us as the listeners and hopefully you got some really good use out of this.

I’m so appreciative that they live so nearby and that they’re a great resource for us here on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andy Brennan – Aaron Burr Cider

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Episode 011.

Do you truly love what you do as a business? Is your passion so clear to others that it’s undeniable?

Andy Brennan is truly passionate about his craft and trade. Andy is the founder and owner of Aaron Burr Cider and author of Uncultivated: Wild Apples, Real Cider, and the Complicated Art of Making a Living.

A life-long artist, Andy did not set out to be a wild apple cidermaker (though always intrigued by the fruit), a writer nor a speaker. His publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing, were able to seduce him to attend and speak at the Mother Earth News Fair being held in Albany, Oregon. Due to his interest in visiting Oregon, (he admits a desire to interview some Pacific coast trees) he unknowingly was set on a direct course to be interviewed by Brian J. Pombo for the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

How does a struggling artist end up becoming an apple farmer? How does he stand out in the growing and crowded cider market?

The way Andy mixes his business with his philosophy, while continuing an uncompromising life is instructive and liberating to any searching or struggling entrepreneur. Listen now!

Find out more about Andy Brennan: http://aaronburrcider.com/

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

 

Full Transcript

Brian: Have you found any way around that yourself?

Andy: For sure. The best solution is always to build intimate relationships with customers which ask questions and you know, certainly large companies, they don’t have the time or the inclination to have one on one relationships with their customers.

Even though I said I’m an introvert, I can’t hide from the fact that bonding with my customers is the only thing that that’s going to save, I think people like me from actually becoming road kill to bigger, faster and cheaper.

Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family. If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing. You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.

We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your Maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure life off the grid.

Brian: A homestead farmer who began making cider in 2007 from wild apples. After rising to national prominence with his cider company, Aaron Burr Cider. He wrote a book Uncultivated, which just came out.

Andy Brennan, welcome to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andy: Thank you. It’s great to be talking to you, it’s an honor.

Brian: Yeah. So, who are you, and just let us know a little about what you do?

Andy: My name is Andy Brennan and I am a homestead farmer, Apple farmer and cider maker. The town of Wurtsboro, New York, which is 75 miles North and West of New York city.

It’s in the foothills, the first few mountains as you’re approaching the Catskill mountains and we’re very close to the Hudson Valley. But in terms of a cultural region, we’re more associated with the Catskills.

Brian: So how did you end up here? What’s your life story up to this point?

Andy: Well, I was an artist first. That’s what brought me to New York city from originally I’m from the Washington D C area. And after art school, I ended up in New York.

Like a lot of people ended up living on couches for 10 years, trying to be the, you know, famous artists or whatever.

Eventually I got jobs working in architecture that at least pays little or as the art wasn’t working out.

After finding a sort of a love for Apple trees, I then looked for land near New York City where I can, grow apples.

Brian: Very cool. So what form of art were you interested in?

Andy: Well, I’m a painter and ever since I was a kid, I excelled, I guess in art, but also perhaps at the expense of being extremely bad at all the other subjects. It was kind of the one field in which I showed any talent for.

I’ve always been encouraged, I suppose, on that level to draw and paint. That’s how I ended up in art school.

But, uh, I’d say I’m not, I’m currently innovative paint as an artist. I’m inspired by people like Sazon who just looked at his work and say it’s just about the act of seeing transcribing, um, that act of seen on a painting or on a canvas.

So it’s not, I guess you would say I am. I worked from life and it’s somewhat realistic.

Brian: Very cool. You’ve written a new book, like we mentioned the full title Uncultivated: wild apples, real cider and the complicated art of making a living. So tell us about that.

Andy: Uncultivated is my original title was a book in which I wanted to describe my, methodology as an Apple grower and why I feel like that’s important to cider making.

The subtitle is – wild apples, real cider, which is an ancient drink, to distinguish it from the modern sort of a hard cider that most people are familiar with and the complicated art of making a living.

It’s a reference to what it’s like to be an Apple grower and cider maker at a small homestead farm level.

I should mention that subtitle was proposed and we loved it by a man by the name of Ben Watson, who’s not just my editor. He’s also the publisher of one of the most popular cider books out there.

But he’s also the guy who organized the Cider Days, which is the nation’s largest cider event. I worked very close with him on the book and I owe him a great deal of gratitude because I’m not a writer, I’m a farmer.

Brian: So what led you to write the book in the first place?

Andy: Well, originally I wanted to explain sort of the 101’s to people. I get at the farmer’s market all the time, People asking like, how do you make cider?

Or what makes these apples different than conventional apples?

And I wanted to explain that or give it the full space to thrive. What makes it different and what is cider and all those things.

But, there’s another reason and I think this is really what I ultimately was fueled by when I wrote book. Well, I want to show people what to look at, what to see when they see cider, what types of businesses and farms are growing apples.

In keeping with the ancient tradition of cider and, a world that modernity has really overlooked. I find it stunningly beautiful.

The cider world, the Apple world, these old homestead farms. And I wanted to paint that picture for people so that they know what they’re looking at when they approach cider.

Brian: Excellent. So did you enjoy the process of writing a book and getting it published?

Andy: I really did. It was…I’ve been writing blog journals now for 10 years, which is just more like a diary that I would publish. And I think there’s like two readers. I’ve been doing that for a long time.

When approached by my editor about writing a book, my original thought was that I would take all these blog posts, many of which weren’t even published. They’re just on my computer and I would sort of create a narrative which tied them together.

But it morphed into something different as I was writing it and it was just absolutely obsessed writing for on average, 12 hours a day for every day, for, for a year.

Brian: Wow.

Andy: I never got tired. I woke up and I just couldn’t wait to get writing again. So yeah, I really enjoyed it.

I should also say the last year when I did write, it was an off year for Apple, so there was literally nothing to do on the farm, so I really lucked out that way.

Brian: Yeah, that’s useful. Do you see yourself writing another one in the future?

Andy: Maybe.

Right now I don’t. It feels good to be a done with that project and I’m just in love with being out in the orchard right now. The same sort of passion I had for writing last year is right now, it’s just applied to my orchard and not excited about making cider this fall.

I just want to spend every moment working with the trees. And, um, so that’s where my energy is now, although I do have ideas that are brewing so it might happen.

Brian: Yeah. You’re slated to present at the Mother Earth News. Fair. One of the main reasons how we found you. What are you planning to be covering? Especially in, I guess you’re going to be in Albany, Oregon, which is the one that I’m going to.

Andy: The thing I’m most known for is wild apples because it’s 75% of all the cider I make is from wild Apple.

So they’re not even on my farm. And I wanted to discuss wild apples and what makes them different, which is such an enormous topic.

Again, I kind of want to introduce people, wild apples to tell them about what makes them so special. So it’s going to hinge on that. And I’ll talk about what they mean to cider, what they mean to a homestead farmer, what they mean to businesses even.

Which are, like I said, it’s all that’s all tied to the book, but an introduction to wild apples and what makes them so important. Because they are to a human.

So that’s one topic and the other I’ve just been asked to do another talk the following day on cider, which really does need its own full focus.

The second day I’ll be talking about, making cider and the 101’s and the history of it and that stuff.

Brian: Have you been to any of these before? These Mother Earth News Fairs, and have you presented on them?

Andy: I’ve never been to the Mother Earth News Fairs. In the Northeast here we have these organizations called Maca and, and Nopa and these are statewide and Northeast organic conferences.

And there’s one in Maine called the Common Ground Fair, which is I think very, very similar to the Mother Earth News Fair, which is largely small scale farmers and homesteaders.

Involves everything from, you know, seminars on solar energy and siphon by hand. Same sort of demographic and these are my people.

We just don’t have a Mother Earth News Fair in our area.

I’ve been excited to be a part of it. And I’ve read that magazine since I was in my twenties, long ago.

So yeah, it’s right up my alley.

Brian: What do you hope people are going to get from watching your presentations?

Andy: I hope they’re inspired to make cider and, if not cider, wine or whatever fruit grows in their area. I really don’t want to live in a world where it’s just specialists to do one thing that’s part of living on a homestead farm.

You don’t just tap your maple trees or grow vegetables and sell eggs and have honey. You do all those things, rather than just one.

I’m hoping to inspire people to embrace what is, I guess, my specialty in cider.

I’m not fond of calling myself a cider maker.

That’s just one of many things that I do, but I want people to realize just how simple and natural it is and hopefully they’ll making it and become part of this, tradition themselves.

Commercial Break: Okay, we’re going to pause the conversation right there. What you’re listening to right now is a special edition podcast. These episodes all have to do with the Mother Earth News fair in Albany, Oregon of 2019 at the time I’m recording this, we have learned so much about how to take advantage of events and I want you to be able to use this information in your own business.

Go to BrianJPombo.com/secrets. We are going to be putting out helpful materials on how you can use events to grow your business. When you go to this page, you will either see our latest programs or if you make it there early enough, you will see an email address, capture page, put in your email address and we will be sure and update you.

As soon as we get these out there, you’re not going to want to miss this. If you get in early enough, you can get a special deal. These are principles that never go away.

These programs will be based on the experience of people who have written books, spoken at the events or exhibited. They’re talking about how to use events, books, and speaking all to build your business.

That’s BrianJPombo.com/secrets. BrianJPombo.com/secrets and now back to the conversation.

Brian: So why are you doing this? Why are you coming out to present?

You’re going all the way across country and everything else. What do you hope to get out of it personally?

Andy: Well, there’s a lot of reasons why I wanted to go to Oregon.

One is I have a great number of my cider customers are in Oregon and I think the demographic of that state is sympathetic to what it is I’m doing. So they’ve always been interested in my cider and sold around the state.

I have like minded people and so on the cider front, I’ve wanted to do that. And my publisher also, has asked me to promote the book and I….selling stuff is not my specialty and I feel it makes me nervous but I’ve agreed at least to do, four or five events to promote the book.

This is really an opportunity to accomplish many things or let’s use a phrase, to shoot you birds with one stone.

But this is more like five birds, a lot of things that are all coming together for this.

Brian: Very cool.

Are you going to have some time to check out the rest of Oregon while you’re out here?

Andy: Yes.

I have a couple of days. My distributor who’s a company I should mention as console on, they mostly distribute line, Ian is his name.

He’s lined up some accounts that I should visit and I think we’re going to do a couple of tastings at the swine or restaurants and he’s going to show me what I should be looking at and people were going to be able to try your cider, that are already out there now with that distributor.

And I’m toying with the idea of bringing some very, very odd ciders, although it’s going to be hard to bring them while traveling.

But yeah, they’ll be able to drink that at the fair.

Also there’s a couple of wines stores that are doing pourings where I’ll be talking as well. I know I’ll be in Portland, and a couple of other towns up there. I’m drawing a blank on where they are, but certainly the fair and then a couple of places around Portland and perhaps further.

If anyone listening is interested, my website probably says that, which is AaronBurrCider.com, and there’s an events page.

Brian: We’ll link to it in the description too. Tell us about that name Aaron Burr Cider, how’d you come up with that?

Andy: Do you know Aaron Burr?

Brian: Yeah, I’m a history buff so. Lol!

Andy: Oh wow. My wife and I are real history buffs too. And we moved to this farm, which was bought by William Brown and 1817.

The Browns had it in their family as the homestead farm for 150 years. As we were researching the deed, when we took it over, we were intrigued by the lawyer who wrote the deed and that was Aaron Burr.

And this was 1817.

And we we’re thinking, you know, could this be the actual, Aaron Burr, who shot Hamilton?

And sure enough, as we did the research, his political career was over at the time and he returned to law and that’s what he did for the next 30 years.

He, mostly sold property deeds. Back in 1817, there were huge properties that were getting divided and sold to homestead farmers. It was a lot of need for that type of a paternity.

Brian: Wow! That is…that’s quite a cool story to go along with the product. That’s great.

Andy: If I could also say we wanted a local name who represented the area, which we very much believed is the prime time or the peak of cider production, not just in America but in the world, which was just after the revolutionary war in the early 18 hundreds.

Cider production in America was just…..the only thing I could think of it as an analogy would be, like 15th century Florence, when there were artists in every loft.

I mean, every town had a cider maker and the Apple cultivation, was just at its peak then.

Brian: Have you got the travel module promoting the book you’re putting on presentations?

Have you got to travel a whole lot, I imagine Oregon’s probably the farthest you’ve traveled, right?

Andy: Yeah. Short of resisting traveling, promoting because after writing the book, like I mentioned, I’m really just in love with farming again and I want to get into the groove and give the trees the attention that they might not have had last year.

So I’ve been resisting it and I only have maybe four or five events lined up before the big harvest this September.

Brian: Well that’s great.

I think what you’re saying is pretty common, especially in this industry and in this niche. A lot of people, they have their own place and traveling is kind of outside of their realm, having to travel a whole lot, especially if they’re interested in what’s going on at home.

You have any logistical tips, anything that for people to keep in mind while they’re traveling, especially if they’re resistant to it?

Andy: I need a lot of alone time. That’s the plight of the introvert.

I just, I love engaging with people and telling people about wild apples and cider if they’re interested in that. And, I didn’t really love it, but my interaction with people…I’m sort of like a cell phone battery.

I go out and then after maybe about two hours or three hours, I just crash and I need to be alone and recharge.

So, you know, that I think is a textbook definition of an introvert and that I need that. And if I have that then, I like to travel.

I’m really excited to see just how apple’s also are adjusting to the soil out there compared to, you know, I know it’s a very different climate, but a different soil structure and I’m used to the Northeast apples so I want to interview some trees while I’m out there.

Brian: Yeah, I think that’s really good tip, especially for people who are more introverted to be able to have that set on their schedule ahead of time. So it’s not completely miserable the entire trip. I really appreciate your time with us.

Could you tell us if a listener is interested in finding out more about you, your book, about Aaron Burr Cider, where’s the best place for them to go?

Andy: Well, our home page, Aaron Burr Cider is really a directory to all the different projects, which includes the book and the cider.

I want to say that it’s not just us. I mean there’s so many other great cider producers out there and small farmers.

I was really, really lucky to have a lot of attention thrust on me, early on as cider was sort of taking off.

In some ways. It’s not fair.

My trees are my trees and somebody else has their trees and the way we all have a relationship to the land. And, I appreciate the focus and the interest from customers.

But, I would say any local, Apple farmer is deserving of that attention.

And, um, I think it’s a local drink.

I appreciate customers far and wide interested in our cider, but, ultimately I think it’s about people bonding to their region, their land.

So, I encourage people to really dig, because the small producers are out there. They just haven’t been as lucky as I am in terms of reaching the people.

Ultimately, I hope that’s what brings them back to apples.

Because you know, the nation, we were all Apple growers and we need to be, we need to be again, so many great lessons there.

Brian: Absolutely. And are you still doing your blog journal? Are you keeping up on that?

Andy: Yeah, I still do about a post every two months or so. And that was always my case.

I keep a lot to myself because I feel like sometimes I’m just a curmudgeon, just jaded and depressed by what’s happening in the modern world. And so I often, I’ll write something, I’ll give it about a week before and if I think there’s something positive, I’ll publish it. But a great number of my rants don’t go unpublished.

Brian: Can people reach that from the Aaron Burr Cider website?

Andy: That’s also linked to the website.

We have all these weird projects because like I mentioned, I’ve got an art background.

I have something known as The Aaron Burrlesque, which is supposed to be the antidote to Hamilton, the play, which any anti-federalist knows to be federalist propaganda.

So, The Aaron Burrlesque is the additional anecdote to…I think his name is Lin-Manuel Miranda, his famous Hamilton play.

That’s a photo series, that’s on the website.

The blog is attached to the website.

We have a whole line of underwear, which is a really long story. People wanted us to advertise our logo on shirts or something like that because we have a neat logo. Has the old gun, the duel gun. And I’m opposed to the sort of corporate advertisement in public.

So we came up with the underwear and I said, well, if you’re going to wear our logo, nobody’s going to be able to see it.

So we have that because they’re all just art projects, really.

Brian: It’s great that you allow yourself to be so expressive and to find new ways to be able to put things out there and just kind of follow passions the way you do, it’s really refreshing.

What makes wild apples and wild Apple cider, so uniquely different that comes straight from a domestic orchard?

Andy: This is a long story, but I’m going to try to say as fast and I’ll say with each sentence it can unfold into a huge topic on its own.

But my interest in wild apples as a farmer is that they exist unsprayed and apples are the most sprayed crop in America. And there one of the most in the world.

They’re extremely manipulated and they have to be because about 150 years ago, we’ve kind of stopped the evolution of the Apple.

Meanwhile, every other disease and insect has been keeping pace. And, now these trees are sitting ducks.

So that sort of describes your conventional orchard, um, monocrop environments, which is what is now a sitting duck for diseases and insects, which can destroy your crop and literally kill the tree.

A wild Apple is an Apple tree, which has figured out how to acclimate to the environment. And it’s a very diverse environment.

Here in the Northeast, they’re everywhere.

They’re along the roads and old pastures and they don’t get any of that attention and yet they still survive.

So that’s one way to describe a wild apple, but just even genetically, it’s very different than a farmed apple.

This is fascinating. And um, and every single Apple are five seeds in every single seed, it’s going to become genetically its own variety.

So whereas in your grocery store, you have five varieties that we all know, golden, delicious and red delicious and McIntosh apple. In every single Apple, are five new varieties that this world has never seen.

And then on just one tree alone, there is, on a good year, there might be a thousand Apples.

So that’s 5,000 varieties that this world has never seen.

And the point of that is to put as much heat out in the world and see what survives and what type of genetics are needed for that, for where that seed just happens to end up.

That’s not done on farms.

What happens on a farm is they fall in a particular variety, let’s say a Granny Smith and they’ll take a piece of wood from the original Granny Smith, which is a variety and they just graph that onto the root system of hundreds and thousands and now hundreds of thousands if not millions of trees.

So that what grows above that graft union is just one variety, Granny Smith. And every single wild apple tree, if it’s a from seed, it’s going to be its own variety.

Brian: Wow!

Andy: I should also mention that genetically they are infinitely more diverse than humans and humans have not cloned or at least to say that we’ve never had two humans exactly the same on the planet.

So I find that, alarming that something that as sophisticated as an apple tree is not able to given the green light to express itself genetically.

Nor is it allowed to defend itself or acclimate to various environments.

I’m telling you about apple trees and sadly as is true of pretty much everything, from farmed animals to farm crops. Apple trees are particularly diverse and I believe they might be the most genetically diverse plant in the plant kingdom.

Brian: That is really interesting. You know, I’ve heard it expressed on occasion some pieces of that, but I’ve never heard it said quite that way. That’s really interesting.

Is there anything else that you want to cover?

Andy: We’d like to say something about, I don’t know how to do this and even after writing the book, I still don’t know how to do this, how to really say what I find is important about running a business in the modern world because we have the economy is constantly going up.

Costs of living are constantly going up.

And as a business owner, usually it’s just assumed you’re going to be larger next year than you are this year.

But that doesn’t really apply to a farmer. You can’t enlarge your farm.

You have a relationship with the land and a limited amount of acreage or so or a limited amount of trees.

And there’s an economy to be worked out on every homestead farm on how to survive and how to maximize what you wait and get from your farm. But in the end, that’s not the larger economy just demand so much more.

So there’s a real disconnect between farming sustainably and that includes cider that includes, fur sure, apples and particularly the old versions…or I should say the real versions of the apple seedling tree.

All these things are in direct competition or I should say out there that they’re so easily or antiquated by a world where everything is a cheap and expanding and homogenizing and it’s really, we live in a world where efficiency is King and expansion is King.

Those are not applicable principles for what I feel like is real cider and real apple growing in the end.

Agriculture is about a relationship and I think that I tried to cover that in the book. I don’t know exactly how to do it, how to give that limited scale business, just deserts.

So what I did, at least in the book is I really tried to focus on the people and the culture around me in the farm and hopefully the reader empathizes and will understand just what’s at risk or what sort of just overrun by the modern expanding economy.

Brian: Do you have any clue as to what possible solutions might be to some of that? Have you found any way around that yourself?

Andy: For sure, the best solution is always to build intimate relationships with customers.

Which ask questions, and you know, certainly large companies, they don’t have the time or the inclination to have one-on-one relationships with their customers.

So yeah, even though I said, I’m an introvert, I can’t hide from the fact that that’s bonding with my customers is the only thing that that’s going to save, I think people like me from essentially becoming roadkill to a bigger and bigger and faster and cheaper.

Brian: Wow!

That is a very, very, very important point there that you just made. I hope everybody that’s listening catches that because it’s such a simple concept, but that one thing, like you said, it’s the thing that the big guys can’t do, even if they have an inclination too.

They’re not able to do what the smaller operation can do in terms of having that one-on-one relationship.

So that’s really important. That’s a really great point.

And your book plays into that too because you’re helping to educate and like you mentioned, kind of answer the questions that people already had about the process.

Have you found that to be true?

Have you gotten feedback as far as that from your customers or future customers?

Andy: Yeah, I can’t believe how much people seem to like the book.

You know, I’ve even been mistaken as a professional writer.

So yeah, I’ve been fortunate that way that I think the book was a success. And, every year I make cider and some years it’s fantastic.

But I don’t know how I did it and it just happened that way and I could never repeat it. And that’s really how writing the book was. I think it is good, but I have no idea how I could ever do it again.

Brian: Well that’s great. I mean, if you’ve been able to achieve that much with one book, that’s a huge deal that so many people go through their lives, including business owners and homesteaders that never get to do anything like that.

So that’s fabulous that you’ve been able to reach out like that and been able to make a difference.

Andy: I want to share that attention with all small apple farmers and cider makers and encourage everybody to dig deep and find those local resources.

Because like I said, I’m just one of literally thousands around the country.

Brian: Absolutely. Well, fabulous.

Hey, thanks so much for being on the show, Andy.

This is a lot to chew on and you’ve got so much information and such a depth of thought put into everything that you do that we’d love to have you on the show in the future sometime. And in the meantime, look forward to meeting you out at The Mother Earth News Fair In Albany Oregon.

Thanks again for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andy: Well thank you. Thank you for your podcast. I’m looking forward to meeting you.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Andy’s a really sweet, really smart guy. Lots of fun to talk to. A lot of this conversation went back in my mind to the importance of understanding your own nature.

If you happen to be a nonconformist, if you happen to be an introvert and allowing room to continue being who you are, just like he talked about, allowing time to just be alone while he’s out and traveling, it really comes down to know thyself.

I think it’s cool how he has this history, this background story to the name of his cider, Aaron Burr Cider.

It’s great to have those types of things. I know he didn’t do it on purpose, but the fact that it came about and he’s taken advantage of that, that shows a lot of ingenuity along with all the different ways that he’s able to be artistic and be himself and be able to express himself even in ironic ways when it came to putting his brand out there on underwear and everything else. It’s just very funny. Very cool.

Right toward the end, the point he made about relationships, about really having that one-on-one with your customers and how the larger corporations and brands, they can’t compete with that.

You could bring something completely different and be able to have that one on one relationship and be able to be an actual person to your customers.

Not just a personality, but be a real person, someone they can talk to on the phone or communicate via email.

I think that’s important and it ties in so great with his book because his book puts himself out there.

It’s him spending hours and hours and hours putting this book together. I mean that talk about blood, sweat and tears.

I can’t wait to get into that book.

It his passion for a worthwhile cause. He has this concept of the way that it was the way we should be paying attention to our agriculture and our plants.

It’s important to have that. It’s important to be able to voice that and have that be tied to your brand also so that people who either already have that cause in mind can be connected with you and your brand and also it brings other people who have liked your cider.

Now they can come in and learn this story.

That’s something they would not have known otherwise and you can bring new people into the cause. Overall, I expect really big things from Andy Brennan in the future and can’t wait to try his cider at The Mother Earth News Fair.

Outro: Join us again on the next off the grid is podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.

That’s BrianJPombo.com.

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I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.