Today's episode brings you to Hidden Cave Cidery in Middleton, Wisconsin. We have a talk with Walker Fanning about his innovative ciders and how they came to be. Cheers!
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SPEAKERS
Walker Fanning, Connor Brekke
Connor Brekke 00:03
Hello everyone and welcome back to The Ombibulous, a show where we discuss a variety of topics about alcohol. From beer styles, the brewing process, distillation and spirits and even liquor laws, there's a fascinating world to discover. On today's episode, we pay a visit to hidden cave cidery of Middleton, Wisconsin. Joining me today is hidden cave cideries Walker Fanning. I'm your host, Connor Brekke. Let's all raise a glass to, The Ombibulous.
Connor Brekke 00:36
Hello, everybody and welcome back to another episode. I am in Middleton, Wisconsin, and I am at the Hidden Cave Cidery. Joining me today is Walker Fanning. The head of this amazing facility. Welcome to the show.
Connor Brekke 00:50
Thank you for inviting me out here. I heard about this place on an NPR show a little while ago and it was like, "oh, I need to get out here really, really soon." ...so...
Walker Fanning 00:50
Thank you.
Walker Fanning 01:00
Awesome.
Connor Brekke 01:01
cider and fall go really well togetherI think. So hidden cave cidery you are located in Middleton, Wisconsin. Let... tell us a little bit about yourself. You're... you make cider here. You make a lot of herbal based ciders. How did you get into the cider industry?
Walker Fanning 01:18
Yes. So I'm a local Wisconsinite, grew up here, went to school here, and got a degree in agronomy from the UW Madison. And agronomy, for people who don't know, is agriculture for fuel, fiber and feed. But I was always interested in agriculture, more of like specialty crops like fruit crops. And so when I graduated college, I was looking to use my degree and I wanted to do something in fruit crops. And I was looking for a job all summer long, I was having a really hard time because I also wanted something where I could still live in downtown Madison with my friends. And I ended up finding a small apple orchard that had a cidery in the South Madison area, about 30 minutes from where I was hoping to live downtown.
Walker Fanning 02:17
So they didn't have a job posting up or anything like that. But I decided I would just reach out and ask them if I could volunteer on their farm to learn about the ins and outs of being an orchard assist. And I sent them the email, they invited me out to take a tour of the farm. There were 200 Different apple trees, every single apple tree was a different variety than the last. And they showed me the cidery, I tried dry cider for the first time in my life. I actually turned it away the first time I was offered. He said "do you want to try some cider?" And I said "I don't like sweet stuff." And he said, "No, this is real cider." And that's when I had my first sip of real cider, which was tart and dry and very apple forward. And we got to the end of the tour. And I said, "so can I volunteer my time here?" And he said, "I'll do you one better, you could be my orchard manager." So I was able to continue living downtown with my friends in Madison. And so I was really excited about that. And I was starting to learn about the hard cider industry. And I didn't know it at the time, because I was only interested in growing the apples. Well, I get there on the first day. And really it was August. So most of the orchard management had already been done. It was really now we were looking at, okay, mowing the lawn, but mostly picking apples. Well picking apples, it would only take me half a day to get all the ones that were ripe off the trees. It was a really small orchard.
Walker Fanning 03:55
And I noticed that they were taking their hard cider that they were producing and just putting it in their basement. And so I asked "Do you want to sell this hard cider?" And they said, "Of course we want to sell this hard cider. We just don't know who would want to buy it." And I was thinking to myself like... these guys have something that no one has ever tried. Like the concept of hard cider to me at the time was sweet, syrupy, fruity. Something that most people if just it wasn't a an attractive drink to most people, whereas this place was producing things. It was on the drier side. It was nice and tart. It was made from local apples and I thought to myself that a lot of people, especially in the foodie culture and these farm to table restaurants, all would be interested in hard cider from this place. So I set up a plan basically to sell to every single farm to table place between their orchard and my apartment in downtown Madison and helped them grow their business from two liquor stores, to over 30 different bars and restaurants in the downtown Madison area in eight months. And so I was helping them with the farming side, I was helping with the sales side. And then I noticed that they're having some production issues.
Walker Fanning 05:22
They would get one blend of apples and it would come out a certain way, they'd get a different blend of apples, and it would come out completely different. And so all of a sudden, when you're, when you're selling a product, like a cherry cider, all of a sudden, have you come to that same account that they had it in a supposed to taste like this, and you bring them something else. I knew that people were going to get upset, and I was a salesperson, and I did not want to be the person that was getting in trouble for handing them something different than what we were promising them. So I said, "Can I help you guys, like fix these production issues so that we have a standardized product every single time, no matter what time of the year it is, no matter what kind of apples that we're getting?" And they said, "Sure." So I sat down pen to paper on a Monday night, I had orders going out that Friday. So I wrote down everything that I could about making hard cider. And by Tuesday morning, I had a plan, we implemented it on five gallons, all the sudden the cider tastes like it was supposed to. We scaled it up to 50 gallons. All of a sudden, that cider tastes like it was supposed to. Then we scaled up to 200 gallons, and then all of a sudden, now no matter what time of the year, it was, no matter what kind of apples that we were getting, we were still able to make that standardized product that these bars were expecting from us.
Walker Fanning 06:39
So after I'd worked there for eight months, I felt like it was time to move on. So I started working for a different business in downtown Madison called the Old Sugar Distillery, owner Nathan Greenawalt. And I noticed he had made cider. And he said, "you know, we have a bunch of cider. It's kind of like a side product for us because we're a cocktail bar, would you be interested in flavoring some of that for us?" And I said, "Yeah, I actually want to start my own hard cider company. So let me flavor this for you," though, like, kind of what I was picturing my flagship flavor would be rose hip, rosemary. So, I flavor five gallons of his cider that way, and we sell the five gallons in a day. And so then we flavored the rest of the cider that he had, another 200 gallons, and we call the distributor, and they signed us before we even had a name for the company to get distribution in Madison and Milwaukee and La Crosse.
Walker Fanning 07:40
And so we were really excited. And then from that point on, I was kinda like, "Okay, I went to school for agronomy here in Wisconsin, I want to support Wisconsin farmers. This is my platform to do so." So all of the apples that we use in our hard cider blend are from Wisconsin. And when we use honey, in our cider, like the lemongrass lavender is a drier cider with a little bit of honey. Rose hip Rosemary has some honey to it. Hibiscus juniper has honey to it. It's all a Gentle Breeze Honey from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. So trying to keep it as local as possible and trying to put money back into the pockets of the farmers here who have decided that this is what they want to provide Wisconsin. And we want to say, yes, we want you to keep providing that. And so we want to support you.
Walker Fanning 08:36
And another thing that I noticed when I was going around as a salesman for the first company was that a lot of places had a semi sweet cider. And when I talked to the bar managers, who were the ones that were buying the kegs, they're just like, "oh, you know, we kind of rotate through everybody's, semi sweet." So I was thinking, "okay, there's nothing really here that is making a distinction for these bar managers other than they all wanted local." But all the local people really had a lot of semi sweets, they would just kind of rotate through Well, the company that I was working for, had a lemon, ginger cider. And I remember I emailed one of the top, highest rated restaurants in the downtown Madison area. And I sent them a list of all the ciders that we had, and I got an email back that said, "Okay, we have a cider, but we don't have a lemon ginger cider. And so I want to meet with you." And I thought to myself, "Okay, interesting. It's these flavors that are super unique," that all of a sudden people are interested in because they're nobody's producing it. And it's not accessible in this area, even if somebody is already producing it. So when I started my own company, I thought, "okay, what can I do that's super unique.? How about making flavors of cider that are all things that nobody else is producing? And things that aren't available in the area around around us?
Walker Fanning 09:58
So I mentioned lemongrass lavender, rose hip Rosemary, hibiscus juniper, we have the only chocolate hazelnut hard cider in the world. We make it with WM chocolate that's single origin from Ghana. And the chocolate maker is also local person. And we have a honey suckle french toast hard cider which uses honey suckle, Wisconsin maple syrup, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, vanilla... and an ingredient that's really unique to the cider industry, at least for now, is lactose, milk sugar. But I figure we're in the dairy state, so if there's anywhere to put out a cider with lactose in it, that's probably Wisconsin.
Connor Brekke 10:41
Now, it's interesting that a lot of your ciders don't really have fruit in them, other fruit. And then there's a reason why it has to do with laws and taxations.
Walker Fanning 10:53
Yeah, so when I was looking through all the different rules and regulations of the different regulating bodies of alcohol in the United States, I came upon some rules that if you are making a hard cider, just with apples, just fermented apples, that gets taxed at a certain rate per gallon. And when you added fruit, all of a sudden, you jumped up from about nine cents per gallon to about like $1.30. And there was a little loophole in there that said, if you were using herbs, then you wouldn't have to jump up to the next tax bracket. It would still be considered hard cider and not fruited cider, which falls in the category of special natural wine. And so those are things like hops, those are things like if you were to use pumpkin spice, because there's no actual pumpkin in there, it's a blend of different spices. And then for me, when I thought about it, I said, "Okay, well, I can make cider that is fruit forward without using fruit using herbs." But I'm not trying to impart the fruit flavor, I'm trying to impart the herbal flavor.
Walker Fanning 12:14
So for instance, our lemongrass lavender, hard cider, it has real lemongrass, real lavender, and we just steep it like tea. And although it does have a lot of lemon flavor to it, I'm not trying to say that I'm making a lemon lavender cider. I'm making a lemongrass, lavender cider. So I'm... I'm putting in the flavor of lemongrass when I steep the lemongrass in there. I'm not actually trying to make it taste like a lemon. I'm trying to make it taste like lemongrass. And then all sudden, you stay in that hard cider category. It's the same for let's say, hibiscus juniper. Hibiscus flower actually imparts the flavor of cranberry without the bitterness and the Juniper, even though it's technically called the juniper berry, the berry is not a barrier at all, it's actually a pine cone with all of the cone parts kind of pushed together to look like a little ball. And so that's not a fruit either. And so working within those rules, has helped kind of shape our company to offer these things that are really unique. And that's what I was hoping for from the beginning. And so it's just kind of playing within the rules has been a fun thing to do, just to kind of innovate without breaking any rules.
Connor Brekke 13:36
I was just gonna say the kind of... forced restrictions you had, made you come up with these amazingly creative ciders.
Walker Fanning 13:44
Yes, it's a... it's been a it's been a lot of fun. And I think it's, it's always funny when someone says to me, like, "oh, you need a blueberry cider," or "you need pomegranate cider." And again, I think those can be really good. And those are things like a blueberry ginger cider, for instance, is something that isn't available here. But all the sudden when you kind of move outside of those rules, you kind of start getting into okay, now, it's not quite as innovative as it was before. Like I had never even had a hibiscus drink before I started making it into a cider and I think like one of our most unique herbal ciders is the elderflower holy basil. It's a vegan cider and the all the other ones are only not vegan because they have honey in them. I'm not putting any meat products in the cider, but the honey technically if you're vegan, I think a lot of people choose where they can draw that line. And I think for a lot of people that do choose to be vegan that honey can be over that line, and so they wouldn't have it.
Walker Fanning 14:54
So what we did was we created our elderflower holy basil hard cider, which we take elderflower, and we steep it in, like tea, for 30 minutes. And during that time, you really get all these great flavors from it with the point being that we are kind of trying to make it like an elderberry without using the elderberry. So we take the flour, we steep it for a really long time. And then we add cane sugar and simmer it down into like a simple syrup. And then we add that to our dry hard cider. And then steep in holy basil, which is also called Tulsi, which adds this like lemon, slash mint, slash clove flavor all in one herb, into the cider. And it just creates this thing like... you know, you look at a menu board and you see something that says elderflower holy basil, and you go like "I have no idea what that would even taste like." And that's that's the kind of product that you at least ask the bartender for a taster. If they have it on draft, like I at least want to see what that tastes like. Because like those ingredients... me specifically, I would have no idea until I use them and put them into a beverage. I can only imagine what somebody else sees that up there, they might not even know that holy basil is an herb out there.
Connor Brekke 15:11
Right... I ... that's first time I've ever heard of it, to be honest with you.
Connor Brekke 16:25
So how did you come to this location? Did you have other locations for your business? Or did this place just kind of pop up and...? How was the location hunting process like for you?
Walker Fanning 16:37
Yeah. So originally, when we launched the business, I was working downtown with Old Sugar Distillery, and Nathan Greenawalt. And they were really cool to me. And we basically launched it as a profit split, where I would produce all the cider and the owner of the distillery was funding the project. And then we would split the profit at the end. And we had done that for three years and Hidden Cave and Old Sugar both grew. And then all of a sudden, it was like, we couldn't just make the cider in the corner of the distillery anymore. We needed more space. We were bottling, we were making new flavors, we were increasing our distribution into new territories. And all that stuff just meant that we were growing and we needed to expand. So I found this lease in January, or well start in January, I had been looking for a place for probably a year and a half, two years. I'd say one year super seriously. And one year just kind of looking at my options.
Connor Brekke 17:50
So you guys offer meat and cheese trays. And then do you guys have other kinds of events like maybe a food truck or something?
Walker Fanning 17:59
Yeah, so for us our capacity is really small right now. So like for a food truck, it just wouldn't work out for us currently, We don't have like the sort of traffic that a food truck would like. And we're in an industrial area. It's kind of a destination... to like to get that many people out here. It's kind of a trick. But we do like to bring in food and so we do a lot of live music, especially like Friday and Saturday. And on Fridays we bring in local pizza during the show to have something to serve. We do have the cheese board with award winning cheeses like the Roth dill Havarti, Roth buttermilk blue cheese, and then we also have the Hooks one year aged cheddar, and then we serve that with gluten free almond flour, crackers, free refills by the way, and salted almonds and dried cranberries. And then other than that we... for big events, we like to work with a local barbecue company called Middleton Barbecue. And they provide... they make it's a catering only business and they make it a block away. So when we order it we're the stop that gets it the freshest. And they make homemade barbecue sauces, the pull pork, the buns they make in house, they have a jalapeno cornbread that's really good. And coleslaw, also homemade by them. And so those are the types of food that we offer. Typically from weekend to weekend. When we do events. We've done a lot of like food pairing events.
Walker Fanning 19:22
So I know this is going to come out a little bit later. But tomorrow we have a doughnut and hard cider pairing with Hurts Donuts. We've done food pairings with Clasen's. We did a sweet and savory one with Clasen's and then we also did a chocolate truffle pairing with Clasen's Bakery which is a local bakery to Middleton. It's been here for a long time. And we're working on a cheese and hard cider pairing. And actually, the city of Middleton also has the Mustard Museum and so we did a mustard and hard cider pairing a few weeks ago. And we bought these different type of super unique mustards from the mustard Museum, paired them with our cider, and then served it with a Clasen's pretzel. Clasen's soft, salted pretzel. And so that was a lot of fun as well. And so that's pretty much the extent of like the food that we do here. And that's because when you order in, when you get someone catering barbecue when you're buying doughnuts, or bakery items that they've prepared at a different facility, that allows you to still allow dogs. And where we are located on the west side and Middleton, there are not a lot, a lot of dog friendly venues, especially indoors. And I have a puppy, her name is Annie. And it was always hard to kind of find a place for her to come and hang out with me when I... when we were in town. So when I opened up my cidery I was trying to think of a plan that would allow us to continue to allow dogs and even if we had a little bit of food.
Connor Brekke 21:04
That mustard pairing sounds really interesting.
Walker Fanning 21:06
Yeah.
Connor Brekke 21:07
I drove by that on the way down here. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting.
Walker Fanning 21:11
Yeah, you should stuff in there. They have a whole museum in the basement.
Connor Brekke 21:15
Mustard?
Walker Fanning 21:16
Yeah, mustard.
Connor Brekke 21:17
Fascinating.
Walker Fanning 21:18
I think there's 2000 different kinds.
Connor Brekke 21:20
That's a lot.
Connor Brekke 21:21
Yeah. Not really a mustard Congress. Some pretty cool. So you guys, obviously bottle and distribute. Where can people find your stuff mostly in the Milton Madison Area? Or does it branch out a little farther, mainly Wisconsin, or?
Connor Brekke 21:22
Not really a.... mustard connesuer, but that does sound pretty cool. So you guys, obviously bottle and distribute. Where can people find your stuff? Mostly in the Middleton, Madison Area? Or does it branch out a little farther, mainly Wisconsin, or...?
Walker Fanning 21:38
Yeah, for now it's all in Wisconsin. And we're in the Milwaukee area, and the South Madison area. And we used to be in La Crosse, but we switched distributors. So it's not quite in to La Crosse anymore. But really the greater Madison and area, the Greater Milwaukee area. And then we're also now in the Fox Valley area, which is also kind of on the eastern side of the state kind of working its way north towards Door County.
Walker Fanning 21:38
Yeah.
Connor Brekke 21:38
So for anybody interested in trying your cider, or how can people find you or get ahold of you or you know, enjoy?
Walker Fanning 22:14
We're on Facebook and Instagram, Hidden Cave Cidery. And then we're also we have our own website, hiddencavecidery.com. And so we post all of our events there, we try to have something going on every weekend, we try to release new flavors every other week. The taps are always rotating. And then we also have a lot of live music. So our website, Facebook and Instagram are the best ways to stay in touch with what we're doing here.
Connor Brekke 22:42
And if you guys get a chance, come on down. It's a it's a really fun idea. It's... I just had a flight or before I did this and they're all really good. And I'm excited to come back again after the show and try some more so...
Walker Fanning 22:57
Support your local farmers!
Connor Brekke 22:59
Yes, indeed. It's always great to have something like this. That's very very community supportive. If you want to support local come on into hidden cave cidery. So until next time, cheers.
Walker Fanning 23:11
Cheers.
Connor Brekke 23:14
The Ombibulous is made possible with Castos, giving creators the tools to connect with their audience and community. The music is courteous of pond5. With over 25 million royalty free stock videos, music, photos, and sound effects there's something for every creator. Today's episode was recorded at Hidden Cave Cidery here in Middleton, Wisconsin. I'd like to thank Walker Fanning for the use of his time and facility to make this episode possible. For the latest updates, videos, photos and web links to our guests, please consider checking out our Ffacebook pageThe Ombibulous Podcast. And of course a big thank you to all our listeners. Thank you for all of your support. Until next time, cheers