Santa Sidra Hard Cider

About

Our company was founded upon an epiphany. Our cidermaker, Mike, made cider for years as a hobby. In 2012, New Mexico's apple growers had a bumper crop in their orchards. There were more apples than anyone had seen in years, and many of the growers told Mike that half or even two-thirds of their apples would have to stay in the orchard - left to rot - because there was no market for all their apples. These growers had a market for their best apples - the perfectly-sized and -shaped, unblemished apples - by selling at the farmers' markets and to local stores, restaurants and school, but they had no market for the less-than-perfect apples.

Mike realized that making more hard cider for more people could create a reliable and scalable market for New Mexico's apple growers thereby creating an entirely new source of income for New Mexico's family farms. That meant starting a hard cider company!

Mike traveled to Washington (the U.S's biggest apple growing state) and England (the motherland of hard cider) to receive training in commercial cider-making. In 2013 the plans for the company were formed, and a location was identified and outfitted for hard cider production. After fits-and-starts with construction and licensing, our first ciders entered the market in July 2014.

Most companies (at least the successful ones) have a mission statement - something that guides their decisions and reminds them about why they get up in the morning in the hazy craze that is a new and growing business. When writing our mission statement we realized that the best ideas often come from the questions we ask rather than the statements we make. That's why our mission statement is actually a question (and also, we think, perhaps a bit poetic).