loading . . . Coronation Hall
I come from west quebec. Almost as far west in quebec as you can get – there’s maybe another sixty minutes down the road (which is nothing) before it all starts to peter out. It’s not natural apple country. That came later.
When I was a kid, it was a place where most of the english families were tied to farming, and the french families were tied to logging. When I was a really little kid, my dad had a dairy farm. It was his second; the first burned down and all the animals were lost. That was before I was born, but it was something I always grew up knowing. There were lots of dairy farms in those days. You had a quota of milk you could produce, and the government would buy it, sending around the big tanker truck every few days to collect up what’d been milked. But farmers retire, or get out of the industry, and they fund their retirement or their next venture through selling the quota. The only people who can buy the quota are other farmers who already have quota. They can borrow money against it with the bank. There were lots of farmers with quota when Dad got out of farming; quota wasn’t worth a lot then. There were two banks in town with local bankers, when I was a kid, but now all decisions are taken in offices somewhere in Montreal, where they don’t know your family, don’t know your land, don’t know that you have the ability to do the thing you could do if you had the money. We’ve got some ATMs though, now.
All that to say that nowadays, there are only a few dairy farms left, and they are huge. Nowadays, the only farmers who can afford quota are the people who already have it. Nowadays, there are many fewer families making a living from the farm. Folks sell off their farm land to the big operators. Some formerly independent farmers are now more or less tenants on their own land. I expect something similar has been happening in the bush, in the logging. I do know that there are fewer sawmills and pulpmills around than once there were.
All that to say, the idea of someone planting an orchard, in that kind of environment, raised eyebrows. The idea that someone would then process those apples into cider: People did laugh. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Twenty years ago I came home from overseas, where I’d been studying and trying to be an archaeologist. I was newly minted with a PhD, and had had my ass handed to me by life. It was a pretty lonely time, that last year abroad (I had to go back to fulfill some obligations). I’d spent a lot of time at internet cafes and public libraries trying to find jobs to apply for, writing emails, writing applications. But I also spent a lot of time reading about cider making.
I didn’t even drink cider. When I first went to college (the two years between high school and university in quebec), there was a brewery and pub that everyone went to just beside the college. This was an exciting place to go, and I thought then that it was probably just the neatest thing in the world to be a prof and be a part-owner of a brewery and a pub that you could go to and relax and be all scholarly with your students, friends, and colleagues while drinking something that you yourself had made.
My friends and I bought the diy-brewery-in-a-pail kit from a shop and set out to make beer in our apartment. A crucial stage in the process – letting the beer age – we never managed to achieve but would instead drink the crap we’d ‘brewed’ up the moment the instructions said it probably wouldn’t poison us. The indestructible 18 year old, eh? I moved on to university, where there was another microbrewery nearby. I worked summer jobs in another city with a booming microbrewery scene. I was fascinated by the process, and would sometimes take the tourist tour of the local breweries, just to look at the equipment.
But it seemed to me that there were more and more microbreweries around; surely this couldn’t be sustained, and anyway, it’d cost too much to start up at the scale necessary. But then I started thinking about where I was from, and its relative proximity to Ottawa, and the presence of some summer residents, and the lack of any sort of amenities… Maybe a brewery could work in my area. In idle moments I would sketch the ideal brewpub. I’d scout real-estate websites. I’d work out the best place it could be built to cater to summer tourists.
It was a kind of dream that worked as a shield, that I could bring out and spend time on when everything else was going to shit.
It was probably when things were at their lowest that I switched to thinking about cider. The reason for that was quite straightforward. My brother, who had training in horticulture and landscape design and philosophy, wanted to come home and start a family. He and his wife found a farm where the landowner was willing to sever a 100 acre parcel (the consolidation I mentioned before hadn’t accelerate so much in those days). Such things get reviewed by a land protection commission at the provincial level. My brother had to demonstrate a business plan to make a farm on the arable portion of the land work, before the province would approve the sale. Turns out fruit – and apples in particular – have the best ratio of minimal land to productive income, so he told the government that he would plant an orchard. They said ok.
Well, if you’re going to plant an orchard, you have to have somewhere to market the apples to, right? Remember, this was dairy & forestry country. Beer drinking territory. Quebec’s developed apple regions are away to the south and east of Montreal. At the time this was all going on, I had applied for a youth development grant, for a project that would seek to catalogue the heritage resources of the municipality, so that the municipality could develop a heritage action plan, which would be used to catalyze tourism development. That was the proposal, at any rate. I got the grant, and I spent a few months racing around the township, putting dots on a map, writing a report for the mayor which I’m sure was never read. Nothing ever came of it, except…. except that we found out that the dance hall in the village could be purchased.
An advertisement we found inside the old hall when we first purchased it. A photograph we found of the hall back in its heyday.
The dance hall was built in the 1930s, and named ‘Coronation Hall’ in honour of the new king. It was a massive wooden building whose exterior walls could be flipped open to create cross-breezes inside, to cool the dancers. It had last been used for dancing in the early 1960s. Afterwards, it’d become a junk storage. Trees had grown up in front of it, hiding it from the road. I made a pitch to my family – if we pooled resources, we could purchase the dance hall, and put in an apple press to make juice from my brother’s orchard. Maybe we could even ferment the apple juice. Dad said, ‘Ok- let’s see what happens’. Mom was less sanguine, as I remember. After all, they’d just retired. But they talked it over. We all talked it over. We planned it out. And we did it.
After the sale went through, the first thing I did was to cut down the scrub brush in front of the hall. The second thing I did was to flee the ground hornets I had disturbed. The third thing was to evict the racoons in the rafters. That first day in 2003 was a busy one.
None of us had any apple growing experience. None of us had any cider making experience (hard _or_ soft) . What did we have in our favour? Well, my brothers and I all studied history in one fashion or another; all of us had worked in museums at one point or another (as tour guides or education programmers); and my Dad had years ago sold the farm and started a series of businesses. He’s got an excellent financial mind. The final business was successful enough that he eventually took on a partner who bought the business from him. Mom had always done the books for the farm and the farm feed business they’d started together. She’d also worked part time then full time in the government. And she’d been a home-ec teacher, once upon a time. And a part-time wedding cake maker too, now that I think of it. So she handled the books, and set up and ran the tea room.
I’d like to think that another partner in that initial decision to say ‘ok’ was my grandfather. Now, grandpa had passed away years and years ago. He’d never gone to school beyond grade 8 before he’d had to take over the farm. But we have some of his old account books. He’d bought a threshing machine at one point, and would take it around his neighbors’ farms, custom threshing and cleaning for them. He’d been one of the first investors in a creamery co-op in the next town. He’d been the kind of man who read voraciously, and widely, and could pull together ideas that other people ignored or jeered, pulling them together into something new. Something that would work. The things we do echo for years afterwards.
If I’ve had any success as an academic, it’s because I have a family who were always ready to say, ‘ok, let’s see what happens’.
Anyway, that was twenty years ago. The available cash flow we had was sufficient to buy the dance hall and the property it was on (a few thousand dollars). We registered a new company that fall. The next few years were hard for me, and I’ve talked about them elsewhere, but suffice to say I wasn’t an academic any more. More of a jobbing scrivener-for-hire. You needed something researched? You needed a warm body in front of a high school class to cover for sickness? Can I write a grant application for you? I was your man. Over the next five years as money allowed we slowly collected equipment that we would need to grind apples, press apples, put the juice into plastic bottles. The orchard, planted with ten year old rootstock, began to mature.
But never the banks. Dad wouldn’t go to the banks, and he didn’t want this venture beholden to them. The banks would take their decisions from Montreal, and on paper, we were too big a risk. It wasn’t apple country, and we didn’t have quota to bank against. We tried some of the government quasi-banks, like the BDC. ‘Sure’ they said, ‘just fill in these online forms’. The forms were designed with the assumption of a high speed internet connection. **We were still on dialup**. We couldn’t even get the forms to load. The BDC people had a hard time understanding that, and we had a hard time understanding why they couldn’t just let us fill in paper. Eventually we got over that hump, but then they wanted all of my Dad’s financials. My Mom’s. My brothers’. Mine. Our partners and wives. Um, no.
I was still carrying $60k student loan debt. I have no idea how much the rest of us were carrying. The BDC did not work out. Sometimes the local economic development agency would pop up with grants that we could apply for. Well I knew a thing or two about applying for grants! We got some of them; others were (in retrospect) never even feasible, never even on the table but if I’m being cynical I suppose it did look good for the agency to be seen to be having clients -us- who were submitting grants of all types.
The belt press
The press (third hand, a belt press) and a uv machine (uv light kills the nasties in raw juice, for when you sell soft cider) were eventually purchased. In 2007 we started building a dedicated building for processing the apples because we’d found out that the regulations wouldn’t permit us to use the old building. We’d done minimal renovations to the building, cleaning it out, cleaning it up, and patching a few holes in the roof. The building was in astonishingly good condition, and we started planning how we could rent it out for events, use it for summer theatre, put on meetings and so on in it. I sketched out how the processing building would be laid out. It was fun.
What eventually became the pressing room The mill building takes shape. The foreground concrete is the foundation of the store/tearoom/tasting room portion, that connects to the old dance hall. The finished cider mill, that first winter
In the fall of 2008, at Thanskgiving, we opened for business as Coronation Hall Cider Mills. My sketch did not survive first contact with the builder (my uncle; keep everything in-family as much as possible to keep costs down) but the finished building looks pretty good. Because we weren’t making alcoholic cider at first, we didn’t need the full range of permits from the alcohol bureau (the ‘regie’). We fell under the rubric of agri-business. One hiccup that we encountered was a rule that said our processing plant had to be on the same property as the orchard. We had to appeal to the land protection commission over that (I’ll spare you the alphabet soup of acronyms that dictate so much of living in Quebec) but eventually it worked out. We had an orchard (12 acres or so of trees, in my brother’s name) and we had a place for making juice. Mom made pies. They’re good, you should try ‘em.
Opening Day, just before the appointed hour
The plan was to make alcoholic cider though. There’s no money in juice. You simply can’t compete against the people who make the cooked apple drink product that everyone calls ‘apple juice’. We marketed as ‘sweet apple cider’ so people would at least know to expect to see pulp and particles, but it was a hard sell. Our best selling venues were the farmers‘ markets near Ottawa/Gatineau. Locally, not so much – beer drinking territory, remember. We applied to the regie for the permit to make alcohol, but it was hugely frustrating. Letters and documents would get returned, because some turn of phrase wasn’t right, or some element was missing (nothing from the list that was indicated on their website was missing, but there’s a difference between a regulation and the interpretation of that regulation). It took almost two years to crack this particular nut. What made the difference was a chance conversation with someone in the agriculture ministry regional office, which led to a name and a phone number for a ‘consultant’. The consultant came, looked at our materials, and provided us with an excel spreadsheet. Fill this out with just the info I’ve already provided, and send that in, he said. And lo! it came to pass that we got the permit. The consultant worked with us to make our first few batches, and then we were on our own.
We didn’t sell much alcoholic cider at first. We launched during the great recession, and by the time we’d mostly recovered from all of that (surviving, really), the world went all to hell with covid etc. The old dance hall hosted numerous community theatre productions, weddings, anniversary and birthday parties. The community players have put on several shows annually, using the dance hall as their defacto home base, which helped put them on a sound financial footing, too.
I love summer evenings when there’s something on at the Hall, when I can stand out by the trees and look inside and see everyone watching a play my brother directs.
The old dance hall of a summer’s evening.
Right, the alcohol. We initially put our alcoholic cider in bottles, because that seemed to be the expectation. Artisanal cider in Quebec is regulated as if it were a wine, with a number of rules concerning where it can be sold, how it can be sold, what kinds of ingredients one might use (you want a blueberry cider? got to get it approved by the regie first. You want to try to experiment with say vanilla beans? Not allowed: not on the list of officially permitted ingredients. I don’t know if vanilla-bean-cider would be any good; the point is we’re not even allowed to try). But in the Ottawa Valley, people don’t tend to buy cider in glass bottles we’ve found. If they wanted wine, they’d buy wine. (Most of our customers are from the next county over, too as it happens; some local people I know well still think we’re making beer. People are funny. So we market up in Chelsea and Wakefield for the most part). We started exploring the wild world of packaging.
About two years ago we found a supplier of aluminum cans, and we got one of those can seamers from a home brewing shop where you have to pull and push on a leaver to get it to crimp the lid just right on the can. That worked better, and cans sold better than glass, but we couldn’t get the consistency you need. Some cans would leak, for instance, with the old machine. There was wastage – pull too hard and you’d sheer the top right off. Eventually we found a can seamer that handled that part automatically. The problem of filling cans was a hard one too – we’re too small (nano-verging-to-pico sized) and the cheapest units are made for micro breweries or larger ($50k or more). You really don’t want to be using a beer gun. Last year we found a guy who makes automatic can fillers for home brewers. We bought three of them for less than $1k and macgyvered them together to make a three spout filling system. I can run an entire 1 bbl tank of cider through the filling-canning-labelling process in about three hours. The quality is top notch, the labels look awesome. Cans sell. Glass does not. (An aside: every label has to be approved from the regie, not just for content, but also for eg font size. I had one label rejected because the slash in al/vol was too vertical).
When we want to make cider now, we have a hand trolley that lifts the giant box of apples out of the cold room. I manoeuvre the box into the tipper, which lifts it up and flips it against a guide so that a stream of apples flows down to a cleaning and inspection station. The washed apples go up a belt and drop into a grinder. The pomace falls into the perforated belts of the belt press. As they go up and over and between the drums of the press, more and more pressure is brought down, squeezing the juice into a catch tray. The juice goes into a tank, and the fermentation process begins. When fermentation is over, we pump the cider through a series of filters into a brite tank for carbonation (our cider is dry, no residual sugar). Then from the brite tank I fill and cap and seam every can one at time. Then we label the cans. The whole process takes a couple of months; we have capacity for 1500L. There is something supremely satisfying about all of this.
The old dance hall, the tea room, and the cider mill in the autumn of 2023, twenty years after we first started.
There’s a vinyard up the road from us now. A few miles downstream there’s another one, and up in the main town, one of the dairy families has branched out into winemaking and event hosting. They have a nice spot. Upriver there are a couple of microbreweries too. There’s another orchard further north. The one golfcourse near us has reopened under a new name after its previous owners called it a day; the closer golfcourse renovated one of their outbuildings and now hosts weddings there. A chocolatier opened a shop in the village beside the anglican church. There’s a guy who organizes wine and cider tours up from the city to visit, bringing lots of visitors to all of us. I’m not saying this is all because of us, but I’m not saying that we didn’t have an impact.
It’s taken longer than we first imagined, but we’re now making and selling some really nice ciders, using apples from our own orchard, to a customer base who really like them. We’ve learned a lot, and it’s a lot of fun. I get to work with my Dad, I get to work with my Mom, my brothers, making something we’re proud of. And we’ve moved the needle, locally. We’ve expanded the possibility space beyond dairy, cropping, and logging. All because my Dad said, ‘ok, let’s see what happens’.
….and that is how I came to be a part owner of a cider mill, and a semi-professional maker of cider.
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### _Related_ https://electricarchaeology.ca/2024/02/04/how-i-came-to-own-a-cider-mill/
