Bold Rock has been making cider for about a decade, so when the company launched into hard seltzer last year, they decided to keep distribution in areas where their cider was already successful.

Brian Shanks, Bold Rock founder and head cidermaker, spoke to Hard Seltzer News in an exclusive interview about the company’s plan for hard seltzer and RTD distribution. 

“We’ve just expanded from around our regional bases,” Shanks said. “When we became part of Artisanal Brewing Ventures (ABV) late last year, that gave us [sic] a huge increase in market and in [the] number of salespeople and resources.”

With facilities in Virginia and North Carolina, Bold Rock’s regional bases also span into West Virginia and South Carolina. Other states in the distribution roster for Bold Rock Cider include Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia, Tennessee, and, most recently, Florida.  

“We felt that with our seltzers, our biggest strength was the name and the brand equity we have with the Bold Rock Cider brand,” Shanks said. “So, we’ve tended to focus our seltzer marketing on the areas where we’re the strongest in sales, which is mainly the Virginias and the Carolinas.”

Consumers are becoming overwhelmed with choices as more companies dip their toes into the hard seltzer market. If people are aware of a brand and enjoy a product, they will be more open to branching out and trying other products from that brand. 

“You can’t just make a cider, or a seltzer, or a hard tea and say, ‘Oh, here’s my product!’ Who’s going to buy it?” Shanks said. 

To answer his own question, Shanks also spoke about the new luxuries afforded to Bold Rock since their deal with ABV, and how that impacts the company’s distribution reach. This deal, in conjunction with their plan to continue piggybacking off of their cider following, is pushing the company’s growth.   

“You have to have trained salespeople on the ground,” Shanks said. “You have to have a lot of resources, as well as manufacturing capabilities to do that, and [sic] this is where we may have been struggling to expand at the rate we are, had we not moved into the deal with ABV and became part of ABV.”

Shanks said that Bold Rock is following a similar trend with their new, spirit-based ready-to-drink (RTD) line as the company’s distribution widens.

“We’ve recently launched Copper Mug Mill and Bold Fashioned in Virginia, as well as central Virginia…We’re continuing development with the release of a vodka soda line, and we’ll be heading into a lot of new states in 2021,” Shanks said. “At the moment, the RTDs also are remaining more locally-focused in our strongest state, which is Virginia, but all these things are in the offing as we continue to grow our core cider business.”

Interestingly enough, Bold Rock is planning to take a different approach with their hard tea and lemonade RTDs. This choice is impacted by hard tea market trends, which vary a bit from hard seltzer.  

“The [hard] tea business is really something that’s [huge], and we’re expanding distribution for that right throughout the East Coast and beyond, sort of in tandem with the expanded access to resources, sales force and production scaling that being part of ABV provides,” Shanks said.

While Bold Rock plans to keep hard seltzer and spirit-based RTDs close for the time being, they are excited to expand the reach of their cider. As the Bold Rock Cider brand begins to build a larger following in more states, brand recognition will open more opportunities for Bold Rock’s seltzer and RTDs to get into the hands of consumers.

Shanks emphasized his gratitude towards ABV as they journey into the future. 

“[ABV] gives us an opportunity that would have been a lot harder to do if we remained [independent],” Shanks said. “We would have done it, and we would have achieved it, I guess, had we not become part of ABV, but it would have taken us a lot longer and the road would have been a lot more torturous than having a bit more size in scale and the ability to do things properly.” 

Stephanie Meade
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