In an exclusive interview with Hard Seltzer News, Brian Shanks, co-founder of Bold Rock Beverages, disclosed advantages of their joining Artisanal Brewing Ventures.  This is the transcript of the full interview.  Enjoy!

HSN: Can you talk a bit about your background before Bold Rock as a cider maker in New Zealand? Why’d you get into the business?  

Brian: It’s quite a long story, but I’ll try and keep it relatively short. I grew up in New Zealand where I am right at the moment while we’re speaking. I grew up in a farming family and one of the assets that we acquired was an apple orchard. After quite a few years of running the apple orchard, I sort of tried to look and think of…what are ways to value add? You know, how do you value add to an apple? One of the ways [sic] was first, convert it to juice, and then to make cider. So, I guess I spent quite a lot of time and effort [in] learning how to make cider…We also had grape vines and quite a large area of grapes, so we were entwined with the wine industry as well. I went to England and looked at the fledgling cider industry over there. Well, it wasn’t fledgling. I mean, it was really a very strong proposition to me when I saw, in England, cider was such a huge force. And, it seemed to be expanding. So, I learned all I could over a period and came back to New Zealand, [sic] then set up a very, very small plant almost in the back shed of my house, and we started to make cider. We were very fortunate that we got everything right. I’d obviously [learned] my lessons well. I think the first year I sold something like 5,000 gallons. By the end of the second year, I was selling that a week. And then, I was selling that a day after about year three. So, cider became very, very successful…

I grew the company significantly over that period and ventured into Australia. We made cider there as well. [The] Bulmers, the family that owns the Strongbow brand of cider, came and bought 75 percent of the company from me. [sic] I stayed on with them and became a director of Bulmers in Australia and New Zealand. I went and lived in England for a while, helped Bulmers put up a cidery in China, then returned back to run my original company again. 

One day, out of the blue. I got a telephone call from a guy who said, “I’m an American!” And I thought, “Oh well, yeah ok, tell me more…” He said he’d bought some property in Virginia many years ago and was planning, really, to retire on it one day. It was just a beautiful piece of land with the Rockridge River running through it. He was going to retire on it, and he said, “Would you be interested — I’ve read about you on Google and saw that you’d had a lot of experience starting cideries and making cider all over the world. Would you consider joining forces with me and doing something in America?” I just thought, well, this seems like an opportunity…He rang me two or three times over the next year, and, in the end, I sort of said, “Well, let’s hop on a plane and go and have a look.” 

I came over to Virginia and had a good look around — and what I saw, I liked. We looked at the market, we looked at the rules, we looked at the laws, we looked at the progress of the cider industry, which was largely — at that stage — [sic] still basically artisanal based. There was basically a few small apple growers that had turned [to] making cider. I looked at what we had done in New Zealand and the knowledge that we had from the much more, I guess, upscale markets in the UK and my experiences there. [I] thought if we could duplicate that in some way in Virginia, and in striking distance I guess of D.C. and the [Golden] Triangle and North Carolina…We had Wintergreen Ski Resort just up the road. I just thought that it looked like a good market, a good climate, and if we could create the sort of buzz that cider had achieved in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, we would do quite well. Once again, fortune shined upon us, and in our first year…I think we had planned to do something like 18,000 cases in the first year, and we did something like about 105,000 cases…The business just virtually doubled every year from then on, so we knew we had the concept right. That’s really how Bold Rock was born. John and I just, one day, we were driving down the road and we ticked off everything. [sic] We stopped the car, got out, shook hands and said, “Let’s do it.” [sic] And then, all we had to do was name it Bold Rock, and away we went!

It seemed easy at the time, but it was, I think, the first three or four years of developing Bold Rock were extraordinary hard work — working long hours, 5 o’clock in the morning until maybe sometimes midnight that night, bottling with a small plant and trying to keep up with demand. And, we had to find good distributors…We found some of the best distributors I think you could ever get, and they locked horns behind us and helped and promoted us. [sic] Every day when we thought we’d made some stock of [it], a big distributor truck would arrive and the whole shed would be open — it would be empty. It was hand and mouth. And then, gradually, we expanded after about two years. Of course, we thought, well, we could expand on this property, but it might be a more interesting thing to go down to North Carolina and make cider there. So, we spent a little bit of time looking [sic] around the Asheville and Hendersonville areas in North Carolina. There’s a very, very significant and very, very good apple resource there, so we built our second cidery there where we had access to sufficient apples from there to do it. Been very grateful that we somehow managed to get it right. We seem to attract about us really good people, really good staff…We source staff from Virginia Tech and the engineering schools, and we found we’re able to pick up all [these] people and we became a fairly large business fairly quickly.     

HSN: As you know, we are a hard seltzer news publication, so we are very interested in your hard seltzer. You launched into seltzer in 2019, followed by a line of ready-to-drink cocktails and hard tea and lemonade. Can you talk about your decision to begin seltzer and ready-to-drink production? What drove you in that direction and what was the transition like? 

Brian: A learning transition, that’s for sure! [sic] The seltzer…it didn’t actually come out of nowhere. I’d seen sort of similar-type products in Europe, particularly in England and even some in New Zealand…It came very quickly, [and] we looked at it, but all the seltzers that we saw on the market and the leading brands, they were all made out of sugar and water base plus sufficient malt base to qualify as a beer. So, they were largely made by breweries or contractors who work for breweries with specialized equipment…All the early seltzers that we tasted you could always taste [sic] that little bit of a malt base that, often, without the sufficient nutrients and things maybe, wasn’t the best bases to try and hang a flavor off, particularly when the products don’t have a lot of substance to them and you’re trying to keep the calories down. So, we looked at it very hard. As a company, you play to your own strengths. We [have] thousands of tons of apples were juicing, we have great resources and we understand almost completely how to make alcohol out of apples. [We decided] let’s try making seltzers and achieve all of the things that the main seltzers are achieving, and let’s make them out of a fruit base. So, we used our strengths, I guess, to create a rather unique seltzer [where] 100 percent of the alcohol comes from apples. Being that, it’s a very clean alcohol. It’s an alcohol that leaves no bitter aftertaste, so it was very easy then to use [fruit] to actually impart the flavors that we wanted in the styles of seltzer that we make…I think it was quite revolutionary, really, in the way in which we approached that. Of course, the downside was that it was a little bit, a fraction more, expensive to manufacture, and on top of that was the issue of the fact that it didn’t always attract the [sic] same tax breaks that malt beverages enjoy…Of course, that varies from state to state a little bit. But, anyway, we think that we put those issues aside and said that we feel that we’ve made considerably a better quality product with a purer, cleaner taste profile…To us, that was what suited and matched the Bold Rock brand. I mean, the Bold Rock brand of cider has always been about sustainability, session-ability and having drinks that are not too bitter, not too sweet, not overly flavored, have substance and they’re clean and refreshing and easy to drink…I think that’s been a standard of the success of Bold Rock cider, and, of course, we were able to transfer those same qualities, I guess, or taste profiles, through to the seltzer range and that has given us a niche position, I guess, in a very, very large segment.  

HSN: Yeah, I don’t know of any other apple-based hard seltzer products on the market right now. So I guess it does speak to how much cheaper it is to do it with malt, especially with the tax breaks and stuff. 

Brian: Yes, it’s normally the tax that makes the difference. But, to us, it was…We didn’t need specialized equipment. We already had the equipment and know-how and the ability, and I was fortunate that my experience — because of working in the UK — I already had experience making similar products out of an apple alcohol base.

HSN: Where are your cider/seltzer/RTD products available now? I’m in Los Angeles, so I don’t have access to Bold Rock, unfortunately.

Brian: Pretty much, with our Bold Rock Cider — which is what still is our core base — we started in Virginia. So, Virginia, the Virginias, Virginia and West Virginia, plus the North and South Carolina areas are our strong regional bases, and then we extend upwards in Pennsylvania and Maryland and a little bit into Georgia, Tennessee and [sic] we’ve just expanded from around our regional bases. When we became part of Artisanal Brewing Ventures (ABV) late last year, that gave us, of course, a huge increase in market and in [the] number of salespeople and resources. So, we’ve been able to expand quite rapidly, of course, the seltzer market that we’re talking about is a big, well-established market, and we felt that with our seltzers, our biggest strength was the name and the, I guess, [sic] brand equity we have with the Bold Rock Cider brand. 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. And, at this stage…we’ve just launched in Florida and, you know, each year we have a plan for expansion so over the next 6 or 7 or 8 months…But, that has been spurred by the fact that with ABV, we are now a much-expanded company in resources and in people on the ground and skills and expertise, which you need. 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? I mean, you have to have trained salespeople on the ground. 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. And, I think that’s made a huge difference to our ability and how we treat the future. 

HSN: Anything else you want to add, anything new coming up?

Brian: Yes, well, of course, Bold Rock is what we really want to do, and, [sic] as I explained before, what we’ve tried to do with the seltzers is to take the same type of taste profiles and the qualities or the essence of what is Bold Rock, and that’s something that people like…something that just tastes right. And people don’t sniff it [as] you see at some tastings, and then say, “Ooohhh, I can taste a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” What we like to see is people just sitting down, having a few drinks and enjoying it, and they’re talking about their life and all the things that happened to them in the day, not really critically looking at it…The big thing is to get people to be able to drink more than one, so a lot of our sales and repeat sales come from producing a product that really is the best we can make, or what we think people will like, and carrying that through to seltzer. And, of course, we’ve also carried that same concept now through with an RTD range which we’re doing. I mean, we’ve recently launched Copper Mug Mill and Bold Fashioned in Virginia, as well as central Virginia, and 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. 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. The tea business is really something that’s hugely large, 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 [scale] that being part of ABV provides. It gives us an opportunity that would have been a lot harder to do if we remained [independent]…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. Having been part of a company now that has the resources, but also has the skills necessary in all areas, you know, from sales analysts to CEOs, to superb sales force and training. It’s a state of the art business that we have now from what we started — when John and I started way back. So, it’s quite pleasing now to sit back and look and see the skills, the dedication, the execution. And, that’s where I think a lot of smaller cideries and people trying to make seltzer and some of these other products sort of have issues. One of the things, you know, it’s the…how do you make it happen, and having a strong team and a strong philosophy to get out there, and do things, and make it happen and the assurance that we can do it properly. Do it once, and do it properly, is a big thing. I think, hopefully, it underpins our future. 

HSN: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.

Brian: Thank you for showing interest in us. And, as I say, we’re relatively small we’re still…I guess size is a relative thing, and we’re relatively small compared to the very large seltzer brands that are out there. But, seltzer certainly is an interesting product. I wasn’t too sure whether I liked it when we first started making it, and then I got to like it and it became one of my favorite drinks.

Stephanie Meade
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