In 2011, avid home brewer Stephen Hance was making so many ciders with childhood friend Colin Post that they weren't named, only numbered.
Cider Number 12 was particularly good that year. Made with apples of unknown varieties from Sapsucker Farms in Mora, Minn., it was crisp, dry and sparkling, with intriguing apple notes. People loved it.
Hance entered it in the Minnesota State Fair, where it won a blue ribbon. That award would set the home brewing friends on a journey to become professional cidermakers, ultimately opening Number 12 Cider in Minneapolis.
But their love of apples goes back much further, when the two would steal apples from neighborhood trees as kids. The cider bug bit when Post got them started home brewing beer. After tasting an intriguing glass of cider in a bar, Hance was hooked.
"I went on to read about how to make cider and I started reading about the history of cider," he said. "I was really attracted to the simplicity of adding yeast to juice to make something."
Initially the two wanted Number 12 Cider to be connected to an apple growing operation. They got a farm winery license and set up shop at an orchard in Buffalo, Minn., selling the first cider from there in 2015. Though they loved the idyllic setting, it soon became clear that the orchard was not the right fit. "We're not farmers," Post said. "We're people who grew up in the suburbs."
It was also an issue sourcing the heirloom cider apples they wanted to use. "It turned out that not many people were growing the kind of apples we were looking for, including the orchard we were on," Hance said. "Within a year, most of the apples we were using were coming from other places."
They realized they didn't need to be on a farm — they needed to build relationships with farmers.