The origin story of Oregon-based 2 Towns Ciderhouse is very similar to the humble beginnings of many craft brewers: childhood friends with a passion for the craft, and a basement.
Fifteen years later, founders Aaron Sarnoff-Wood and Lee Larsen have grown the company to be the second largest cider brand in grocery nationwide, with their products available in 19 states.
The duo “didn’t start this company to be a national player,” with the focus on the two towns where the founders lived – Corvallis and Eugene (hence the cidery’s name) – hoping to bring “top shelf quality” cider to their communities “at an everyday price,” making cider “an accessible luxury for the masses,” Sarnoff-Wood told Brewbound.
“Both of us had spent some time in Europe and really fell in love with cider as a cultural element in Spain, France and England,” Sarnoff-Wood said. “And getting back to the States, we saw the U.S. was treating cider very different. It was kind of a near-beer, sweet beverage for people that didn’t like beer, and we thought that there was so much more to offer in the cider category than that.”
2 Towns focused on growth where it “made sense,” eventually becoming the first craft cider brand to pass Boston Beer Company’s dominating national brand Angry Orchard in dollar sales in any state, hitting the milestone in Oregon around 2016, according to Sarnoff-Wood. The cidery’s core West Coast markets continue to be the drivers of growth for the company, with the Northwest and California primarily contributing to 2 Town’s most recent milestone of becoming the second best-selling cidery in grocery.
“It’ll happen where and when it makes sense for us to grow, but our priority isn’t to try to take over the world,” Sarnoff-Wood said. “When we see an opportunity to enter a new space, we like to work with partners there. We like to be a community partner, a member of that region, wherever we’re going. And so we want to be intentional when we make the decision to go to new places.”
2 Towns increased total dollar sales +5.4% and volume +6% in NIQ-tracked off-premise channels in 2024, according to data shared by 3 Tier Beverages. In the last 13 weeks, ending February 22, the company has recorded double-digit growth (dollar sales +11.5%, volume +12.1%).
Meanwhile, the total cider segment recorded single-digit declines in dollar sales (-2.1%) and volume (-4.1%) in 2024. Trends have improved in the last 13 weeks, with dollar sales increasing +2.7% and volume +1.3%.
2 Towns’ growth comes as the cider industry draws more attention from beer industry members hoping to capitalize on the potential opportunities the segment could bring to a struggling category. In 2023, the Brewers Association welcomed cideries to pour at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) for the first time, followed by the addition of hard cider awards at GABF in 2024. 2 Towns came away with the most awards out of any participating cidery at the festival, and was named Cidermaker of the Year.
“As a cider producer, I wasn’t really sure what to expect,” Sarnoff-Wood said. “I’ve been to GABF before as a participant, tasting beers and enjoying the time, and I think it was really an important step for just the acknowledgement of cider as a legitimate category to be included at GABF.
“It’s been a long time in the making, and certainly some of the current trends in the market have not been kind to craft beer,” he added. “And it’s forced a lot of folks to look over and see cider as a legitimate category as we’re still seeing some pretty nice performance when domestics and craft are both down pretty substantially.”
One of the opportunities for cider is to capitalize on consumers’ continued interest in ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails, Sarnoff-Wood said, pointing to the advantage that cideries have with already creating fruit- and flavor-forward offerings that speak to many of the desires of RTD consumers.
2 Towns is participating in the RTD space with Craftwell Cocktails, a line of canned RTDs and wine-based ready-to-serve (RTS) offerings, akin to On the Rocks. The latter lineup recently expanded with Purple Raindrop, a glitter-infused 20.5% ABV offering in a 375 ml glass bottle. The wine base of the RTS offerings give 2 Towns the advantage of selling the products in liquor controlled states, including its home state of Oregon, Sarnoff-Wood said.
2 Towns will also release Transfusion RTDs this year, inspired by the “golf course centric cocktail,” he shared.
Craftwell has helped 2 Towns “open the door into the RTD space with another type of innovation that’s fun, more flavor forward, and we get to be a little bit zanier in that category than we do in cider,” Sarnoff-Wood said.
“Cider is even better positioned than a lot of RTDs in that [in] our operations, we work in our cider with 100% fresh-pressed fruit,” he added. “We’ve had to figure out how to source and process dozens of fruits from around the world, and in doing so, that opens the door in the RTD space. Most RTDs are having to go to a flavor house to develop an artificial flavor.”
2 Towns is also innovating with its core hard cider lineup, not just with new flavors every month, but with new package options, including the addition of single-serve cans thanks to new standard of fill allowances from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) enacted earlier this year.
2 Towns’ Cosmic brand family, led by Cosmic Crisp (8% ABV) – the No. 1 imperial cider 6-pack in the country, according to Sarnoff-Wood – will expand with two 19.2 oz single-serve offerings this spring, Cosmic Crisp and Pineapple Cosmic Crisp. The company has had the packaging ready to go for about two years so they could launch as soon as the new TTB guidelines were released, Sarnoff-Wood said.
“Cider in general under-indexes in convenience [and] it’s a place where we’d like to put a little bit of focus in ’25,” Sarnoff-Wood said. “There’s some solid opportunities, especially now that we have some applicable, larger format, single-serve that we can target that channel with.”
The Cosmic line also expanded with a second variety pack this year, as well as a new year-round flavor, Mango Cosmic Crisp, which started as a summer seasonal in 2024. For this summer, the brand family will feature POG Cosmic Crisp (passionfruit, orange, guava) as its seasonal offering.
Also on the horizon are projects with the Seattle Kraken (NHL) and Climate Pledge Arena, as well as the Portland Timbers (MLS).
“In our early years, a lot of [cider] was kind of the Wild West, and getting legitimacy, getting distributors to understand us as a category, getting consumers to know what the hell we are, and the regulatory landscape was kind of a mess,” Sarnoff-Wood said. “A lot of those things have shaken out now and are starting to form a structure so we can really, really speak to our consumer base.”