The latest installment of Brewbound’s A Round With – a weekly Insider-exclusive Q&A series with industry leaders – features Caitlin Braam, founder and owner of Yonder Cider and The Source.
Yonder operates two taprooms near Seattle – with a third location on the way – and sources its apples from throughout the Pacific Northwest, where its ciders are available. The company also added distribution in California this year.
Braam chats about her vision for Yonder, the challenges of sourcing ingredients and what lessons from her extensive career that she has taken into her role as an owner.
Read the full Q&A below:
Your professional background is in PR and marketing. What did you learn from that experience that has helped inform your decisions around Yonder as a brand and how you translate it to consumers?
Caitlin: I was originally a television reporter, which means I told stories for a living. Every day, multiple times a day, I was researching, writing and telling stories. When I moved into PR, it was an easy and exciting transition to begin telling stories for brands I was passionate about! It fueled my freelance career and continues to fuel Yonder.
Getting people passionate about a brand takes more than just amazing cider, and we knew that going into Yonder. We were entering an era where people care about where their product comes from, who the people are behind it, what the company stands for, and yes, how beautiful it looks. It’s the combination of delicious, innovative cider and beautiful, eye-catching branding – plus the people – that makes Yonder the brand it is. I always joke that we had merch before we had our first cider, but it’s true! We knew the cider we produced was going to be great, but the combination of great cider and a great brand was the winning combo for us.
At the same time, it’s all about authenticity. People can see right through a story that isn’t true and a brand that’s lacking passion. We don’t give consumers enough credit when it comes to that. At Yonder, we do wild and crazy well, and tell it like it is. We’re just lucky we have such an amazing story to tell.
Along with Yonder, you started The Source, which helps other cideries with sourcing and production. What characteristics are vital from partners to have the best B2B relationships?
Caitlin: Communication and trust. It is not easy to turn over the pressing or production of your cider to another person. We know that. We also know projecting needs of a growing cidery is hard!
The Source was founded to help new cideries get started, help current cideries expand without the capital investment, and bring quality cider and juice to customers across the country. Even as we build our own brand in Yonder, the opportunity to work with cideries and breweries across the country to bring quality cider to new markets is something we cherish. We work hard to help a diverse client list find their way in this business. We have a lot of knowledge about making cider, packaging cider and being in the industry that our clients appreciate and rely on to avoid the pitfalls of so many brands in the past.
At industry events, you usually have several Yonder folks in tow. What are the keys to creating and nurturing Yonder’s company/employee culture?
Caitlin: The core of our culture at Yonder is communication, honesty and respect – being honest about your personal strengths and leaning on your team for theirs. For example, I don’t make cider, so I have built a team of extremely talented cidermakers and production folks. At the same time, they are always ready and willing to work together with me to make all my crazy cider dreams come true.
We are a diverse group of people with all different backgrounds. Embracing that diversity and recognizing how much stronger it makes us as a company has been a huge part of who we are today as a company. To a point, we’re all learning as we go, so we might as well do it together!
What is the biggest challenge your business is facing right now?
Caitlin: Making sure there is enough cider fruit to do what we do! At Yonder we add 20% cider fruit – the apples full of tannin and flavor, typically intended for cider – into everything we make, but there’s only so much of that fruit grown in the Pacific Northwest and around the country. We pressed 650,000 pounds of just cider fruit last year, and are hoping for double this harvest. We are so passionate about supporting the orchardists who grow this fruit for us, but we worry there will be a point where there’s not enough. That’s why we do what we do both at Yonder and through The Source, to continue to encourage the growth and use for cider fruit in the hopes that it remains in the ground and financially makes sense for orchardists to plant more, because that fruit makes all the difference.
Even more challenging is funding the growth we know is possible. We are nearing the maximum capacity of a lot of our equipment. Because we’ve grown so fast and somewhat unexpectedly, it wasn’t something we could necessarily plan for. And because we press our own fruit and also store finished cider fruit year round, it’s not just tanks and glycol chillers. It’s new presses, cold storage, freezer storage, apple bills. We’ve been almost completely self-funded to this point with a small friends-and-family round, so it’s a shift to begin looking at ways to fund our growth.
Yes, we could stay the size we are now and halt the growth, but where’s the fun in that?
On the flipside, what’s the biggest opportunity you see for Yonder this year?
Caitlin: Can growth be your biggest challenge and biggest opportunity? Because for us it certainly is. The opportunity to bring Yonder to more people and continue to change the perception of cider is so exhilarating. We have the opportunity to take a chance and make that happen. Will it be easy? Never. Is it guaranteed to be one hell of an exciting and interesting ride? Always.
Yonder does a lot of collaborations, including releases with everyone from beer bars like Chuck’s Hop Shop, to bands like Thunderpussy. How do you select collaboration partners?
Caitlin: I’ve worked in this industry – whether it be for wineries, breweries, distilleries, cideries or restaurants – for 15 years. This is my first time having a company all my own and I have so many ideas! I’m just thankful there are so many other brands out there – and an amazingly enthusiastic team – that resonate with what we do and want to be a part of creating something totally new.
One of my goals with collaborations and many of the limited edition ciders we release is to break the barriers around what people think of cider. The beverage industry can be siloed, but it doesn’t have to be. We definitely make ciders that fit the classic definition of cider – from our flagship Dry to our single varietals – but we also release ciders modeled after our favorite cocktails and inspired by our favorite bands. We even have a cider hot sauce with Hot Mama’s Salsa out of Portland!
Yonder shares a taproom with Bale Breaker. What are the benefits of sharing a space with a craft brewery?
Caitlin: Technically in Washington state, breweries and wineries/cideries can’t share taprooms, but in typical Yonder fashion, we love a good loophole! In 2020, a bill was passed that allowed distilleries to share taprooms with breweries and wineries/cideries, so naturally, we started a distillery.
Being the first space to open under that bill opened up a lot of possibilities. We now have a space where people can drink cider and beer, as well as wine, seltzers and slushies. It brought a lot of people who typically wouldn’t drink beer into the space, and vice versa. People can get flights of cider, beer or both. It breaks down so many of those beverage barriers and allows people to pick drinks based on what they’re interested in, not what they’re being told to drink.
What’s the best advice you’ve received in your career?
Caitlin: I was told to never stop asking questions. It’s the same advice I give when asked now. The thing I love most about the beverage industry is there is always more to learn and explore. When I started in cider, I knew so little about it. It’s been a 15-year journey of asking questions to get me where I am today, and I’m still asking them!
It can be intimidating to do so at times, especially as the only woman in many of the rooms, but I find most of the time, it opens doors. Not being scared or ashamed to admit when you don’t know something wields its own special kind of power and in the end, it only helps you grow.
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the cider industry, what would it be?
Caitlin: I would wave that wand and have every person who thinks they don’t like cider forget what made them think that in the first place! There are so many preconceived notions around cider and it’s one of the biggest uphill battles Yonder and so many other cideries face. A clean slate and open mind would do so much for the cider industry.