We Started With Juice. Here's How the Same Standard Ended Up in Cider, Beer, and Wine.

We started out as the World's Healthiest Juice Company, and I mean that literally. We were trying to take an everyday product and make it as healthy as it could possibly be, the same way you'd squeeze a fresh juice for yourself at home first thing in the morning, just done properly and at a scale that could actually reach people.

But juice was never the only thing we were drinking or thinking about. Fermentation had fascinated us long before we ever bottled a drop of it ourselves, and when we made the move to the Swan Valley, we suddenly found ourselves right in the middle of this incredible pocket of locally made alcoholic beverages, with genuinely legendary stories happening all around us: Feral doing extraordinary things with beer, Jack Mann achieving legend status in wine, Old Young's doing the same in spirits. And yet, as far as we could see, nobody had really had a proper crack at cider.

By that point we'd already taught ourselves to home brew, largely thanks to our farm mechanic Wally, who had a genuinely impressive home brew setup and showed us, almost by accident, just how good fresh homemade beer could actually be when you did it right. So naturally we started asking ourselves a bigger question: how do you take something made like that, in a shed, and turn it into something you could actually produce at scale, properly — unpasteurised, preservative-free, no shortcuts — and could that same thinking be applied to cider?

We made a decision early on that we simply wouldn't attempt it unless we could make it pass what we've always called the Funk Test:

If something couldn't pass that test, we simply wouldn't make it. No matter how promising it looked.

So before we went anywhere near a barrel, we went and asked winemakers and cidermakers who'd actually know whether cider could clear that bar. Almost every one of them told us the same thing — that it was impossible, and that we were mad for even considering it.

Honestly, that was about the best motivation we could have asked for.

As far as anyone involved could tell at the time, we were attempting to make Australia's first unpasteurised, preservative-free cider, with nothing more than a bit of beginner's luck and a lot of late nights spent reading through home brew forums to guide us and, somehow, we got it right on the very first attempt.

The thing that tied it all together, the one factor that made shelf life possible across the entire range, turned out to be beautifully simple: keep it fresh, keep it cold, the whole way through the process. And just as important as getting that right ourselves was taking the time to actually explain to customers why it mattered so much in the first place.

For us, this whole thing comes down to one belief, and it's the same belief that's driven everything since the very start: nature has all the answers. When you make something as naturally as it can be, the goodness of what's in it cannot hide.