Some guys order flowers to win over a crush, or they cook dinner from scratch. Charlie Davis made apple cider.
What started as a DIY project to impress a friend eventually became a business, and that friend, Katie Morgan, eventually became his wife and the cidery's co-owner. The seed of Right Bee Cider (Get it? Right beside her? Awww.) was planted on a snowy night in 2012 when Davis trudged home from Tony's Finer Food on Elston Avenue carrying a few jugs of apple juice, which he pitched with distilling yeast and then sweetened to make cider for Morgan's birthday.
"I was really surprised when I saw that he had made it for me," Morgan said. "In the back of my mind, I was like 'Crap, I have to act like I like this because it's so nice that he did that for me.' Not that I doubted his skill, but I really was so pleasantly surprised. It was perfect. It was sweet but not too sweet; it was carbonated perfectly. It was exactly how I prefer cider to be."
In two years following that first batch of hard apple cider, the couple discussed turning that recipe into a commercially available product. Davis is a professional brewer who now works for Vice District Brewing in the South Loop, so he knew he had the background to make it happen. Despite being busy planning their wedding earlier this year, Davis and Morgan, who live in Sauganash, thought the time was right to turn Right Bee in reality. Now, their first commercial batch sits in fermentation tanks, ready for kegging and delivery to bars this week.
Davis and Morgan are the newest addition to a relatively recent wave of Midwest cider makers that are reviving the region's history of apple cider production. Michigan's Virtue Cider, Vander Mill Cider and Long Grove's Prima Cider all began making cider within the past decade, part of a larger cider industry that's seen double-digit sales growth for the past few years.
But unlike other Midwest cider producers, Right Bee is a thoroughly urban operation. Its apple juice arrives already pressed from a mill in Pennsylvania, while some other cider makers extract juice from apples grown in nearby orchards. Walk up to Virtue Cider's Fennville, Mich. headquarters, for example, and you'll park outside a barn where red and green apples overflow from their crates and a rogue cat explores the premises. Drive to Right Bee's building, and you'll park in a Lincolnwood industrial complex outside a low-slung warehouse with a sign that reads "House of Cans."
It's a building that houses the can distribution business that Davis' family owns, and it's where Right Bee has made its home. "My landlords are pretty cool-we'll put it that way," Davis said, laughing.
The actual cider-making takes place in two rooms: a fermentation room that occupies a former office and a completely refrigerated 9-by-9-foot cooler abutting the back of the warehouse. The second room, which barely has space for two square aging tanks and a silver, oval-shaped brite tank for carbonation and chilling ("The Submarine," as Morgan has nicknamed it), is cooled to jacket-necessitating 35 degrees, and is where the cider goes through secondary fermentation before it is back-sweetened and transferred to kegs. Despite the relatively small scale of the operation-the brite tank can hold about 30 kegs of cider-it's a huge time commitment for Davis and Morgan, who both have other jobs.
"We both wear a lot of hats," Morgan said. "It's only the two of us. Most of the physical labor, I'd like to think I can do but I can't, so ultimately for the physical process of cider-making, it's all Charlie." The work can be intensely physical-lifting and dragging boxes of raw juice the size of desks, tipping huge tanks that contain multiple kegs' worth of cider-but that's where Morgan's other job as a nurse comes in handy. "I think we have a good relationship. After a long nursing shift, a good cider is ideal and then after a long day in the cidery, sometimes [Charlie] needs a nurse."
While Davis attends to the cider making, Morgan handles many of the other duties involved in Right Bee: painting the yellow tap handles, answering emails, updating social media. They hope their combined passion for their cider encourages Chicagoans-even skeptical cider drinkers-to try Right Bee.
"The really exciting thing about being involved in the rebirth and resurgence of American ciders is that there's a variety of styles. People who didn't enjoy their first cider, we hope they enjoy ours," Morgan said. "Look for the bright yellow tap handle that resembles a bee; that's where the good stuff is."
kbernot@redeyechicago.com | @redeyeeatdrink
>>EXTRA: Watch Davis and Morgan pour us some of their English-style cider.