Their cider offerings now include strawberry, guava, mango, pear, pineapple, berry, blood orange, honey and even pumpkin. The California Cider Company moved into the old Vacu Dry/ Sonoma West plant and have installed multi-million dollar high speed bottling, canning and kegging lines.Īce makes the cider from apples, but flavors some with other types of fruits. Since 2011, both the tasting room and the production facility share the industrial space just west of town, across from Andy’s Produce in Sebastopol-one of the many places where you can find Ace Cider on the shelves. They began buying larger shares of the apple production from West County and now use the juice from over 50,000 tons of apples each year. Then little by little, across the 50 states. Production steadily grew until the company’s cider was in bars and restaurants up and down the West Coast. Meanwhile, Jeffrey was building a cider empire. It felt a bit like a British pub right here in Sonoma County.ĭuring the 1990s, apple production in Sonoma County began to fall off, as wineries moved in and began converting orchards to vineyards. The cider flowed, but so did the beer and other drinks. For years, the Ace-in-the-Hole was a fixture in West County, occupying the corner of Graton Road and Route 116. Jeffrey opened America’s Original Cider Pub, the Ace-in-the-Hole in July 1999. Seemed like a logical place for a cider pub. The town of Sebastopol had started the Gravenstein Fair in 1973 to attract attention to its prize-winning apples. Apple orchards still had a significant share of the agricultural land in the County. “I drove up here and couldn’t get over how beautiful it was, like the UK but with sunshine.” The rolling terrain around Sebastopol was Gravenstein country. “A journalist told me I should go to west Sonoma County to find cider makers”, says House. Later, while working in Marin County importing other people’s cider, he made the decision to make his own.
#ACE CIDER PLUS#
The company imported a collection of premium beers such as Fullers, Ruddles, Greene King, Caledonian and Felinfoel plus Dry Blackthorn cider. In the late 1970s, he sought his fortune in California, starting his own import- export company, Thames America Trading Company, on January 1st 1980. In 1972, Jeffrey left Sheffield University with an Economics degree and went to work as an account executive in American advertising agencies in London. Here’s Jeffrey’s impressive immigrant story. ACE now produces over 1.25 million case equivalents of fermented cider. You can buy their cider in all 50 states and seven export markets.
Now Ace is the leading, independent cidery in the U.S.
An immigrant from Surrey, England, Jeffrey has put his Sonoma County-based cider company on the world map.Īce was the first craft hard-cider producer in the Western States and opened the first cider pub in America since prohibition, right here in Sebastopol. If you have seen bottles of Ace Cider in your local grocery store, it’s because of Jeffrey House.
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