Greg Hall has had an insider's view of the craft beer world for 25 years.
The son of John Hall, founder of Goose Island Brewing, has worked with the Chicago based company since its formation in 1988 and played a major part in the company's rise from hobby to household name.
Now the former brewer has his sights set on helping another type of beverage gain mainstream acceptance as he is going all in to make craft cider the new "it" beverage, and he's doing so right here in Southwest Michigan.
"There is great cider being made all the way up the(Lake Michigan) coast," Hall says. "We really feel that this could be the Napa valley of the cider world. We're trying to get people to start calling it the Cider Coast."
Hall co-founded Virtue Farms with his business partner and fellow Chicago resident Stephen Schmakel in 2011 and in less than a year has created four unique craft cider brands, including the traditional English cider Redsteak; the Norman style, oak barrel aged Lapinette; and, two yet to be released ciders, Percheron and The Mitten.
"I really took inspiration from my father," Hall says. "He founded Goose Island in the 1980's when he was 45 years old. Here I was; I was 45 years old and had the opportunity to go off and do my own thing. I knew there was an opportunity with cider."
Hall points out sales of cider grew 80 percent last year. "As hot as craft beer has been it has never approached 25 percent growth in one year."
Beyond the chance to get into a rapidly growing market, Hall had the opportunity to purchase a farm on 62nd Street in Fennville and then study the art of craft cider in Europe.
"I left Goose Island back in 2011 and really dove right in," Hall says. "I went over to England and went to a couple festivals and took a cider making classes."
While studying in Europe, Hall had the good fortune of learning the traditions of small batch cider making from some of the old world's most respected producers including Dupont, a French farm known for making Calvados, an apple based brandy.
"Dupont makes not only a wonderful range for ciders, but they also make their own Calvados, and they make a product called Pommeau. It's a blend of Calvados and fresh pressed apple juice that's been aged in a barrel," Hall says.
He now hopes to replicate the traditional taste and quality a bit closer to home using as many locally sourced ingredients as possible.
Virtue Cider's most recent recipe is called "The Mitten," based on the French Pommeau, and it will be available on draught throughout Michigan sometime this year.
"What we decided to do was go with Bourbon barrels. We made a cider in 2011, aged it three seasons in bourbon barrels. We are just blending that now with fresh juice from the 2012 crop. It has two years of product in there and it's a wonderful cider. To begin with, it picks up some great notes from the barrel of some charred oak, vanilla, and caramel, plus that bourbany nose, and we're backing that up with some fresh pressed juice," Hall says.
Until now, the majority of Virtue's distribution was in the Chicagoland area, but with the release of "The Mitten" Hall hopes to expose a brand new audience to the pleasures of cider.
"We focused in Chicago in 2012 because that's where we've been based for so long and have had so much experience selling beer. The intent was once we have enough cider to open up Michigan, right when our 2012 crop is getting ready to sell, we'll open up Michigan," Hall says.
Despite not being available formally in the Great Lakes State, Michigan has played a major role in the growth of Virtue Cider as nearly 90 percent of the apples used by the company are grown along the state's lakeshore.
"We always want to be buying fruit from the community," Hall says. "There are over 1,100 apple growers still in Michigan and most are small family farmers that have been doing it for generations and we feel like they are growing some of the best fruit in the world," Hall says. "In 2011 we bought 90 percent from Michigan and about 10 percent from Illinois."
Most years Michigan's apple farmers produce upwards of 9 million pounds of fruit, and if Virtue has its way, the company will be purchasing, and growing, a large percentage of that output.
Besides buying locally produced apples, Virtue also intends to have nearly 5,000 trees growing on its farm by next spring.
Hall says Virtue uses "a few million pounds" of apples each season to create its four brands of cider, and the company is just one of several producers of hard craft cider currently working in West Michigan.
The state's west side is home to a number of other operations that include hard craft cider in their lineup, including Cascade Winery in Grand Rapids, Round Barn in Baroda, Black Star Farms in Suttons Bay, Vandermill in Spring Lake, Seitsema Orchards in Ada, and, of course Tandem Cider in Leelanau, whose founder Dan Young has for several years been an inspiration to Hall.
"He makes great cider. And if you're in Leelanau you can buy it, but if you aren't then you can't," Hall laments.
Hall sees distribution and promotion as being the primary roadblock for the current cider industry.
Until now, most ciders have been available primarily at company tasting rooms and in small batch bottles, but Virtue hopes to make its product on a large scale and ship it region-wide for consumption at bars and restaurants.
In a nod to traditional, small-batch ways, Virtue Farms also will serve up its ciders at the company's tasting room, located in a renovated farmhouse on its Fennville orchard.
"We just rehabbed an 1880 farm house, rehabbed the inside," Hall says. "It has original Michigan white pine floors. We'll have a couple of our cider makers staying up there permanently."
Besides onsite cider makers, Virtue Farms also plans to hire and employ several new people over the course of the next few years.
"We'll probably hire somebody to help us with sales in Michigan this year," Hall says. "We'll certainly hire a few more people for the production facility. We'll get another cider maker on we'll get someone to run the lab, kind of a director of quality for us and we'll also have some work in our bottle shop."
Hall is certain that the growth of Virtue Farms can play a pivotal role in the overall growth of the Michigan craft hard cider industry and he's excited to see where that growth can lead.
Hall says, "We think that people, once they start understanding how good the cider is, and how great the apples are coming out of Southwest Michigan and the whole Lake Michigan coast, that we'll be known as the epicenter of craft cider making in the U.S."
Visit Virtue Cider
online or take a trip to the orchard located at 2170 62nd Street in Fennville.
Jeremy Martin is a freelance writer. A graduate of Western Michigan University, he lives in Portage with his wife. Follow him @secondwavebeer on Twitter.
Photos by Erik Holladay.