What do maritime law and hard cider have in common? Well, likely not much, but for Sixknot Cider owner and cidermaker John Sinclair that doesn’t seem to matter. The former lawyer turned cider producer has been crafting his cider commercially out of his Twisp, Washington, location since 2013, all while harnessing the power of the sun to make sure his operation runs successfully.
“Nobody’s going to be 100 percent solar powered, but we have enough solar capacity to make sure when the sun is shining we can power everything we need to make cider,” he explains.
Sinclair and his family started their orchard in 2002, just one year after purchasing their land in North Central Washington’s Methow Valley. He says the original plan was to simply have a Honeycrisp apple orchard but, as time went on, what was once just a tree fruit orchard grew into Sinclair’s largely sunlight-powered cider operation. When the land was first acquired, they started out with just a few solar panels which quickly change into the solar array they now have on the property.
In his early years as a cidermaker, Sinclair says he stuck to producing sweet, non-alcoholic fresh cider, eventually getting comfortable enough with the cidermaking process to delve into the world of organic hard ciders. A completely self-taught cidermaker and orchardist, he emphasizes how hard it can be to craft an organic hard cider. “There was a ton of trial and error in those first couple years,” he says. ‘I threw out thousands of gallons of cider before I finally got it right.”
The year he finally got it right was 2012 and shortly after in 2013 Sixknot Cider was up for commercial sale, pressing certified organic apples for certified organic cider. Sinclair says there are big plans for the cidery in 2017, and one of those plans is taking some of the workload off of himself so he can focus more on the orchard. Currently, he oversees all facets of cider production, from the cultivating of the apple to the capping of the bottle. Although he does receive help from his family and friends when it is time to press and bottle, it is pretty much a one-man operation. This is something he looks to change in 2017 due to the opening of Sixknot’s taproom and an upcoming venture in mead-making.
The taproom will be on the main street in the nearby town of Winthrop and is tentatively scheduled to open this spring. Sinclair plans to hire a staff that can work both on the orchard and in the taproom, versatile enough to switch between locations when necessary. Recently, he has been interviewing fermentation studies graduates from universities along the West Coast to find someone to focus on the cidermaking, while he commits fully to his orchard.
“Five years ago I wouldn’t have [opened a taproom], I didn’t start making cider until I was 50 — I’m a rookie,” Sinclair says. With a new taproom, a bigger staff, mead-making and the future addition of new varieties to his orchard on the horizon, Sinclair and Sixknot are set to successfully blow past a sophomore slump.
