Our Story —

FROM ORCHARD TO BOAT TO BOTTLE

The Orchard

Our story starts in 2005, when owners Bob and Yannique Purman began planting their Washington Island orchard with 200 dwarf apple trees, all traditional cider-making cultivars. They focused on varieties typically found in Brittany, France, the famed cider-making region where Yannique’s father is from and where Bob first fell in love with cider.

Since those early plantings, the orchard has steadily grown in acreage, diversity, and yield. Today, it boasts over 3,000 cider apple trees, 250 pear trees, and 25 hazelnut trees—for the squirrels.

Rows of apple trees with red apples in our orchard on Washington Island. There's a grassy path between the rows of trees, and a cloudy sky.
Apple orchard with numbered wooden posts and green grass under cloudy sky.

In the orchard, we harvest all the fruit by hand.

The harvest begins in September and runs through mid-November. With lots of pruning, planting, and upkeep happening in the orchard throughout the rest of the year.

Person picking apples from a tree branch in a sunny orchard.
Large wooden crates filled with red and green apples on the deck of the Washington Island ferry.

The Boat

To get the fruit to “the mainland” for fermentation, we truck our bins of apples and pears across the Lake on the Washington Island Ferry.

Our little boat logos are romanticized versions of the fruit being ferried across Lake Michigan’s Death’s Door.

A red graphic depicting bins of apples being transported on a boat.

The Bottle

Once the fruit from the Island Orchard is pressed and the juice is obtained, our Ellison Bay production team works their magic. Each cider ferment takes roughly three to four weeks from start to finish. During that time, the crew carefully tends to each fermentation, monitoring the progress daily. When the cider is fully fermented, it is stored in our chilled warehouse to mature before bottling and kegging.

Head cider maker sampling his most recent batch of barrel-aged cider in a dimly lit room.
Two people pasteurizing bottles of hard cider in the production space with steam rising from the bottles.

Bottling cider in the classic Island Orchard Cider glass swing-top bottles is the final step in your favorite cider’s journey from —

ORCHARD TO BOAT TO BOTTLE.

Bottle of Island Orchard Brut Apple Cider on a wooden table with a waterfront background and canoe paddles in the distance.