WEST AVENUE CIDER COMPANY
WHO: Chris Hayworth, owner
WHERE: Stoney Creek
EMPLOYEES: 2
FIRST RELEASED CIDER: 2012 westavenue.ca
CHRIS HAYWORTH brings the same experimental flair he employs in the kitchen to his cider making.
“A passion for the culinary arts” encouraged the Manchester native to give making cider a try. “It’s like, once you learn how to cook, how do you take that passion to the next level?”
The former executive chef at Spencer’s at the Waterfront in Burlington started messing about with cider recipes in 2008. He and wife Amy Robson had been to one of Ontario’s only cider companies at the time, Waupoos in Prince Edward County, and couldn’t understand why more people weren’t making the drink.
Back in England, he had tried brewing beer using the heat of the radiators in his home.
With cider, he took a more formal approach.
“My cider is made to a recipe,” Hayworth says. “A specific amount of apples picked at this specific time when they’re ripe.”
By 2012, he had quit his day job and launched West Avenue Cider Company – the name paying homage to the street where he and his family lived in Toronto before moving to Carlisle earlier this year.
The couple’s 75-acre farm, Somerset Orchards, is now home to about 3,000 trees, including 52 varieties of apples and 10 varieties of pear, as well as a store selling local fruits, vegetables and baked goods.
Plans are underway to have cider for sale at this location by the end of summer, but for now, West Avenue Cider is available at about 150 bars and restaurants in the GTA.
Hayworth is known for barrel aging and testing out different yeasts and fruits in his cider recipes. West Avenue recently won an award in Michigan, he says, “best in class for a wild blueberry cider, barrel-fermented while in a tequila barrel.”
Overall, Hayworth said he’s making about 80,000 litres a year, not enough to make it worth his while to sell it through the LCBO.
It’s one of the bones Hayworth has to pick with the way cideries are licensed in the province, as well as the rule that a cidery must have five acres of orchards in order to have its own retail outlet. Sales from these outlets are not subject to LCBO regulations and fees.
“The taxation doesn’t allow us to grow as rapidly as the market.”