Looking for feedback on a new cider product

Hello,

I am doing a little market research before I move forward on introducing a new product to the U.S. Homebrew market. I am planning on releasing an apple cider concentrate that can be used for making hard ciders. The advantage being that it is consistent, available year round, and can be stored for up to a year.

Before I go nuts and start running production I was hoping to get a little feedback from the market. Please let me know what you think of the idea or fill out this survey, so I have some hard data to work off of. Thank you for your help.


http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TMFSG9M

-Will

Interesting idea, how would it be different from frozen AJC that is currently on the market?

flavor-wise, I am unsure. I will have to pick some up and try it.

The main difference I could see, would be that my concentrate wouldn't need freezing or refrigeration, and it would be packaged more conveniently for 5 gallon batches.

I suppose to clarify. My company currently makes a spiced apple cider concentrate for specialty coffee shops, ski areas, and restaurants, but lately I have been getting more calls about how well it can be used for home brewing. I personally do some home brewing with it (sans the spice) and have made some pretty good ciders. If I get enough favorable feedback from consumers and retailers, I'm thinking this could be a pretty viable product.

AJC from grocery stores is already dirt cheap and easily available. If you want to compete with them you should look into marketing specialty blends of apples, such as traditional cider apple concentrate or at least a well balanced cider base, as most grocery store juice is not suitable without pH adjustment IMO. Simply not needing refrigeration probably wouldn't get most people interested enough to buy it since we're not dedicating much/any freezer space to storing AJC at the moment and pretty much immediately turn it into juice and start fermenting.

I like the idea though, good luck!

great info so far. Looks like I'll need to work on a little product differentiation. Keep the feedback coming

I agree with LeBreton. If you could concentrate something different than your run of the mill Granny Smith or Red Delicious type juices, I would definitely consider it as an option. There are a lot of apples that I just can't get my hands on that I would love to try out in my ciders.

Even a "hopped" or "spiced" version (like canned LME for beer) might be a nice change of pace for some who just want to dump and go.

I would have to know what types of apples are used in the concentrate, and where they came from. I absolutely refuse to use apple products from China.

Perhaps you could make smaller batches of concentrate, maybe enough to make one gallon. And if they were different apple varieties of concentrate, we could mix-n-match to make our own blend. For example: if you had Rome apple concentrate, and Empire apple concentrate, then I could get 4 containers of the Empire and 2 containers of the Rome, and make 6 gallons of my Roman Empire Hard Cider, a variety I made when pressing apples a couple years ago.

I would also like to try some English apple varieties, like Kingston Black, or Stoke Red.

UpstateMike said:

I would have to know what types of apples are used in the concentrate, and where they came from. I absolutely refuse to use apple products from China.

Click to expand...

Yes!

If I were to choose 5 separate apple varieties, which do you think would be ideal for both flavor and broad appeal?