DRINK
The Downeast cider house in Boston has become quite a draw for locals and tourists alike. Photos courtesy Downeast Cider
Extracurricular
Enterprise
Downeast Cider founders grow basement experiment into a thriving regional business
By Kevin Noonan
T
he creators of Downeast Cider can point to their years in college as the key to their success, but that didn’t come from what they learned in a classroom — it came from what they learned in the basement of their dormitory. That college, Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, is where Ross Brockman, Tyler Mosher and Ben Manter became friends and, eventually, entrepreneurs. Like many people who become professional craft brewers, they didn’t intend to get into that field and that’s certainly not why they went to college. But once they got there, they discovered they didn’t have a passion for their selected majors. So, in 2012, they started making a hard cider and, to their surprise and relief, their brand became big in the New England market. Initially, they were going to call their new enterprise “Three Idiots Cider” and even went so far as to contact a trademark lawyer to make it legal, only to discover that less than a week earlier a winery in California had filed for that same name. So, they went back to the drawing board and came up with Downeast Cider Co. — downeast is a nautical term for sailing downwind on the way to home port and that seemed to fit their Maine roots. Now, 11 years later, that sea-inspired name has become one of the biggest in the hard cider market, even though Manter and Mosher are no longer with the company, which is now run by Ross Brockman and his brother, Matt, from their distillery in East Boston. ► OCTOBER 2021
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