Meet Blake Kininmonth | Founder & Master Brewer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Blake Kininmonth and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Blake, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
My thought process behind starting Balcom Canyon Cider was a mix of passion and opportunity. After nearly 15 years of “craft bartending” in San Francisco, Portland OR, and Ventura County, I developed a deep appreciation in creating my own drinks. My first DIY liqueur was a Nocino made from green walnuts growing on a tree in my backyard. Other DIY projects included fermenting hot sauces from bulgarian carrot peppers, and fermenting kombuchas. I have always had a passion to create, and I have used beverages as my vessel for creation.

My backyard in Portland was surrounded by blackberry bushes, and one year we had picked hundreds of pounds of blackberries. I was giving them away to friends, using them in smoothies, but I couldn’t get rid of the blackberries fast enough. Wondering how I could preserve all of these blackberries, I decided to ferment them into blackberry wine. I was shocked to discover that the finished product of my blackberry wine had similar flavors and characteristics of grape wine. That is when I realized that wine can be made out of ANY FRUIT, not just grapes.

Soon after blackberry wine I ventured into other fruit fermentations; pears, grapes, apples.

I was intrigued with the simple fact that I could make alcohol out of any fruit we grow from the earth. That ALL fruit trees, bushes, vines grow in different terroirs, with different soil stresses and soil types, NOT JUST GRAPES.. There is a whole world of wine to be discovered from other fruits.

Kombuchas and seltzers were really big at the time, and I remember the whole reason I stopped making kombucha at home and switched to fruit fermentations was because I saw the raw ingredients that went into it. I figured out that hard kombucha companies and seltzer companies were tricking us into thinking these drinks are healthier than they actually are. Hard Kombucha is made from fermenting cane sugar, and is considered malt liquor just like hard seltzers. A small batch of hard kombucha I would make at home consisted of 400 grams of table sugar in 8 Liters of water yikes!
Hard Cider on the other hand is made from fermenting apples, so you have natural monosaccharide fruit sugars, along with all of the vitamins and minerals in apples.

When we moved to Ventura County in 2018, we were shocked to see that there weren’t any local ciders on the shelves at the grocery stores. I thought that this was my chance to disrupt the hard kombucha and hard seltzer industry.

After formulating business plans and months of recipe testing at home, I had saved up enough money to start renting space at a local winery in Fillmore. I began fermenting my first large 1,000 gallon batch of cider in January 2020. My initial plan was to put the cider in kegs and have it on draft at local bars/restaurants.

When my cider finished fermentation in March, Covid struck and all of the restaurants/bars closed down. How can this happen on my very first commercial batch of cider. I shifted quickly and built my own 4 head bottling machine for $400. I bottled up my ciders and went door to door to every mom+pop liquor store in Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, and Los Angeles.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Growing up as a musician, I always looked forward to escaping real life and getting lost in creating. I look at cider making as a way to express my creativity in a different format. Music and cider making are one and the same to me, just using a different vessel to express my creativity.

Working at local wineries and learning their secrets really helped me get to where I am today and I couldn’t have done it without them.

This industry has not been easy, and it still isn’t, haha, but passion and pride keep the dream alive.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I would have them drive into Ventura westward on the highway 126 to see the sprawling land of agriculture in between two mountain ranges, lemon groves, orange trees, avocados, and continue out to Oxnard covered in strawberry fields out to the ocean. We would eat at Rumfish Y Vino, Jaguar moon for cocktails, and Fluid State for beer and a slice of pizza. Next day we’d drive up to Ojai and go for a hike to the hot-springs, go to Ojai Beverage Company where the selection of liquor is like no other. Finish off the evening with gourmet Burmese food at The Dutchess.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
When I really think about it, I can give thanks to hundreds of people for getting me to where I am today.

The one person who stands out the most:

My very first bar manager was a celebrity mixologist named Josh Trabulsi at Burritt Room in San Francisco. After a long night of bar-backing, Josh took me out for drinks at a local bar around the corner. He had me taste each cocktail we ordered and asked me how each drink could be better balanced. If it was too sweet, then it could be balanced with more acidity. Bitters can add depth and complexity.

Josh taking me aside, making me feel special, and putting that effort into me really made me latch on to bartending. Every night at work he would quiz me, push me to my limits, and really taught me to be the best bartender that I could be.

I use the same principles in balancing a cocktail as I do in balancing a cider. Every time I balance a cider I revert back to the formulas that Josh taught me.

If I thanked Josh for all that he taught me today, he would shrug it off and say it was nothing, he doesn’t realize how much he influenced my career.

Website: https://www.balcomcanyoncider.com

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