A Look Back at 9 Years of Portland Cider Co.

Time Flies When You’re Making Cider! 

Springtime always has us feeling a little nostalgic here at Portland Cider Co., because it’s our anniversary! We’re celebrating nine years this month. 🎉

We like to use this time of year to slow down for a minute and take a look back at how far we’ve come together, and make sure we’re still on the right track. Moving forward is important, but it’s also worth it to celebrate where we are, where we came from, and all the people and partners who made it possible for Portland Cider to be nine years old. 

With the relentless encouragement and helping hands of dear friends and family, Jeff & Lynda Parrish founded Portland Cider Co. in a tiny production facility in Oregon City, selling their first cider at local farmer’s markets in 2013. (This was a step up from their former homebrew operation, which may have been responsible for at least one closet explosion…) By 2015, things were going well enough to open Portland Cider House on SE Hawthorne Boulevard, and the next year, the original production facility and pub were relocated to one ten times larger in Clackamas--a huge upgrade! 

Around the same time, we started canning our cider, and we hosted our first Fruit Forward drive, collecting fallen fruit from the community to be turned into the inaugural batch of PDX Community Cider. This remains one of our most popular annual programs, and we’ve been able to donate over $47,500 to local nonprofits like Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon as a direct result of our community’s generous fruit donations. 

Since the start, we’ve been committed to using 100% Northwest-grown apples in every batch of cider, and we make a point of working with other Oregon businesses to source great ingredients and elevate our ciders. Just in the last year, we’ve worked with Portland-based businesses such as Blue Star Donuts on our Blueberry Bourbon Basil cider and donut collab, and released our Imperial Peach Tea cider featuring Steven Smith Assam tea. This year we even went down to Eugene, using Oregon-based Singing Dog Vanilla in our Tangerine Dreamsicle cider.

In the year ahead, we have even more fun collaborations up our sleeves, and we can’t wait to share it with you! For us, these partners are important because their creativity inspires our craft, driven by a passion to support our city and state’s makers. 

The past two years have been challenging, to say the least. But our fans continued to support Portland Cider by purchasing our cans in stores, which got our business through the worst days of the pandemic. We even managed to win our 100th cider award last year, and are about to open the doors of our third location, the Portland Cider Westside Pub in Beaverton. We have some incredible new ciders on the horizon, and are also refreshing the look of our brand. (You’ll see some gorgeous new labels rolling out very soon…)

We really, really love this place and the people who live here. Portland ❤️ runs deep in our roots, and we couldn’t have gotten to this point without this community. So, in this anniversary month, we at Portland Cider are raising a proper pint to all of you—our close friends and family members who helped us craft our first batches of cider, our hard-working crew over the years, our wholesale and retail partners, fellow Oregon businesses and Portland Cider drinkers everywhere—THANK YOU! 

To toast 9 years with us, join us in our 30 days of cider-brations through April 16th, 2022! Follow us on @PortlandCider for all the details, and save the date for our 9th Anniversary Party at our Clackamas Pub on April 16th, featuring 32 of our favorite ciders, great food, and entertainment.