It Started with a Porch and a Patch of Iowa Ground
The Land
In 2015, we bought eight and a quarter acres outside Wellsburg. Crystal's grandpa always said the most important thing you can do is own land, and Luke, who had fond memories on a small acreage himself, had never quite let go of what that felt like. When this place came along, it felt like the right ground to grow something together.
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More than half of it was rented out for corn and soybeans back then. It took a few years, but they reclaimed that farmland and started turning it into something of our own.
Growing Into It
Anyone who's spent a season in Grundy County knows the wind. Crystal grew up with a windbreak and knew how nice they can be, so we planted one. Thick with fruit and nut-bearing shrubs, pines, and hardy trees. We put in a stretch of wild prairie too, because pollinators are part of this story from the ground up.
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And almost as an afterthought, we planted a small orchard of apples, peaches, cherries, and pears just to see what it would be like to grow fruit. It started with six apple trees and a simple question: what on earth are we going to do with all these apples?
How We Found Cider
The answer came from three friends. A coworker had built his own apple press and invited us over one fall to press with him. Tasting juice that fresh, from perfectly ripe fruit, was a little bit magical. Another friend, a home brewer, had cider on tap during a board game night and showed us just how different cider could taste. And a third had a stash of brewing equipment he'd never gotten around to using.
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Put those three together and we started making cider. It was okay. Not great. But we kept at it, learning about fruit and yeast, chasing down apples from different orchards, figuring out what we actually wanted to grow. Somewhere in there, especially through 2020, apples went from a hobby to the thing we wanted to build a life around.
The Orchard Today
150+ trees, 45+ varieties, and counting
Those six trees have become more than eighty semi-dwarf trees, with young trellised rows coming on behind them. We're growing over forty-five varieties right now. It's an ongoing experiment to find out what varieties love growing in Grundy County. As we find our favorites, that's the part of the orchard we'll keep growing.
Coming Downtown
For a long time we wondered whether we'd build an estate cidery out on the property, the kind of place you drive out to visit. Then a building came up for sale in downtown Grundy Center, and we instantly fell in love with it. In hindsight, it was the better move by far. Right in the middle of a lively downtown, it's close to the people we most wanted to know.
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There aren't many urban cideries in Iowa. We're glad to be one of them. The orchard is still very much part of who we are, and we'll host gatherings out there now and then, but downtown is home base, where we make our cider and get to talk apples with whoever pulls up a stool.
A Building With a Few Lives
Our home is actually two buildings built in 1911. The bar side was the town's original pharmacy. If you look closely at the reclaimed floor, you'll find markings we think are the ghost of an old soda fountain. The other side was the original GNB bank, and its vault is still there; we've reworked it into a spot where you can sit awhile. Most folks around here remember the whole place as the As You Like It (Hallmark) store, a fixture downtown for the better part of fifty years.
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We built the bar top from Iowa black walnut, milled on a friend's sawmill. The face of the bar is reclaimed from shelving we found down in the basement, left over from the pharmacy days. And when we were exposing our brick wall we found a name scribed into a brick: Theodore Mund. Most likely one of the folks who laid it in 1911. We love thinking about all the lives this place has held, and we're still turning up its stories to share.
Our Whole Idea
We opened our doors in January 2025, not long after our third child arrived, so the cidery and the kids are growing up side by side. Luke's dad helped with the build-out, and plenty of family and friends left their fingerprints on this place.
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Here's what we're really after: we don't want coming here to feel like a special occasion. We want it to be part of your week. A regular stop, a standing tradition, a familiar seat. So come gather, sip, and stay awhile.
