The Bricker Cider Company Ltd. has withdrawn its application for a 64-seat lounge in hopes of calming fears and starting off on the right foot in Sechelt.
The company, headed by married couple Morgan Moore and Nick Farrer, is meant to be a family business at 6642 Norwest Bay Rd., where patrons can sample the cider produced onsite and buy some to take away.
The establishment is not meant to be a pub, which the couple heard was a concern for some community members when news of their application was advertised in Coast Reporter recently.
Advertisements are necessary when a lounge application is taken out to alert the public and seek a response; however, ultimately the application must be approved by the Agricultural Land Commission and the B.C. Liquor Control and Licensing Branch. It doesn’t need to come to Sechelt council for approval.
When the advertisements were placed in the newspaper, Moore and Farrer started hearing concerns around the lounge, so they decided to withdraw the lounge part of their application, saying they never really wanted that type of establishment but were encouraged to “apply for everything.”
“Obviously now we regret doing that because it’s not what we wanted to do,” Farrer said.
“Our vision of the company is just like a small family run winery that you would find in the Okanagan.”
He said the couple were sorry for any confusion caused by the lounge application.
“We do apologize to people if they’ve been given the wrong impression as to what we’re trying to do here,” Farrer said.
“Hopefully speaking to [Coast Reporter] will remedy that and we can actually give a vision of what we do want to do. If people have been misled by us, if we haven’t been communicative enough, we are sorry about that.”
The couple, who moved to the Coast from Vancouver in May, plan to start small as their company is self-funded and includes other family members: Chris Moore, Bronson Moore, Russell Moore and June Crosby-Moore.
“Our business plan says that within the first year we’re looking at [making] around 20,000 litres [of cider],” Farrer said.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to use the income from that to slowly expand over the years. Because it’s a family business, we’re trying to avoid any form of outside benefactors or anything like that.”
Currently there are about 700 apple trees planted on two acres of the Bricker Cider Company property, and more will be established in the future.
The couple said they’ll be using their own apples as well as apples from a family farm up the road and some grown in the Okanagan to make their cider.
The plan is to start making cider in the late fall and open for tastings around Easter of 2017.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to get our cider in bars and restaurants around Christmas, but you won’t actually be able to come here and have a little tasting until next spring,” Morgan said.
