Ask Matt and Marie Raboin the best way to enjoy apples on a crisp fall day, and they’ll give you a delicious answer:
With a hard cider made from locally grown fruit.
As the owners of Brix Cider, the cheery, family-friendly cider pub in Mount Horeb, the Raboins are turning Wisconsinites onto a new way to drink local.
The couple’s passion for cider runs as deep as their roots in Wisconsin: Marie spent her childhood in Ashland, Cable and Wauwatosa before getting a bachelor’s degree in soil science from UW-Stevens Point, while Matt grew up in Fond du Lac and received a fine arts degree from UW-La Crosse.
The two met in graduate school at the UW-Madison, where they both studied agroecology. Now, they raise their four-year-old son Teddy and one-year-old daughter Vera — and roughly a thousand apple trees — on a farm near Barneveld.
Matt and Marie began producing cider commercially in 2016 and opened the taproom and farm-to-table eatery early this year with a commitment to emphasizing local flavors, working with apples grown on farms within sixty miles of Mount Horeb to create their dry ciders.
Matt shares more about the business.
What brought you to southwestern Wisconsin?
We got homesick and dreamed of life on a farm back in Wisconsin. We both loved the Driftless part of the state, and when Marie was offered a job in Dodgeville, we decided to buy a six-acre farm near Barneveld. We couldn’t afford a bigger farm or the investment that would have to go with it to get a large orchard started, so we decided to start with a small orchard that we began planting in 2014.
How did Brix Cider come about?
We started doing some fermentation experiments together back in graduate school, around 2009, and the hobby grew from there. We fermented just about anything that could be made into alcohol — beers, wines, meads, experimental creations and, of course, cider.
I think we wanted to start a business because we’re both independent thinkers, and over the years we grew tired of always working for someone else’s company or organization. We wanted to be our own boss and chase after our own dreams. Seeing the success of some craft breweries as that industry grew, we thought that making craft beverages might be an opportunity for us.
What attracted you to cider in general?
We always wanted to be connected to farming in some way. What we liked about cider is that it’s an agrarian beverage. It was a beverage for homesteaders and small farms in America before the nation industrialized and beer became the most common drink. We like that with cider, we can grow quality ingredients — apples — right here in Wisconsin, and we can source them from other local farms. In all of our experiments making fermented beverages, we really liked the ciders we made. At the same time, we did not like most of the ciders that were available on the market, since the majority of them tasted too sweet, artificial and soda-like for our palates. When we committed to cider as a business, we were putting faith in the assumption that other people would share our taste and would also like our ciders better than what’s currently on the market shelf.
What makes a great cider?
A great cider should capture your imagination. It should transport you to the orchard where the apples were grown. It should sparkle and hint at champagne, without being snooty. Good cider starts with good apples, and the personality of the apple varieties used should come through in the finished cider.
What’s it like running an orchard as well as a restaurant?
Our orchard is a place for experimentation. We’re growing about one hundred apple varieties, many of which are old cider apple varieties that are currently very rare and hard to find. We’re testing them out to see which ones grow best and make the best cider. Since opening our tasting room and restaurant, the orchard has largely been on the backburner since it’s not essential to the success of our business. We work in the orchard when we can and try to at least do the bare minimum to keep the trees alive and growing. In a way, we’re putting all our apple varieties to the test of minimal management. Those that can still grow and produce a nice crop of apples are probably the varieties we want to plant more of when we have more time for the orchard again in the future. In the meantime, we’ve really enjoyed developing relationships with other local apple growers who supply the apples for our cider.
What’s it like running a business while raising a family? What do you hope your kids learn from seeing you run Brix Cider?
Both the kids and the business need a lot of time and attention. We always want to give the kids our very best, and at the same time, we can’t afford to neglect the business. We end up seeing less of each other as parents because we trade off time with the kids and the business.
There are days when we’re simply exhausted, and it’s hard to give our best to either the kids or the business. On days like that, we just have to struggle through. On the whole though, we’re making ends meet, and we’re finding joy in the kids and in our work. Being so busy does make us appreciate the times when we are all together as a family.
Whatever path one chooses in life, there are sacrifices to be made. In choosing to start this business, we may have sacrificed the comfort and free time that come with a regular job. On the other hand, having started this business, we can feel proud as role models for our kids since we weren’t afraid to take a chance and to work hard to try to make a dream come true. There’s probably no right answer, and the kids will draw their own lessons over time. In either case, the best thing we can do as parents is to give our kids as much love as we can muster.
Why have you chosen the Barneveld and Mount Horeb area as your home base for your family and business?
We like our little home in the country. It’s beautiful and peaceful, and it keeps us in touch with nature, the changing seasons and the rhythms of the surrounding farms. It’s fun having the kids “help” with the orchard, and we hope they have fond memories of it as they grow.
Mount Horeb made sense for our business because it’s close to home, and it’s a growing community with an attractive downtown in a pleasant setting not too far from Madison. We figured we would get enough of a local crowd and enough folks just passing through to make things work.
What are your family’s favorite things to do in the fall?
We sure pick a lot of apples, and we do still find joy in it. You would think we’d get sick of going to orchards and picking apples since we do it all the time for the business, but sometimes we’ll bring kids to an orchard for fun too on a day off. We usually go through a few rounds of carving pumpkins each year, and playing in leaves never gets old. Fall is a great time for cooking too, and that’s another activity the kids love to “help” with.
What’s next for you?
We are proud of the cider and food we make at Brix now, but we know we can keep improving. This year we entered four ciders into the world’s largest cider and perry competition, and we came out of it with three silver medals and one bronze. We know that some of the newest ciders we’ve made are our best to date, better than those we entered this year, and we believe we can keep getting better. We’d like to come out of next year’s competition with even better results, hopefully making a name for ourselves as one of the best cideries in the world.
Photos by Katie Vaughn and Brix Cider.