He also helped develop Coopersmith’s Pub and Brewery in downtown Fort Collins, Colorado. “I’m an old beer guy,” he says. “I got interested in cider twenty-plus years ago. Kathe, my wife, and I went to the Western Slope in the early 90s looking to open a cider company, but the timing wasn’t right.”
The early 90s was when craft brewing was getting going, and craft ciders were few and far between, according to the Pages. During that time they were frequent beer-curious visitors in the Northwest. They discovered endless parallels between the various flavor profiles in beers and ciders, and one can only imagine that these trips inspired Colorado Cider’s Grasshop-ah dry hopped cider, often described as “a gateway cider for beer lovers.”
"In 2009 we looked into [opening a cider company] again and took some more trips to the Northwest,” says Page. “We got to know some people in Oregon and Washington who were making craft ciders, and we made the assessment that it would finally take off in the United States.”