Lee Larsen Oral History Interview, February 20, 2017

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Okay, go ahead.

LEE LARSEN: My name is Lee Larsen. We're at Two Town Cider House. I was here in Corvallis, Oregon. I was born in 1985, and today is February 20th, 2017.

TEM: I wish I could give you a star. Great job. That's the trip up part. So you were born in Corvallis? Is that right?

LL: Yes. Good Samaritan. I was born in Good Samaritan.

TEM: Where did you go to elementary school?

LL: Elementary school, I went to Mountain View and Montessori.

TEM: What were some of the things that you liked to do when you were little?

LL: I really liked running around the forest, building forts, climbing trees, playing a lot of soccer. As I got a bit older, I got a lot more into skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding.

TEM: So Mountain View is the farthest north elementary school, is that right? I believe that's where you're from.

LL: Yeah.

TEM: So you guys were pretty close to the McDonald Forest area.

LL: Yeah, exactly. I grew up with the McDonald Forest in the back yard.

TEM: Okay, nice. So then you didn't go to high school for most of your high school here though. Where did you spend most of your high school years?

LL: Correct, so after going to Sheldon Middle School, we moved at the end of 8th grade, going into 9th grade to Barcelona, Spain. And I went to an international high school called Benjamin Franklin International School. It was somewhat center town in Barcelona, probably.

TEM: Did you speak Spanish?

LL: When I moved there, I knew all of the words that were the same in English as in Spanish. So no. No.

TEM: What about your family? Did they speak Spanish or was it kind of set up so that you were going to a school where you could learn in English?

LL: Yeah, so no one in my family really knew Spanish. My mom had been studying some. My dad definitely didn't know any Spanish. But he was working at Hewlett Packard at the time and got a job over in Barcelona, technically in Saint-Quebec, which is not Barcelona City, Barcelona probably, but it's a little city that's about a 30 minute train ride from Barcelona. And so from that job, that's what moved the whole family over there. At the time, my brother actually was just starting university at the University of Washington. But my sister and I, sorry, brother and sister, my sister and I went to live in Barcelona. And the way Benjamin Franklin worked is the predominant language was English, but there were more classes in different languages than just specifically like, oh, I'm going to take Spanish or French. And so it was kids from all over, as you would assume, kids from all over the globe that were in similar positions. But our parents went to work in Barcelona. They were kind of connected through the school.

TEM: That must have been quite a transition from Corvallis in the, doing my math, mid, no, late 90s? No, early 2000s.

LL: Late 90s.

TEM: Late 90s. I just showed up and couldn't do math on the fly. So quite a transition, though, even if you were kind of in a suburb of Barcelona, that's still a pretty high populated area.

LL: Yeah. You know, I mean, going from 45,000 people to 2 million is definitely a pretty big.

TEM: Yeah. Understatement.

LL: Yeah. No, but it was in the beginning, it was very difficult. You know, you're leaving all the friendships you've built up to date. And I think high school is probably for a lot of people kind of when those matter more than not. So the first six months were pretty rough, but realistically, after the initial shock wore off, it was amazing. Barcelona is an extremely vibrant city. I was really into skateboarding at the time. It's one of the most famous skateboarding cities in the world. And they have a very just vibrant, fun culture. Soccer is also extremely large in Europe and Spain in general. And so a lot of my key interests I can do there. So even though I didn't speak the language at all to start, there were a lot of other activities that really helped me get integrated because it was kind of another form of communication.

TEM: Yeah. So did you play soccer?

LL: I played a bit of soccer. Mostly I was skateboarding, but some of the friends I made, their parents had season tickets to come out. So we'd go and watch Barca play all the time, which was pretty amazing.

TEM: Yeah. What are some of your memories from that time about the stuff that you liked to do? I guess I'm thinking about food, drink, the culture side of it. What are some of those high points?

LL: Yeah. So I mean, I think in general, just charcuterie, cured meats, jamon serrano, iberico. The Mediterranean diet is fantastic. I really, really love just small little tapas that you just eat all the time. You know, a lot of the places you go to get a drink and they bring you free tapas to go with your drink. So you can kind of hang out for quite a while. It's usually lower alcohol beer. And it's just a very pleasant environment. As far as where cider sort of came into the picture while I was over there, there were areas, it's mostly in the northern region where cider has kind of a very large grasp on culture. Not so much in Barcelona, but there still is a significant amount of cider. And that's really where I found out about cider, which at the time I didn't really think that much of. It was another interesting beverage. It was fun to drink.

The beer in Spain is not the best. The wine is pretty fantastic. And it's especially so cheap. Same with the cider. You can go and buy a reserve bottle. At that time it was still in pesetas – it hadn’t transferred to the euro yet while we were there. And it was the equivalent of maybe a dollar for a really nice bottle of wine. A pretty decent bottle of wine. Which is crazy to think about. For someone that's used to going to Safeway or a winery around here where it doesn't even exist. My dad had been big into winemaking for probably at least 15 years prior to us moving there. Him and some of his buddies had always joked about starting a winery, but it was definitely a thing that piqued his interest. He was in heaven over there going to all the different wineries. And being in Europe, everything being so close, we'd do road trips to France and elsewhere. We'd stop and get super special bottles of wine. Which was always really fun because I'd get to go along for a ride and try all these wines. But when I first moved there, it wasn't really for better or for worse. There was no actual drinking age in Spain. It was more like if your head's over the counter. And then as soon as I turned 14, it was technically 14. When I turned 16, it was technically 16. So I was kind of the last.

TEM: You were chasing the drinking age. So your sister came back and started a cider magazine, is that right?

LL: Yeah, that is correct. When we all moved back, which was my senior year of high school in 2003, she ended up actually the next year going to Japan. She lived there for a while. And then she moved back to Spain, to Oviedo, which is in the northern Basque region. And she actually still lives in Spain. So she I don't think is ever going to come back. But yeah, when she was there and specifically living in Oviedo, she got really excited about the cider culture. And so she started an online magazine. And that was right around 2010. So similar time to when we started. We started in March 2010. I don't remember exactly when she launched the online magazine. But it was fun because we kind of got to throw ideas back and forth. And she would give me amazing insight on what people were doing in Oviedo, northern region of Spain. So we got to go and visit Pepe from Piñera. And we went to Menendez, one of these larger cider producers in the area, and did private tours.

TEM: This is before starting Two Towns?

LL: This was just after starting Two Towns, which was very cool.

TEM: Yeah. Were they similar to vineyards where they would be doing things on site and have a tasting room in the middle of an orchard? Or were they more city-based, like with a tap house or all together?

LL: They were definitely more rural. I mean, it was more Spain, which is pretty much that whole area is. I mean, there's definitely cities, but they don't. It would be different in that they weren't necessarily all like estate orchards. So they usually do have their own orchard, but a lot of the fruit, there's only so many specific cultivars of apples that are grown. And everyone basically knows what they are in those regions because cider plays such a vibrant part of the culture and such an important part. And they basically have days where you just bring whatever apples you have, and they'll weigh them and they'll take them. So the whole community is kind of part of this, you know, I guess, collecting of all the fruit and the bounty that exists in the area so the producers can make the cider. Their way of making cider is, I would say, very, very different than what you might see here. You know, I think Europe in general, because tradition dates so far back as opposed to America where everything is relatively new, they kind of have their ways of doing things, and there's not really a lot of science behind it, to be completely honest. It's just kind of like, yeah, we always press it and press it for the same amount of time. We do the same thing, and we hope it turns out the same, which is very cool and great.

But it was very interesting to see, for instance, when we went and toured Piñera, one of these fairly small cider producers in the area, I was asking him in Spanish, I was like, "Well, what yeast do you use?" And my Spanish was a bit rusty at the time, so I wasn't sure if it was coming across right. And he says, "I have no idea what you're talking about." I was like, "Okay, let me try to rephrase that." So I'd ask again, and he's like, "I have no idea what you're talking about." I was like, "Okay, well, how do you make the alcohol?" He's like, "Oh, the apples do it." I was like, "Okay, so they just use whatever yeast is on the apples." And then I asked him, you know, I was just asking basic questions, like, "Well, how do you ferment at the temperature you want to ferment?" He goes, "Oh, it always stays at 15 degrees Celsius." And I was curious at how that was possible, because they have very large fermentation vessels, and it's an exothermic process. And he was like, "No, no, it's always the same." I was just like, "Oh, yep, perfect." But it was cool. You know, we got a sample of all the ciders, and, you know, they call them al naturale. And basically that just means that they press it, pump it into the tank, it ferments, settles out. No filtration, no carbonation, no nothing. And then, I don't know if you've ever seen them pour it, but when you're sampling it, either you pour it over your head so it falls, and a little bit of dissolved CO2 in solution comes out of solution, so it kind of gives, you know, there is some aromatics that kind of burst out. Or if you're taking it off a tank, you literally hold your glass out, you know, about as far as you can, open the tap over here so it shoots, hits the corner of the glass. Which is pretty cool. And one of the other funnier or more funny moments when we were over there was, I was asking Pepe, I was like, "Well, you know, when you're doing this all the time, I imagine when someone gets sick, everyone gets sick, and he goes, "Yeah, you know, no one's ever sick. We're always all the same." And so I thought that was a pretty good comment.

TEM: Maybe, yeah, you're all sick at the same time, so you don't seem sick.

LL: Right, exactly. No one's actually sick, everyone's just how they are.

TEM: Yeah, how they are. So when you came back, graduated from Crescent Valley, right?

LL: Yep. Or, sorry, CHS, Corvallis High School.

TEM: Oh, okay, okay. I think I must have mixed. So which of the three of you went to Crescent Valley?

LL: Dave went to Crescent Valley and Aaron went to Crescent Valley. Technically, based on what my parents said, I should have gone to Crescent Valley, but I decided to go to CHS.

TEM: Was there like a rivalry, like a high school rivalry between you three?

LL: No, not really. No, definitely after high school, going to OSU and U of O, now there's where more of the rivalry comes in, but on the high school level, definitely no.

TEM: So did you think about, when you were thinking about high school, did you, or thinking about college, was fermentation something that you thought about as a potential course of study?

LL: Yeah, at the end of high school, very beginning of college was kind of when I started getting into the idea of home brewing and I thought that was really cool and I made wine with my dad a couple times. And so that was something I definitely wanted to pursue. I don't think I, at that time, thought it was anything more than a long-term kind of dream of something I might like to do. And as college progressed, I started taking some classes. I was, and my focus wasn't business, that's what I'd done. I grew up, I'd kind of always been buying and selling things on eBay and my dad had always been teaching me about the stock market and I liked math and so I did the finance side of business, but I also took a lot of classes, some with Dave, some with other friends, in fermentation sciences because I was very interested in it.

TEM: Yeah, it seems like it's probably a hard major to drop into, from what I've heard about.

LL: Yeah, it's, I think the hardest part about it was most of my business bacc core, and I'm sure it's similar for other degrees, the bacc core didn't line up very well. And so I was taking several, it probably took ten or so classes, and I was thinking about getting a degree in it, but then I realized it didn't really make a lot of sense because I was going to have to spend so much time doing the bacc core, I should just finish my degree in finance, and then if I wanted to go back and do something else, I could do that then, but for the time being. And I also, I'm a much more practical person, I like doing things as far as studying in the class environment. I'm not the best student, I'm much better at actually doing things.

TEM: So when you graduated, you graduated in 2009?

LL: Yep.

TEM: So was there, were you and Aaron already talking at that point in 2009 about Two Towns? Or a business, I guess you probably didn't have the name immediately.

LL: Yeah, it was shortly after, but when I graduated, that wasn't really on the horizon. We, I grew up, so my brother, who's four years older than Aaron, was the same age, are best friends. So I grew up with Aaron, I've known Aaron for 27 of the 31, maybe 26 years. But we hadn't spoken in quite a while, however, the last time I did see Aaron was when we were living in Barcelona. He actually came out to visit, and I kind of took him all around town, went out and tried cider, tried wine. And that was a really fun bonding experience. And then, you know, we kept in touch and talked to each other every year, but it wasn't more frequent than that really. And then in 2009, actually, in the summer, and I had graduated earlier on in the year, was my brother's wedding. And at my brother's wedding, I had made a bunch of beer and some cider for the wedding. And that was when we really started talking about wanting to do something within the, I guess, fermentation world. Whether that was beer, cider, or wine. So cider was definitely a strong focus, but at that point, I think really we were just excited to maybe branch out and do something on our own, specifically with fermentation.

TEM: How many cideries were in Oregon when you started?

LL: I think there was three other ciders, I think. Because there's Blue Mountain, Wandering Aengus, and [unintelligible].

TEM: So we are almost at 20 minutes. How do you feel about time?

LL: Let's go another four, five minutes.

TEM: Okay. So I'm curious about how you learned. At that point, you could go on the internet. Obviously, there's a homebrew shop here. There are homebrew clubs. How did you educate yourself about how to come up with new things, I guess? Not just the, "I take this and this and put it together and then alcohol happens." But that kind of, the creative side of it all.

LL: So I think a lot of the strengths Two Towns has had in general is we have a very diverse group of people all working together. Dave, for instance, his background in fermentation science, getting a master's in enology from OSU, is just as far as book smarts is invaluable because he knows how to fix things very quickly and he has connections to the right people to help figure it out. Also, Dave and I, we always kind of laugh that we're winemakers with a crafty mindset. I think that makes a big difference. To answer your point, we're always trying to learn or try new things and kind of push the bounds of what cider maybe can be and maybe historically has been. It's a really cool time to be in cider because that framework doesn't currently exist. The history of cider in the U.S. is well known, but a lot of that knowledge has been lost over time and now it's really the resurgence and people are starting to redefine what different styles of cider are, how they taste, what quality standards should be, and what crazy wild things can you do. A lot of that culture is coming directly from the craft beer industry. The craft beer industry has done an amazing job really continuing to try to innovate and make new products and very minute changes or extreme changes, but it's incredible. I think we have a similar approach in that sense where we're just always trying to learn, try new things, and experiment, experiment, experiment.

TEM: You referenced history. Obviously, I think a lot about history. I'm curious, as one of the people who was on the fore edge, the forefront, do you think about your impact on what people will write about and how people will know the beginning or resurgence in this industry in Oregon?

LL: We definitely think about it to some extent. I think from our perspective, the most impactful thing to do is just to use the highest quality ingredients we can, work with people as locally as we can, and make the best product we can with every step of the way. I think just like most products, you have to start out with the highest quality ingredients because the only thing you can do from there is mess it up. If you don't start out with the best, you can't make the best. Then from there, every step of the way, it's important to make sure you're taking care of that product and guiding it along the way. Now, stylistically, sure, you can do some wild stuff and you can do these other things, but in the same way, you want the wild thing to do what you want the wild thing to do. I think just making sure that people are actually staying true to the craft, I think part of the reason, aside from prohibition, why cider didn't come back sooner is because most of the cider that was prevalent in the grocery store, it's not even really cider. It's like sugar or corn syrup with Chinese concentrate blended with Jolly Rancher flavoring. It's so far removed from what actual cider is that people are thinking they're drinking cider, but they're not. I think it's really just making sure that people are drinking cider that's actually made from apples, and not only just any apples, but hopefully apples that for that style of cider should be used in that style of cider.

That's not to say that all of the apples in every cider every day need to be these traditional French and English bitter sweets. Those create a specific style of cider, just like you wouldn't use roasted barley, probably in an IPA. Now, you might if you're making Cascadian dark ale or something, but that's again a different style. You wouldn't add two pounds of hops per barrel in a lager probably. I think just helping those distinctions and the styles exist and actually being true to the style, not just using some syrup or random flavoring or concentrates or whatever else. I think if you think about the wine industry, if you went and bought a Pinot Noir, and someone told you it was made from Pinot Noir concentrate and Pinot Noir flavoring, you probably would be pretty disappointed and never buy that Pinot Noir again. I think if there is anything that we are trying to push, it's just that it should be made from apples and a specific apple.

TEM: And If you're going to experiment, then you experiment, but you start with intentions, I guess.

LL: You can push the boundaries, but now it’s something else. It can be great, it can be whatever it is, it's just a whole other class. It's something else. It's not a wine cooler.

TEM: As you were talking about Jolly Rancher, I was thinking about wine coolers. I always like to ask people what it is that they feel proud about in the work that they do. What makes you feel proud at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of whatever time frame? What makes you proud about the work you do?

LL: I think I love everything we're doing in the cider space. I really love fermenting. I think for me, the biggest thing is just the people. It is an amazing feeling to work with good friends, new friends, and create an environment where people honestly feel comfortable, I hope. I think if people cared more about the people they work with, the world would be a much better place.

TEM: That's a nice ending. Thank you.