NOVEMBER 2026 16 with Jackson Thorn, Co-founder of Six Byrd Cider 3619 E. Indian School Road • sixbyrd.com In the Kitchen T he Thorn family has come a long way from making cider in the family’s garage. From sweeping sawdust in his dad’s furniture shop to crafting ciders in Tempe and Arcadia, Jackson Thorn has followed his entrepreneurial spirit to Six Byrd Cider, where there’s always a new flavor brewing. You’re an Arizona native? I’m an Arcadia native! I grew up in Arcadia proper and went to school at Prince of Peace, Hopi, Ingleside and Arcadia High School. My dad owned a furniture company called Thornwood over by Tovrea Castle. That was my playground. I started working with my family at 5 years old, sweeping sawdust. What did you want to be growing up? I think growing up under an entrepreneur, the goal was to work with my dad. I had other side jobs, like, I worked as a lifeguard at Paradise Valley Country Club and some other sales roles. But the ultimate goal was to work with my dad and then maybe take over the business one day. Unfortunately, we lost the company in the big crash of 2008. I graduated high school in 2011 and wasn’t really thinking about work, I was heading to the next chapter of my life. I was setting myself up to be in a sales role. I like to chat! Tell us about the journey from sweeping to cider. I always knew I wanted to do something for myself. Out of college, I wanted to work for a brewery. I interviewed with Phoenix Beer Co. for one of my last projects in college and got to know the owner over there; I basically asked, ‘How do I start a brewery?’ I had my eye set on doing that, so out of college I tried working for New Belgium, Ballast Point, Bootleggers in LA… I got close but they wanted me to get some sales experience and then ‘maybe we’ll hire you down the road.’ I reached out to Santa Fe Brewing, and the owner emailed me back saying ‘don’t work for a brewery just because you think it’s cool.’ And that lit a fire and I decided I was going to do my own thing. After graduation – I was going for business communications – I worked for a tech company and got some sales experience for a few years. My cousins Jared and Eric, at the time, were making cider in their home kitchen and they invited me to come check it out. One day we decided to level up and get serious. What’s the ‘home’ process like? You can go buy a gallon of apple juice – we used to go to Whole Foods – and buy some yeast at a home brew store. Drop the yeast in the apple juice, let the yeast eat the sugar and turn into alcohol and CO2. Those are the two byproducts. Cider 101: yeast eats sugar, you’ll see it bubbling at the top, ethanol, boom. How long from yeast to drinkability? Temperature is what’s going to change that answer. I think at room temp it’ll take about two weeks. If you’re doing a cold fermentation, it’ll take a month or two. The colder the yeast is, the longer it takes to eat the sugar. It slows it down and if you do it like that, you’ll end up with typically nicer notes in your cider – but not everyone has three months to put out a product. If you use, for example, a Saison yeast, you want it at 90 degrees – the yeast will eat the sugar in three to four days. It’s quick. The flavor depends on the yeast. Another example is white wine yeast. It’ll eat all of the sugar from the apples. We have a drink called pure liquid gold that is bone-dry – zero residual sugars. Are there classes or a certification for cider-making? I’m sure there are, probably in California, Oregon, maybe Colorado, there are programs people can attend. It wasn’t on my mind when I first started. If we could go back in time, that might’ve been a good thing to check out [ laughs ]. We’re doing good, but maybe a couple years to focus just on learning cider might have been helpful – especially in the beginning of starting a business in the cider industry. Go back to the beginning. How did you get into the biz? The only reason I got into cider is because my cousins have such a passion for it. They were fermenting apple juice, trying different yeast strains, seeing where it lands. The early adoptions of the cider industry weren’t great; it wasn’t that exciting to me at that moment. I decided to give it a shot, and we were making cider out of my uncle’s garage near The Henry on Camelback. We would make them in three-to-five-gallon batches, messing around with every kind of yeast strain, and then – backsweetening is the term – adding in prickly pear or pineapple. So you take out all the sugar and then naturally add it back in with the fruit. That’s when I started getting more interested in it. Our first cider, the prickly pom, resulted from us trying to make a prickly pear work, since we’re Arizona natives. Prickly pear by itself is good but it’s not great, so we combined it with all these different flavors until one day we grabbed a pomegranate, blended it in with little tube testers… my uncle drank the first batch [ laughs ]. It was so good. It disappeared quickly. At that point, I was really into it – it was the best cider I’d ever had, so I was now exploring other ciders around the Valley. What’s the story behind the name? Originally, we launched our business as Crush Craft Cider. We had a cease and desist order from a guy named Kevin out in California. His trademark is Crush & Craft. He was not a nice guy – he deleted our Instagram and Facebook account and sent in his trademark to Meta before we could change the brand name. We were pretty upset, so I threw my middle fingers up in the air and said two Byrds for Kevin. Jared and Eric did the same. We said “Six Byrds for Kevin!” After the fact I joked that we should be called Six Byrd Cider Company and it stuck! How do you come up with the flavors? We have a new flavor every week. Most places have 12 ciders year-round, or distribution places have four ciders to choose from. For October, we released pumpkin pie a la mode; everything is seasonal based. We’ve got the classic

17 NOVEMBER 2026 My favorite thing is when people come back and say, ‘wow, this is really good.’ Open your mind! Try it! prickly pom and hazy apple (also born in my uncle’s garage) – those two are year-round. Everything else is available for a week, maybe two, sometimes for the month. Spiced apple is our intro to fall: cardamom, cinnamon, clove, allspice and apple. I’m a chai guy, so we have a chai cider that’s made with Teaspressa. We also do a lavender flavor with her. We have a 988 blueberry pie a la mode that we do with OHSO every year; that one we do for suicide awareness in September. Our apple pie a la mode flavor won a World Beer Cup award last year. We’re always rotating an ‘a la mode’ flavor. We’re doing a lemon berry crisp flavor collab with the Queen Creek Olive Mill – they’re opening a store in Arcadia soon. We’re doing a maple bar flavor – syrup and apple go well together. Cranberry spice; our hot mulled ciders are coming out in November. We start out with a gallon batch, just to make sure the flavor is there, and then bump it up to one barrel. Then 10 barrels. At any one time, we’ll make three to six different varieties. What do you say to those who aren’t a fan of the drink…yet? Just try it! People sometimes get stuck in a mindset of ‘I don’t know what it is, it’s just for girls, it’s a sugar bomb.’ There are negative connotations against cider where it starts off on the wrong foot and people decide they don’t like it before they even try it. Six Byrd does a lot of festivals and a group will come up and they always say, ‘I hate cider, I don’t want a sample,’ and the wife or girlfriend will take one and the guy will take a sip as they’re walking away… and it’s my favorite thing, because they’ll come back and say, ‘wow, this is really good.’ [ laughs ]. It’s an uphill battle. Open your mind, try it! Where have your adventures taken you? It’s been eight years now, on this cider adventure. I do like to travel a lot, and when I do, I look up ‘cidery near me’ and I’ll try the local product. We go to Oregon every year. I was just in Denver. I went to Stem, which is owned by the same group as Formation Brewing, and got a tour with their cider maker. It’s a good way to learn and network. Every weekend we’re doing some type of event, whether it’s a tap takeover or a festival… I’ll be at Taste of AZ, a whiskey festival at Sloan Park, events at the AZ Science Center. We love to make connections with our people. What is one item during production you find yourself using all the time? Apples! [ laughs ] Who inspires you? I’m going with the easy answer: my dad. Growing up and seeing him go to work every day. We didn’t take weekends off. Saturdays and Sundays we would go to Thornwood and we would work. Seeing him work so hard with something he was passionate about was instilled in me. It’s why I’m such a hard worker and passionate about my favorite things. When you’re not working, what are you doing? I’m 34, so weddings, baby showers, two-year-olds’ birthday parties [ laughs ]. When I’m not attending events, I like to travel to Oregon for golf and fishing. I go every year. Travel, golf and fishing are the top three. As far as everyday things, I like to garden. Dig It, Grow It, Share It is a community garden around 27 th Street. I’m the Number 2 over there [ laughs ] – I have a main plot and a couple smaller plots. Every day after work, I go over there and putter around in the garden. Suggest a few spots that a Valley newcomer should go. Sunny’s Lounge is one of my favorite spots! I love Pizza to the Rescue, and Tandy’s and Mixela – I go for wine, tapas and crudo. Their sushi is fantastic. My local hang is Tombstone Brewing. They make great beer. What’s next for Six Byrd Cider? Making a shelf stable product – it costs quite a bit, so there’s an investment there for some new equipment that’ll allow us to work with more stores that keep it out, like Total Wine, Trader Joe’s, etc. It’ll allow us to grow. After that we’ll probably have to work with a distributor, which is big news. We’re excited! PHOENIX COUNTRY DAY