Journey North Cider Co wins Peter Mitchell Award for Educational Excellence

A local business in the M.D. of Bonnyville has won a prestigious award for cider.

Journey North Cider Co has been selected as the recipient of the Peter Mitchell Award for Educational Excellence.

Each year at CiderCon, CINA announces the recipient of the Peter Mitchell Award for Educational Excellence. This award, in honor of Peter Mitchell’s influence on cider and perry production education in North America and worldwide, recognizes a cider producer who demonstrates a commitment to professional development through education, training, and industry engagement.

“This year’s award goes to a company, rather than an individual. Congratulations to @journeynorthcider in Bonnyville, Alberta,” CiderCon stated on social media. “As a new cider business, Journey North has demonstrated a company culture that supports personal and professional development through training and education. They even sought out and received public funding to offset the tuition. All of the cider staff is a CINA Certified Cider Maker, and the whole team has an engaged, contagiously enthusiastic approach to learning and networking with their peers.”

Jeremy Bourboing is one of the owners of Journey North.

I am beyond honoured for Journey North being not only considered but selected to win this award and so proud of our team who have completed their level one Cider certifications this year,” Bourboing told Lakeland Connect. “This award is generally given to a single person for their advocacy in cider education but it was Journey North as a whole that was given it for our commitment to educating our team.”

Journey North Cider Co is located in the MD of Bonnyville on Highway 28, just south of the golf course, and was opened in October 2020.

“Since inception in 2019 we have planted over 2300 trees and buses for a variety of fruits like apples, pears, plums, cherries, saskatoons, haskaps,” Bourboing said. “We have a cider-making facility on-premise where we do all our own fermentation, blending, canning, bottling, and kegging. We’re also a fully licensed restaurant with a unique menu to this area, focusing on small plates/share plates and things to pair with cider, as well the menu changes seasonally and we have four rotating beer taps with local brewers like Cold Lake Brewing and Distilling, Fat Unicorn, Beaver River Brewing, Piston Broke and Lakeland Brew Co (in bottles).”

Journey North Cider Co make all kind of ciders to tickle your fancy and this involves experimentation in new varieties.

“We make so many and constantly rolling out and experimenting new varieties,” Bourboing said. “We have our two flagships (you will see them in the printed cans) of the Dry and Crisp ciders, but then we roll out new ones all the time. We always have Cranberry and it will be in cans for the first time starting this weekend, we just launched our Mythic cider which was a fun partnership/homage to another local business Mythik Games (You’ll be blown away by the colour of this cider) and then on tap right now we have a Peach Bourbon cider (for the people who ‘don’t like cider’ but drink whisky…), apple Pear, Blackberry, Wassail (our winter spice).”

Last summer, Journey North Cider Co had a cool line up and this year will be even better coming in May.

“Journey North also has a rental space we call the ‘cidersuite’ – it’s more loungy, has big screens and a conference room – its excellent,” Bourboing concluded.

Congrats on your award from Lakeland Connect.