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The beverage side of the foodie scene

Steve Corman holds the Cider Smash.

Steve Corman holds the Cider Smash.
Channon Hodge/CNN
Led only by Johanna's vision and their shared work ethic, the Cormans tapped into an untapped demand for grownup, sophisticated non-alcoholic drinks -- both by customers who don't drink alcohol and foodies who want interesting drinks.
Customers told them, "We've never been able to go out to a bar and actually feel like we're having a nice drink too," said Johanna. "We always get seltzer with cranberry or something like that."
Although it appeared to come out of nowhere, Vena's was really an outlet for old-timey cooking and canning recipes Johanna had been tinkering with for years.
She had found mention of apple syrup in an old cookbook while running the family apple farm in nearby Hiram, Maine, and she decided to try to create it from excess apple cider they made on the farm. (Her brother Billy Johnson is now the third generation of the family running Apple Acres Farm, but the family has lived in Maine for 11 generations, since before the American Revolution.)
"Two months later, we bottled it, we corked and waxed the top," Johanna said. "We're at the old Portland public market and within an hour, people were coming to, we're just selling tastes and bottled. Two or three people said, 'Okay, we want to be your distributor. We want to sell this all.' Within an hour!"
That's when she invented her first drink, the cider smash, around 1989. Now a Vena's best seller, it's "equal amounts of cider syrup, fresh lemon juice and bourbon," she said. "It's the easiest cocktail in the world, and tart, sweet, beautiful."
For Vena's booze-free bar, Johanna wanted real ingredients, no artificially flavored anything, whether she made the products in her commercial kitchen or bought them from the few producers making bitters, shrubs (drinking vinegars) and syrups that she liked.
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