We recently connected with Peter Clausen and have shared our conversation below.

Peter, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?

I think I am unfortunately stuck being a business owner for the rest of my life. There is a certain sense of freedom that comes with steering your own ship, being a master of your own successes and failures, and I don’t think I would be able to find personal fulfilment at a regular job without that.

I’ve owned a winery and cidery with my best friend for the last five years, and I think personal happiness in relation to our business is something we joke about a lot. It’s a tough business in the best of times, and we are certainly not in the best of times this past year. Americans in general are drinking less wine and less of anything than ever before, our economy is suffering, people are hurting financially, and we’ve had a lot of regional disasters like the LA fires at the beginning of the year. We’re super proud of the products we are creating and putting out in to the world, but it’s tough to find that sense of happiness when your immediate consumer economy isn’t able to care about luxury goods because we’re all worried about catching on fire, being kidnapped by federal agents, going hungry, and flooding all in the same calendar year.

So, yes, I do fantasize about having a regular job. Specifically, I fantasize about becoming a librarian, because I love the library. It’s one of the few places you can go to that genuinely wants to help you. They don’t want your money, they’re not trying to get your data, they have no ulterior motives, they just want to give you books, information, arts, social programs, and community. What a beautiful thing to be a part of! As an aside, you should all get library cards and go as often as you can. I think in another life I would have loved that as a career.

However… if I stopped doing what I’m doing, I know next time harvest season comes around and I’m not waking up at 3AM to drive a shitty U-Haul box truck to the middle of nowhere to pick grapes, spend the next 18 hours processing them and stressing out about every little detail of their chemistry, I’d feel a giant empty space in my soul. Taking something from idea to reality is such a satisfying thing, especially when the beginning is something that grew out of the ground. Even though the whole process is difficult, physically challenging, and at many times mentally and emotionally taxing, that sense of satisfaction is something more powerful and deep than any sense of personal happiness I’d find elsewhere.

One of my fondest memories of the last five years was the first time I saw someone I didn’t know order a can of our cider at a bar, take a sip, and say, “Oh that’s really good” to the bartender. I think it’s hard for people to see beverages as art in the same way music or paintings are, but just as much of my soul and heart went in to each can as any song or canvas.

So am I happy as a business owner? I guess it’s complicated. It’s not great when the rent is past due, you have 8 hours of accounting to do but only 1 hour to do it, and the majority of your customers aren’t paying you on time. But does seeing a stranger genuinely enjoy our stuff make all of that general business nonsense worth it? Absolutely.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve been in the alcohol industry for the last 15 years of my life, primarily on the production side. People often ask me if I went to school for it, and I semi-seriously say, “no, I just drank a lot in school and that really paid off.” I have a degree in International Studies, which is really useful for trivia nights, but not much else. When I graduated, I was living in North Carolina, and work was kind of hard to come by. I ended up taking a bartending job at a local winery in their tasting room, and I got really interested in wine. My dad’s side of my family had been farmers for several generations, so I really resonated with the agricultural element of wine, and I thought it was really cool to see an industry that really valued the specific places things are grown and where they come from.

I ended up pestering the winemaking crew at that place enough that they let me start helping them on bottling days, and eventually I realized that I wanted to make wine my career. California seemed like the place to be for wine, so I moved to Los Angeles where I had some family to crash with for a while.

I ended up working at a lot of places – a big, nationally distributed cider company, small craft breweries, a distillery, and of course some wineries. I met Andrew, my business partner, at one of the cider companies we were working at. We both had wanted to start our own thing, and after spending the pandemic working side by side, we decided it was the right time to do it. I think it was also helpful that we were both self-taught, and we have similar ways of thinking. When we’re working together, we often communicate complex ideas by grunting and pointing – we often joke that we have melded minds and don’t have to speak verbally to talk. It’s a pretty cool way to work with someone!

We named our winery Friendly Noise after the sound of a crowded bar. We wanted to emphasize making products that were meant to be enjoyed, and not necessarily “pondered” as many snooty wines are. As any winery with integrity would, we make all of our wines and ciders with real grapes and apples, and we make it ourselves.

I’m not sure it’s something we’ve done on purpose, but we tend to use grape varietals that are not super popular or well known, and I’d say the same thing about our ciders, although no one really knows anything about cider for the most part. Process-wise, we only ferment things using the natural yeast present on the wines, and while we do incorporate modern winemaking techniques to make a tasty end product, we do try to let the very high quality fruit we work with speak for itself. We often say that our goal is to “fuck up good fruit as little as possible.”

Also, and it’s not something that we really communicate to our customers often, we have done this independently, meaning we have taken no investors or crowdfunding money. It was important to us to have complete control and freedom with the things we’re making. We both have worked at jobs where investor money had overruled common sense and good ethics, and we value the purity of being able to operate with our own set of values intact.

Basically, if you want real wine and cider made by real people that you can feel good about bringing to a party, Friendly Noise is your company.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Most of our business is selling our wines and ciders to wholesale customers, primarily bars, restaurants, and specialty shops. Something we felt was super important when we get a customer that puts us on their menu long-term is to support them in return. That means a few things to us – most importantly, we make sure we always have stock for them. We’d rather make our money back on our products slowly if it means we can be a consistent menu item for a bar or restaurant. We’re a small operation, there are literally thousands of options out there they could replace us with, so the very least we can do is make sure if they take a chance on us, we hold up our end of the bargain. It can be tempting to take money faster by selling to as many spots as possible, but staying on a menu long-term is great for your relationship with a business, and it also means that actual customers get to see you as a consistent staple, not a random blip on the radar.

We also just go hang out at the places that carry our stuff. That sounds like a really obvious thing to do, but a lot of producers don’t do it. These places are supporting our hopes and dreams, the least we can do is go by and say hello. Plus, it’s not really twisting our arm to go get a drink and some snacks at any given time.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Uncultivated by Andy Brennan really changed my life. Andy Brennan owns Aaron Burr Cidery in Upstate New York, and makes some of the most interesting, pure cider I think you can possibly find in America. His book, while ostensibly about cider, speaks a lot to the relationship between art and capitalism, and to put it colloquially, how to be a real dude. I’d recommend it to anyone starting any kind of creative pursuit where money might be involved.

I read it as I was building up the courage to spend my meager life savings to start a winery, and it spoke to a lot of the questions and tensions I was having internally about balancing a creative pursuit that would also be my job while also navigating my own personal distaste of investor culture.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.friendlynoise.com
• Instagram: @friendlynoise
• Facebook: @friendlynoise