How Uncle John's Cider Mill got its name (it's not a guy named John)

There’s no Uncle John behind Uncle John’s Cider Mill. The name came out of the work itself. When the family decided in the early 1970s to turn an old cattle barn north of St. Johns into a cider mill, relatives kept showing up to help knock it together, and the line they kept hollering across the barn was, “Uncle John, whaddaya want me to do next?” It stuck. They named the business after the joke.

The farm itself is a lot older than the mill. The Becks have worked this ground off US-127, about seven miles north of St. Johns, for five generations. They were growing fruit and vegetables and barely scraping by when they bet on cider and doughnuts instead — and that turned out to be the move. By fall, the place became one of those Michigan autumn rituals: the smell of warm cider doughnuts, the press squeezing local apples into juice, families wandering the orchard with paper sacks.

The barn next door has had its own second life. Built long ago to store and pack fresh apples, it was rebuilt in the early 2000s when Mike Beck — the fifth generation on the land — looked at all that fresh-pressed juice and saw something his elders hadn’t. He started fermenting it. With a federal grant for turning farm crops into finished products, he launched a hard cider operation in that old packing barn, making him the first generation of the family in the booze business even as he’s the fifth working the orchard.

So the place is really three things stacked on one farm: a sweet-cider mill named after a barn-raising wisecrack, an orchard a single family has held for over a century, and one of Michigan’s pioneer hard-cider makers. Come October, the parking lot off 127 fills with people who think they’re just here for a doughnut.