How Uncle John's Cider Mill got its name

Uncle John is a real person: founder John Beck. The name came out of the work itself. When John and Carolyn Beck decided in the early 1970s to turn the family farm’s barn into a cider mill, relatives kept showing up to help. Everybody kept asking Uncle John what he wanted them to do next. The phrase stuck, and the family named the business after it.

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 the question every helper kept asking John, 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.