An ebullient account of an extraordinary roller coaster of a life

Review by Janet Cohen Mayne

“I am, first and foremost, a salesman and an entrepreneur... I’m goodness and piracy rolled into one. I’ve dared and dazzled, dipped and dangled, danced and deviled. I want to laugh and sing and say it all to you.” So begins Jeff House's ebullient account of an extraordinary roller coaster of a life, which is great fun to read.

There’s plenty here about the nitty-gritty of creating a company, but I enjoyed the book for the dramas, the triumphs and the treachery, and the glimpses into the psychology of an entrepreneur – his delight in the wheeling and dealing, his willingness to take risks, his joy in trouncing the competition, and his determination to pursue his dreams. 

In 2021, at the age of 71, Jeff triumphantly sold his business, the California Cider Company (CCC), with its ACE cider brand, for $53 million. It was a momentous achievement for a man who'd arrived in the US in 1977 with nothing in his pockets but lint.

Back then his first task was to gain residency, and  spotting a gap in the market, Jeff set up a business importing craft beers from the UK, thus creating a job for himself that no US citizen wanted to do – a key criterion for securing the right to stay. Soon afterwards, he got the coveted green card and began his career in the beverage industry.

His original beers came from Fullers. It took a great deal of persuasion and some nifty re-engineering to get this traditional brewery to put its London Pride into cans and in the quantities acceptable to the US market. Fullers Extra Special Bitter, ESB, followed and was a winner – testament to Jeff’s entrepreneurial skills.

Jeff’s redoubtable wife Angela played a huge part in his success. As a strikingly beautiful actress and model, she’d been in the original Star Wars movie as one of a pair of intergalactic hookers – the Tonnika Sisters. She had, and still has, quite a following. It was she, dressed in tight black lycra and a Fullers baby-doll top, who attracted the attention of the beer magnate Peter Coors at a Las Vegas beer festival. The encounter led to the first big distribution deal, although Angela admitted she’d never heard of Coors before that!

Inevitably, there were setbacks. One of the earliest blows came when Fullers changed their importer to Grolsch. Having introduced the brand to the US and nurtured it for 10 years, Jeff saw this a cruel betrayal, and he had to be led from the room, “crying like a baby”. It triggered one of the bouts of depression that could floor him for months and sometimes years at a time. One of the most remarkable things about the book is Jeff’s openness about his illness as he recounts how he’s undergone 50 courses of  ECT therapy before deciding to manage with medications.

It’s impressive to read how Angela and their sons kept the business afloat while he was out of action -- and it’s just as well they did. When Jeff bounced back to take the helm, the cider market was exploding, and new opportunities beckoned. He was already importing cider from Taunton, and when that contract folded, the compensation he negotiated was the seed money he used to start making cider himself.

Cue for more wheeler-dealing, with trips around the hills of California courting apple growers and finding premises. After much hassle, ACE cider production finally began in the 1990s, proudly using local apples. A pub with a micro cidery and music venue followed. After that, from 2010 onwards, the ACE brand grew by 20% a year winning accolades and prizes.

Jeff’s a great believer in luck. For example, the Covid pandemic hit the business hard. Workers fell sick, production days were lost, and the cellar crew refused to enter the building unless the plant was fumigated. At the same time  bars, restaurants, and amusement parks were forced to close, key outlets accounting for 40% of CCC’s profits. But in spite of that, 2021 turned out to be the best year ever. Home business via grocery stores exploded, with more cider being consumed in homes than ever before. So the business emerged ripe for the selling, with the bottom line intact.

What's struck me forcibly here is that building a business isn’t only about the money. It's also a creative process about building a stage on which to perform and direct, satisfying an innate urge to run the show. Meantime, the company itself is almost like a baby, an all-absorbing source of immense pride.

His company may have been sold, but it’s telling that Jeff still pops down to the plant to see old colleagues and take a look at how his creation is running. But he’s no longer the Big Cheese, so I wonder how he'll adjust to life on the outside? Can he happily embrace a life of travel, leisure, and organising reunions with old school and university mates? Who knows. He says it’s good to be free of the pressures, but in his closing remarks, Jeff boldly declares there’s a chance that he might buy the business back. He’s joking, of course. Or is he?