A True Cider Artisan, Charlie Needs a Hand

Hello Cider Friends -

I'm here to introduce you to my friend Charlie Bender. He touched more bottles and cans of Reverend Nat's Hard Cider than anyone else. He delicately hand-stamped every Tent Show label, thousands of bottles in total. He filled six-pack cartons for three years - about 1.5 million cans - all by hand. He ran our labeler for six years, running about 5 million cans through it.

Charlie joined Reverend Nat's just a couple years after I started the business. And he stayed with me until the very end. We worked together for eight years. Charlie had the longest tenure of any employee and showed the highest appreciation for details and quality.

If you ever held a can of my cider, enjoying the flavor or reading the labels, you should know that Charlie also held that can. (Sometimes more than once - we had a pretty inefficient operation for years.) He was pivotal in making the entire business run.

Now Charlie needs our help. He was hospitalized on January 11, 2025 with a serious and life-threatening illness. He will be out of work for a long time - months likely - and will require significant financial assistance to get back on his feet. He has a loving family, who flew to Portland to help him in the hospital, but he and his partner Bato are going to need the support of the community. They primarily need rental assistance and home health care. I don't have a breakdown of expenses because we just don't know how much care Charlie is going to need to recover. But we do know that it will be considerable.

I am asking you to chip in to help out. Thank you.

-Rev Nat West