From edmontonjournal.com
When making award-winning meads at her farm in Grovedale, Alta., Kristeva Dowling likes to talk to the yeast.
Dowling isn’t forthcoming about what she discusses with the miracle fungus, but it must be working. After launching Stolen Harvest Meadery in early 2020 she pulled down three gold medals at last November’s World Mead Challenge in Chicago, a remarkable accomplishment for someone who only started experimenting with the alcoholic beverage on Christmas Day of 2017. Maybe a few encouraging words cooed during the fermentation process isn’t such a wacky idea?
“Ben Staley at Restaurant Yarrow in Edmonton told me that there’s a particular winemaker in Spain who takes his mandolin out to the grape fields and sings to them,” says Dowling, who owns and operates Stolen Harvest with help from her husband, Eric Erme, in the tiny hamlet of Grovedale, just south of Grande Prairie. “He does it so that the grapes know where they’re from. I said to Ben that I need to meet that man.”
Keeping bees
It was a desire to get into beekeeping in 2015 that kicked off the run of events that led to Dowling’s romance with mead, an ancient drink that combines yeast with honey and water, and occasionally other ingredients like fruits and spices. The first year gave her enough honey to take care of household needs, but it was the third year where she hit the jackpot. With hundreds of pounds of unexpected honey containers on hand in the house, Dowling needed to think outside of baking, toast topping and tea sweetener.
“I must have had it in the recesses of my mind that it could be made into alcohol,” says Dowling, who also owns her own massage therapy business up the road in Grande Prairie. “So I started researching. It was the Society for Creative Anachronism website that landed me in the world of mead. I thought it would be fun and whimsical to make it the way the Vikings did, actually melting snow in the backyard in order to get the water I needed.”
That first Saskatoon berry-infused micro batch of mead was a hit with family and friends. Dowling followed that initial run in 2019 by bringing samples to an amateur competition and Viking celebration in Okotoks called Horde at the Hive. With little experience, she ended up winning gold in three categories and taking bronze in a fourth, the presenter telling Dowling early on that she may as well stay on the stage. Needless to say, this was a confidence booster.
“When I got called up for the third gold medal, someone from the crowd called out, ‘I want to come drinking at your place,’” Dowling laughs.
The World Mead Challenge in November sealed the deal. Stolen Harvest tied for second in the international competition with its Saskatoon Honey Wine, while its Bochet Honey Wine and Coffee Bochet Honey Wine scored just under it in the top 10. By this time Dowling was a little more accustomed to the acclaim, though her father remained astonished.
“It’s funny,” she says with a wry chuckle. “When I told dad about the win he said ‘how did this happen?’ I mean, it wasn’t like I went to school to learn how to do this, and I haven’t been doing it for 25 years. I actually now hear my grandma’s voice in my head, because after getting my masters in social anthropology she said to me that she thought I should do something with food. Now here I am, doing something with food.”
In a store near you
Things have progressed quickly for Dowling and Erme since the competition. They’ve placed their mead at a few Edmonton liquor stores, including Sherbrooke Liquor and Aligra, and are looking to expand into restaurants like Yarrow. While still experimenting with small quantities of honey brought back by friends from around the world, Dowling has also become a little obsessed with making traditional meads produced from the bare basics: local honey, yeast, and water.
“It’s exciting, but I also don’t think I could ever get bored by the mix of potential flavours,” says Dowling, who just released a mead that incorporates wild rose petals as flavouring. “There are so many options, and my degree is serving me in a different way than expected. I learned about hunter gathering from studying with Indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and now I’m hunting and gathering for things to put in my mead. That’s partly where the name Stolen Harvest comes from; it’s a play on the fact that I’m stealing the harvest from the land to make my mead.”
Dowling is quick to note the land around her northern Alberta farm is as important to the mead she makes as any techniques she might use.
“When it comes to mead, the idea of terroir is so important because the bees are really bringing the taste of the area back to the hive,” Dowling points out. “The wildflower honey from the area I live in is different from the wildflower honey that someone makes a few hundred kilometres away, or in a different country. In France, a beekeeper might get a lavender honey because there are fields of it there.”
Stolen Harvest is taking off so quickly that Dowling has had to look at renting a larger spot for her enterprise. She’s long been committed to the idea of self-sufficiency, an idea she explores in her 2011 book Chicken Poop for the Soul: A Year in Search of Food Sovereignty, but now she finds herself carefully navigating the world of localized commerce. Whereas before she would harvest berries in the wild, she’s now making connections with local haskap and Saskatoon berry producers, and after giving up her own hive last summer, she’s buying honey from other beekeepers in the area. She’s also making day trips to select liquor stores and restaurants, slowly building up a circle of like-minded businesses to work with.
“I’d like to align myself with restaurants who think about being local and sustainable, and care about where their food comes from,” she says. “We’re a micro-meadery; I don’t want to be the Walmart of mead, I want to build relationships in the community.”
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