From auburnpub.com
AUBURN — Mead, or honey wine, means high alcohol to most. But the flagship product of the city's first meadery is just 5.5% ABV.
That's just one example of the creative approach to the beverage taken by Elaine Ferrier, owner of Combgrown Mead, which opened Friday in Suite 4 of 26 Osborne St., across from Wegmans.
"What I love about mead is it's such a blank canvas," Ferrier told The Citizen. "There aren't a lot of expectations, so there's a lot of room to be creative and surprise people in good ways."
Combgrown is the second mead business for Ferrier and her husband, Michael Sojka, a family physician at Auburn Community Hospital. Their first began about 10 years ago in southwestern Ontario, Canada, while he was in medical school and she worked in environmental policy for the province's Ministry of Natural Resources.
A homebrewer, Sojka suggested they try fermenting honey to produce mead. Ferrier ran with the idea, he told The Citizen, making a batch in the kitchen of her family farm in Thorndale. There, they opened Tallgrass Mead, named for the area's endangered prairie and savannah ecosystems that are more rare than rainforests, she said.
Elaine Ferrier and her husband, Michael Sojka, at Combgrown Mead in Auburn.
New career opportunities took Ferrier and Sojka to Michigan, where they briefly commuted while continuing to run Tallgrass. When another opportunity presented itself in Auburn, they decided to take the meadery with them, expand it and rename it Combgrown. Ferrier thanked her parents for letting her use their property until the move.
Combgrown Mead in Auburn.
On Osborne Street, Ferrier and Sojka will have 1,000 gallons of capacity to produce meads like Honey Pops, their 5.5% ABV flagship. Such "session meads" were scarce 10 years ago, she said.
"It's not often you want to sit down and have mead. It pairs well with food, but not the way wine does," she said. "So I thought there was an opportunity to create meads that are more sessionable."
Although it has less alcohol than traditional meads, Honey Pops is actually harder to make, Ferrier said. That's partly because of the time it takes to carbonate, a process that also lengthens production of Combgrown's line of mead spritzers. About 8% ABV, they include gamay noir rosé grapes with extracts of rhubarb and strawberry, and chardonnay grapes with extracts of elderflower and lemon.
The tasting area at Combgrown Mead in Auburn.
A bourbon barrel-aged mead should be released next weekend, Ferrier said. Though she would like to distribute Combgrown to stores eventually, for now it will be available in cans to go or in glasses to enjoy in the meadery's tasting room. She looks forward to becoming a stop on tours as part of the busy Finger Lakes craft beverage scene.
"With all its wineries and breweries, it's nice to be able to offer something new," she said. "And Auburn has been so great. People here seem to take it seriously to support local businesses."
Ferrier will make traditional meads eventually, but for now she wants to expand people's definition of the beverage. She's also still finalizing some parts of her production, like carbonation, and experimenting with varietals of New York honey. It's one of the most expensive fermentables, she said, on par with Napa Valley wine grapes. Among her first sources was Kutik's Honey Farm in Oxford.
"It's a really unique type of ingredient," she said. "In my opinion, (mead) is a more sustainable type of craft beverage. As much as I love grape wine, there is a lot of agriculture. You have to clear the land, there's sometimes chemicals used in production and definitely a lot of fossil fuels for the equipment. It's very resource-intensive. Whereas wherever there's wildflowers, bees will make honey."
If you go
WHAT: Combgrown Mead
WHEN: Open 4 to 7 p.m. Thursdays, 4 to 8 p.m. Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays; ribbon-cutting event at 4 p.m. Friday, July 21
WHERE: 26 Osborne St., Suite 4, Auburn
INFO: Visit combgrown.square.site or facebook.com/combgrownmead, or email combgrown@gmail.com
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