From washingtonpost.com
When Brett and Megan Hines moved to Colorado for graduate school in 2011, they immersed themselves in the New Age subcultures that were taking root in the state at the time. The Eastern Shore Maryland natives took up mountain biking, joined a CSA, volunteered at an organic farm, raised chickens, drank craft beer and eventually joined a home-brewing club, called Liquid Poets, to learn how to make their own. Brett even parlayed the hobby into jobs brewing for local labels.
But the deeper the Hineses delved into the world of ales and lagers, the more they realised that the industry was out of sync with their emerging environmentalist worldview.
“We wanted to go with our values of sourcing as much local product as we could,” says Megan Hines. “We wanted to make a truly local beverage. And a lot of grain is grown far away at a big commercial scale. Bringing grain in from across the country is not a sustainable long-term thing.”
During their time with the Liquid Poets, the Hinses learned of a different fermentable, one that was made without grain. Mead was essentially honey and water, flavoured with fruits and spices from perennial plants. And they found it every bit as delicious and versatile as beer.
In 2014, the Hinses moved back to Maryland to set up their own organic vegetable farm. They bought sheep, goats, pigs, chickens and bees to raise and planted an apple orchard. But instead of brewing beer, the couple made mead. Six years later, they opened The Buzz Meadery in Berlin, Md.
Mead has ancient roots, predating human agriculture, with origins at least as far back as the New Stone Age. Over the past decade-plus, the beverage has found a foothold in the ongoing craft beverage movement — a recent report from Technavio research group projected mead to be a $2.26 billion global market by 2026. And while Europe, steeped in the mead-making tradition, still holds the largest chunk of that market, the U.S. is closing fast. The American Mead Makers Association (AMMA) reports that the number of domestic meaderies blossomed from just 60 in 2003 to 450 in 2020 — with some 200 more somewhere in the planning stages of opening before the pandemic hit.
Mead’s modern resurgence can be linked to several factors, from appealing to gluten-free drinkers to an association with mainstream fantasy fiction like “Game of Thrones” to sheer novelty. Long-standing industry leaders such as Michigan’s B. Nektar (founded in 2006) and Colorado’s Redstone Meadery (2001) have turned their niche followings into well-known national brands. But whatever the reason for its current popularity, the ancient drink might owe its future to the fact that, in many ways, it’s better for the Earth than beer.
“Mead is perhaps headed to be the drink that, if it’s made as it can be and stays in its own environment, can be the lowest carbon-footprint beverage there is,” says Ken Schramm, owner of the renowned Michigan-based Schramm’s Mead, who has been making the stuff for 35 years and wrote 2003’s “The Compleat Meadmaker,” still considered the authoritative manual for the craft. “If you drink it where you’re at, the whole thing ends up being a very carbon-positive product.”
Proximity is a key differentiator for mead when it comes to carbon footprint. The primary ingredients in beer are barley and hops, the production of which are both mainly concentrated in the western and northwestern regions of the U.S. According to the Hop Growers of America, Washington state produces more than twice the amount of hops than does the rest of the country; and the USDA says that most domestic barley production — three-fourths of which is used for malting — is in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota.
Meanwhile, honey can be produced virtually anywhere, with North Dakota apiaries churning out about 31 million pounds, followed by a far-flung array of regions, including California (11.5 million pounds), Texas (8.32 million), Montana (7.5 million), Florida (7.35 million), South Dakota (7.2 million) and Minnesota (5.2 million). As Schramm points out, many leading meadmakers still import exotic types of honey from all over the world, but usually in much smaller quantities than are grains used to brew beer at commercial scale.
Saving on shipping might give mead a small leg up over beer (after all, honey is much heavier to move than an equal amount grain). But mead’s true viability advantage could lie below the topsoil. Barley, along with other adjuncts in beer, such as corn, rice and wheat, is an annual crop. That means every year, farmers plow and plant, releasing CO2 and carbon into the atmosphere. Those commercial crops often require use of potentially harmful herbicides and pesticides. Perhaps most important: In times of drought, these fields require irrigation.
The fruits generally used in making mead, on the other hand, grow from perennial trees and vines. And the honey?
“You don’t have to irrigate plants that rely on bees,” says Ayla Guild, beekeeper and co-owner of The Hive Taproom meadery, in East Troy, Wis. “During drought, bees are scrappy. They figure it out. Certain plants thrive in drought, and the bees know how to find them.”
Speaking of bees, meadmaking also has the carbon-positive impact of promoting the planet’s most prodigious pollinators, which keep carbon-eating forests and carbon-sequestering prairies healthy. Plus, there’s no strain on the insects’ supply. “Bees make surplus honey,” says Amina Harris, founding director of the Honey and Pollination Center at the University of California at Davis and “Queen Bee” of her family business, Z Specialty Food, LLC. “They’re going to make it whether they need it or not.”
When it comes to actual production, mead requires far less water than beer. While beer wort - the liquid from the mashing process - is boiled, most mead is not. Between water lost in the boil, water used to cool the wort, and water used for cleaning equipment, a brewery could need eight gallons of water to brew one gallon of beer — and that doesn’t include the water-intensive steeping process of malting the grain. Breweries also have bigger physical and energy footprints – they usually require more space and more power than meaderies do.
Of course, part of mead’s overall environmental virtue is the fact that it is still a boutique business and a very tiny wedge of the larger alcohol industry (craft beer’s current U.S. market is nearly $30 billion). And maybe there’s a future in which mead mostly remains hyperlocal or at least regional, with Marylanders patronizing The Buzz, Pacific Northwesterners buying equally sustainability-minded Sky River, and tipplers of the Tri-state area drinking Melovino.
But if mead is to continue to grow as an industry, what’s to stop it from taking on some of the unsustainable traits of beer? Schramm says that the key is meadmakers like the Hineses continuing to capitalize on the inherent advantages of the craft and following a different business model from that of craft beer — that of its closer kin, wine.
“Beer is the ocean liner; we are the rowboat,” says Schramm. “We do have the potential. There’s a notion of having meaderies emulate the great wineries, having the beehives, berry farm and orchard all in one place. Then you can have something that is biodiverse and very environmentally conscious. Alcohol has done tremendous things for our culture. Now it’s time to have it do things for the environment.”
At Buzz, which this summer will release its first cans of carbonated session mead made with Maryland honey, Megan Hines says the calculus is simple: “I think everyone should be hyperlocal and lower environmental impact. Just support your local people.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/08/10/mead-sustainability-beer-alternative/
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