From 88bamboo.co/blogs
Mead - an alcoholic beverage made from fermenting honey that has close to 20,000 years of history, predating beer as the oldest booze of all time. While most ancient cultures enjoyed mead, from the Egyptians to the Greeks and even Ancient China, there’s no stronger association to mead than the Vikings, who have mastered beekeeping and making of the drink (even though mead was reserved for special occasions more often than not).
As mead as mead gets - Vikings, fur coats and horns
So fast forward to the present day. How did an alcoholic beverage most associated with the Nordic region make its way to Singapore, right smack at the Equator? And, managed to bag a few awards no less? That’s exactly the origin story of Lion City Meadery - where two mead enthusiasts and long-time friends from unrelated careers came together and decided to make their own honey brews.
“I’m broke as hell. How hard can homebrewing be?”
It was 2013 - and Sanjay Jegatheesan was working in audio-visual sales. Sanjay was on a trip in London, where it was love at first sip - tasting mead for the first time. Sanjay decided to try his hand at homebrewing, citing that “he was broke as hell”, and that making “bootleg alcohol” was a lot cheaper.
Cheap, perhaps, but not easy. Sanjay found a basic recipe online, and produced his first batch three months later - only to pour it all down the drain, saying it “tasted like crap” in an interview with SG Magazine. For the next four years, Sanjay experimented with his homemade concoctions, and created the first prototype of his mead: the Classic - and as classic as it gets, was made with only honey, water and yeast.
As Sanjay experimented with his homemade concoctions for the next five or six years, he met an old friend of 10 years. Justin Herson, who was then working in construction, was also a fellow mead lover. Justin “crunched the numbers” and saw an opportunity to start a meadery.
This was a time where many small brewing and distilling outfits were booming in Singapore. In 2017, Brewlander made its debut. In 2018, Tanglin and Brass Lion started producing Singapore’s first gins. Early 2018, the duo started making plans for the meadery, and by August of that year, Lion City Meadery joined the growing family of Singaporean-made beverages.
“Our goal is pretty simple. To brew the mead that we love to drink and, most importantly, have some fun and meet new friends while doing it." - Lion City Meadery
The bee’s knees
When Lion City Meadery first started out, brewing operations were done in a Singaporean-owned, rented out brewery in Melbourne. The decisions made were practical ones - ensuring top quality for their ingredients which result in cheaper yet better brews. Honey was sourced from Walkabout Apiaries in Victoria, which was a custom eucalyptus honey blend that ensured consistency across Lion City Meadery’s product line. After each batch is brewed in Melbourne, the stuff is kegged or bottled, then shipped to Singapore. According to Justin, the quality of mead is hugely dependent on the quality of ingredients, hence “a good mead is rarely cheap and cheap mead is rarely good.”
The brewing facility in Melbourne
The style of meads produced by Lion City Meadery leaned towards being beer-like - a beverage that wasn’t cloyingly sweet which you could have multiple rounds of, yet an alternative to, you know, beer beer. The original trio of meads are as follows: the Classic Mead, the Blueberry and Hibiscus Mead where dried hibiscus flowers were steeped in the fermenting brew before being mixed with crushed and pureed blueberries, and the Spiced Mead that took inspiration from the masala spice blend.
As the trio of meads made their debut on Singapore’s shores, they were only available at beer houses, taprooms and beer distributors. No, this was not an attempt at gatekeeping, but the product of Justin’s sharp observation of the mead climate then. Justin observed that, at least back in 2019, mead was in a strange place in Singapore - people either did not know what mead was at all or were really familiar with mead. Hence, the decision to sell at craft beer houses, taprooms and distributors was a prudent one - the folks in the craft beer scene were familiar with mead and were in a much better position to introduce the product to the masses. Not only that, craft beer drinkers tend to be the adventurous sort - and would be open to trying new types of brews apart from the usual pale ales.
The initial meads were found in Singapore’s favourite beer haunts - Sixteen Ounces, Bunker Bunker, Thirsty, Good Luck Beer House (rebranded as Good Luck Good Luck) and many others, but has since expanded to other beer places as well as making its way to most supermarkets across the island.
It didn’t take long before the mead caught on to palates - both locally and overseas. Even though the meadery was in its early years, Lion City Meadery was bagging awards abroad. In the Mead Madness Cup 2020 held in Poland, the largest commercial and homebrew mead competition in Europe, the Hibiscus Blubbery Mead won the Silver Award under the Session Dry Mead (2nd in category out of nine entries), and was the first Singaporean meadery to do so. That year, Lion City was the only Asian meadery to have won any awards in the competition - the previous Asian award winner being Kwan Sak Yoo from South Korea in 2018. This year, the Hibiscus Blubbery Mead once again won Silver in the 2023 edition of Mead Madness Cup, with the Spice Mead winning Bronze.
At the Asia Beer Awards 2019, during Beerfest Asia 2019, the Spice Mead won Silver in Category as well (more on 2023's winnings later).
Locally, the 2020 edition of the SGMagazine’s Best Nightlife Spots and Entertainment venues awarded Lion City Meadery 2nd place under the Best Local Brewery or Distillery category, with this to say:
Lion City Meadery, amongst other local producers.
“The guys behind Lion City have done two things right: produce really good mead, and brought mead into the consciousness of drinkers here.”
Hot for cooling meads
Aside from the three meads, Lion City Meadery has released a few limited edition brews.
Liang Teh (凉茶 liang cha) in Chinese translates to “cooling teas”, where the herbs and ingredients used in this tea is said to have cooling effects on the body. With the perpetually hot and humid climate of Singapore, it’s no surprise that most of us require a cooling brew on most days.
Lion City Meadery started out their “Liang Teh” Series - and as the name implies, is a line of meads that are inspired by actual local brews of cooling tea. Two meads were released under this banner: the Chrysanthemum Mead and the Longan Red Date tea. Production of these meads have been teased as early as August 2019, before making their official debuts a few months later.
The former, the Chrysanthemum Mead, was released on 14 April 2020. This mead took Singapore by storm - and has since gained quite a cult following. This mead was fashioned after the home-brew chrysanthemum teas that are favourite among Asian grandmothers - with Chrysanthemum tea being an already popular and familiar flavour amongst Singaporeans across all ages.
Remember when the COVID-19 pandemic was a thing? Lion City Meadery released this mead when the taps had to be shut in our favourite watering holes. The mead (whether by coincidence or not, chrysanthemum teas and brews are also common household remedies for flus and sore throats) quickly garnered fans all over, and within four months, every single bottle of Chrysanthemum mead was sold out - with a few remaining kegs hidden and cellared in beer taprooms.
Since then, the Chrysanthemum mead has become quite an urban legend: memes were made about the rarity of the mead, and the last few remaining kegs of the stuff was treated like a unicorrn, sparking a hunt nationwide amongst fans. Since 2020 Chrysanthemum mead has made limited appearances (again, like a legendary Pokemon!), once at Beerfest Asia 2023. Looking back at the pandemic, the Lion City Meadery duo credited the fans’ outpouring love for the Chrysanthemum Mead for helping them and a few businesses survive through the tough times.
The latter, the Longan Red Date mead, was fashioned after yet another popular cooling tea recipe. Red dates are believed to be high in iron, and are often given as a supplement to pregnant women as a prenatal tonic to improve blood circulation and general well being. Just like tradition dictates, dried longans and red dates (common ingredients in Chinese medicine halls) are utilised in this brew. Making its debut on 27th Janurary 2021, by popular demand, the mead has made a return in April 2021. This mead, like other seasonals, will be gone once it is all sold out. Be warned!
Since becoming a mainstay offering, the Longan Red Date mead has since bagged the Best in Singapore award alongside Gold for the mead category in Beerfest Asia 2023.
Lion City Meadery's most recent accolades.
A quick detour from cooling teas - perhaps as a testament to the Lion City Meadery’s brewing prowess, the duo has worked on collaborations and released seasonal limited editions as well. The Peach Please, that was released on December 2020 was a limited, 53 only exclusive peach bochet (a mead made with caramelised honey) that came in at 16%, almost double or triple that of the usual mead ABV. The following year, Lion City Meadery would release the Grape Expectations, an 18% ABV mead that was brewed with 100% Concord grape juice, in December 2021.
It does not come as a surprise that the Lion City Meadery duo are chums with the beer brewing scene in Singapore, and have worked on four collaborations till date: the Spice Boys porter with Daryl’s Urban Ales, and a few three-way collabs: Pucker Up between Red Dot Brewhouse and Wild Brew; Sweet Caramelions with Smith Street Taps and Lion Brewing (on tap only), and an exclusive Smith Street Taps mead Out of the Woods with Alive Brewing.
Setting hive in Singapore and the future of meads
As of late April this year, Lion City Meadery has set up brewing operations in Singapore - and to celebrate, the fabled Chrysanthemum mead made its return once more.
More importantly, the brains behind Lion City Meadery feel that more work needs to be done before mead really catches on in Singapore. In an interview with Robb Report, Justin said that they’ll “like to think that we’ve helped increase awareness about its existence”, but don’t intend to stop making it more well known in Singapore. Justin also said that the seasonal meads are never going away, saying that “the gloves come off, (with) no restrictions, no limitations”.
On the future of meads, Sanjay spoke about how there’s a wide spectrum of mead styles to touch on - given the heritage of mead. While the Viking’s style of mead is still the poster child of the mead world, traditional mead styles have origins that go as far as Africa and Asia.
“I think it would be exciting if we could explore these roots and bring them back.”
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