Alaska: A Homer business takes a local approach to brewing mead, with help from thousands of bees

From alaskapublic.org

On an early summer morning, amidst the heavy buzz of energetic honeybees, Jason Davis opened one of his hives and pulled out a frame. It was dense with bees and more crawled in and out of the entrances of colorful stacks of polypropylene boxes that surrounded him.  

“As soon as they start landing, you’ll see that they have little balls of yellow or orange pollen on their legs,” Davis said. 

Davis has twenty five colonies, over a million bees, in the backyard of his meadery in Homer, Sweetgale Meadworks and Cider House. 

“This is a happy day for the bees because it’s either above 50 already, or it’s about to be, and there’s almost no wind and it’s sunny and the dandelions are out,” Davis said. 

Davis turned around and squatted down in front of a row of low bushes. He’s planted rows of nagoonberries, also called Arctic Raspberries. Davis said he discovered nagoonberries in the wild as a teenager and has had a special connection with them ever since.They look like raspberries but have a distinct tangy flavor that Davis now treasures for making mead. 

“It’s hard to get enough from the wild so I grow them here,” Davis said. “I have about 20,000 plants. And last year I harvested almost 500 pounds of berries- mainly my son harvested, but I help him when I can.”

Nagoonberries, honey and water are the only ingredients in Davis’ most popular drink, a wild fermented mead. Producing locally-grown food and drink in Alaska can be challenging and it’s especially true of alcohol, which often relies on imported fruits, grains, and yeasts, even when they’re brewed in-state. But since he began commercially producing meads and wines, Davis has pursued making them with all-local ingredients. 

Jason Davis holds a frame from one of his honeybee hives, in the yard of his meadery in Homer, AK. (Jamie Diep/KBBI)

Davis walked back to his meadery kitchen to explain his fermenting process.

“We do everything in five gallon batches,” Davis said, stirring a ladle in one of a cluster of silver pots. “And this is the wildflower honey, which is our traditional straight mead. So there’s nothing in there but honey and water.”

Pure honey is antibacterial and antifungal, which means bacteria and yeast can’t survive in it. But when it’s mixed with water, yeast can eat the sugars and ferment it into mead, an alcoholic drink that tastes like a honey wine.

Davis ferments with local raspberries, currants, chaga mushrooms, apples for cider, and of course, honey. As of this year, his bees only provide about a third of the honey he needs, though his long-term plan is to produce all his own. Local honey comes with a steep price tag: it’s more than five times the cost of bulk clover honey, and that increases his bottle prices. 

“I sell it mostly for around $30 A bottle,” Davis said. “But I could sell it for half that if I was using Costco honey.”

He said he can’t sell much of his mead in stores around Alaska because the profit margins are too low, but he does sell directly to consumers online. 

Davis said a higher price for local ingredients is worth it; he buys berries from several local farmers and he said the flavors far surpass anything you can find in a grocery store. He said local honey is also much better for making mead. 

“If I make a raspberry or black currant or, or a blueberry mead, if it’s fireweed honey, you don’t taste the honey there at all,” Davis said. “The focus is all on the fruit. Whereas if I get clover honey from Costco, it costs a fraction of the price but it has a very distinct medicinal flavour that comes out once you remove the sweetness.”

But Davis said using all-local ingredients isn’t just about flavour. 

“It’s a desire to support local agriculture and to be local,” Davis said. “And just the craft industry aspect of making an amazing, I think, world class product just using local ingredients from here.”

Davis said it’s hard to find locally grown and produced alcohol in the state. Alaska has many breweries and wineries, but he said water is often their only local ingredient. 

As far as he knows, his commercial meadery makes the only consistently locally grown and produced alcohol in the state. 

And in the long term, Davis said making food and drink with local ingredients makes businesses and the community more stable. 

“I think the more we can do here locally, the better it is,” Davis said. “So we don’t have to ship everything up from the lower 48 where it’s a little bit vulnerable.”

Davis said if for some reason the road system failed, he could still produce everything for the meadery. 

Davis said every year business gets a little bit better than the year before and this year has been good for the bees. In midsummer, he temporarily moved some of his hives to a higher elevation so they could gather fireweed pollen in open meadows, boosting their productivity and giving him a higher yield of the honey that is the backbone of his business.

https://alaskapublic.org/2024/08/06/a-homer-business-takes-a-local-approach-to-brewing-mead-with-help-from-thousands-of-bees/ 

Three Northmen tasting room opens in Haines, Alaska, serving cider, mead and hard sodas

From khns.org

Haines in Alaska  has a brand new tasting room that opened its doors earlier this month, though its spirits have been fermenting for more than a year in preparation. The Three Northmen serves hard cider, mead and hard sodas, each made by one of the three owners. KHNS’ Corinne Smith dropped by to check it out.

On a recent warm Saturday evening in Haines, the doors are open at the new Three Northmen tasting room, located off Main St just a block from the harbor. Chad Clark is at the bar, and runs through the menu of ciders, meads, and hard sodas.

“Our meads and ciders, they serve like a wine,” Clark said. “They average 13 to 16 percent alcohol.”

Mead is fermented honey, sometimes with spices or hops. Some of the flavors include cranberry, vanilla, spruce tip, maple, and smoked maple.

Chad Clark is co-owner with Jeremy Groves and Chris Thorgeson, and each partner has taken on making one spirit. Clark makes the hard sodas like mojito and ginger beer, but he’s happy to recommend other drinks, like the Woodsmen Mead which is birch, spruce, maple and aged in an oak barrel 

“It’s pretty dang popular. Heath and Henry over there, that’s a favorite for them, so shout out to the Woodsmen!”

The beams in the Three Northmen were repurposed from the old ferry dock, and there are crushed peanut shells on the floor (Corinne Smith/KHNS)

Patrons gather around tall wooden tables as their boots crunch on peanut shells that cover the floor. Racks of antlers and fishing gear adorn the walls, giving the Three Northmen’s tasting room the feel of an early 1900s Norwegian fishing tavern.

Erica Loomis is sampling a mixed flight with cider and hard soda. “Its really good, so far I’ve only tried the ginger beer.”

Earlier in the day, I stopped by and Clark shared some background about the business. He says  getting the license took a year and a half, and when they finally got the green light from the Haines Borough last December, they got to fermenting.

The ingredients are bought in bulk from sources in Alaska and the Lower 48, and Clark says they’re most focused on quality.  

“As I specialize in hard sodas, a lot of mine comes from concentrate. So we have a source for fruit concentrates. So for example the strawberry daiquiri, that is pureed strawberry,” Clark said. “The same goes for hard lemonades and margaritas, sourcing the ingredients, and keeping them fresh, and keeping them quality, so we’ve got a great product and people keep coming back.”

With the Canadian border closed and less cruise ship traffic this summer, the owners weren’t sure what to expect when they opened their doors. But Clark says they have confidence in their products, and that the community will rally behind the new local watering hole.

 “If you want to look on the bright side, glass half full, you could say you know what, you get your feet under you, you’ve got town supporting you, you can get your groove, get your process, get it stream lined.”

Clark says they hope to start selling their products in restaurants and liquor stores, but for now, the Three Northmen’s tasting room is the only place to try the Woodsmen Mead.

https://khns.org/three-northmen-tasting-room-opens-in-haines-serving-cider-mead-and-hard-sodas

Mead flows in Homer, Alaska, once more

From homernews.com

If Homerites have been missing honey with their alcohol, they’re in luck — mead is back in town.

Sweetgale Meadworks and Cider House opened in early October under owner and operator Jason Davis. Located in the barn behind the former Timeless Toys building on Main Street, the tasting room boasts five berry meads and three hard ciders on tap.

Homer’s last option for local mead, Ring of Fire Meadery, closed in 2013. Located in Old Town, it opened in 2004 and won several international awards until its closing.

Davis, whose background is in making natural wines in Malta and Sicily, already owned the former Timeless Toys building and the building behind it. After originally putting them on the market, he ventured back into his wine-making days once more.

Mead is made by fermenting honey with water. Berry wines with honey as the fermentable sugar source are considered meads, and end up with a drier finish. Berry meads are the feature of the new meadery.

“In the mead making world there’s a long tradition of combining berries and herbs with honey water,” Davis said.

He said berries help feed the yeast, which in turn can help the mead end up drier, as opposed to sweet.

“The end product is much more like wine than it is like mead, but it’s also a traditional way of making meads,” Davis said.

In order to call his products wine, Davis would have to use only cane sugar. As soon as honey is introduced as the sugar component, the end product is required to be labeled mead.

Davis’ preference leans toward dry meads, which will likely continue to feature in the tasting room, he said. To make them and his ciders, he’s sourcing local fruit from the area, from rhubarb to apples.

Right now, Davis said his weekly batches are 125 bottles. He’s trying to expand relationships with producers to keep up that pace.

Having a winery license, Davis was also able to make ciders and decided to give it a try, he said. Davis said he worried that the dry cider might be an acquired taste, but that it’s proven popular so far.

Davis, who had always thought he would end up making wine in his retirement, had begun to think that wouldn’t happen after his family tried out California for a few years. It didn’t take, and they moved back to Alaska, where Davis, a beekeeper, said he realized he could combine that resource with local fruits to make natural wines the way he had previously. That’s where the business grew from.

“I guess for me it’s a way to showcase our local fruits and berries and honey,” he said.

Davis doesn’t plan to have a huge operation, especially since he plans to continue using local products, which tend to be more expensive.

Right now, the Sweetgale Meadworks and Cider House has on-site tasting available, as well as the ability to fill a bottle to go, like a smaller version of a growler.

Sweetgale Meadworks and Cider House is open from 3-7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, and from 1-7 p.m. on Saturday at 3657 Main Street.

Reach Megan Pacer at mpacer@homernews.com.

Jason Davis, owner of Sweetgale Meadworks and Cider House, pours a drink for a patron on Oct. 20, 2020 at the new business on Main Street in Homer, Alaska. (Photo by Megan Pacer/Homer News)

https://www.homernews.com/news/mead-flows-in-homer-once-more/