Canada: Prairie Bee Meadery preserving history with honey

From discovermoosejaw.com

Prairie Bee Meadery is Saskatchewan’s premier craft meadery, known for their award-winning honey wines, also known as mead – a traditional beverage made from fermenting honey that goes back centuries.

Prairie Bee Meadery began back in 2012 with their parent company, Grandpa’s Garden, a u-pick farm, growing fruits like sour cherries, strawberries, raspberries, haskap berries, and melons, as well as a selection of market garden vegetables.

With all the fruit growing on the property, Grandpa’s Garden naturally turned to beekeeping to promote better pollination, and soon they had honey to harvest – and lots of it!

“At the beginning, we had about four dozen hives. We’re down to around two dozen at the moment, but it’s still a lot of honey” said Prairie Bee Meadery Owner and Mead Maker Crystal Milburn. “Obviously, the primary ingredient in all meads in honey; mead at its base is fermented honey. So, we turned to making mead, and here we are today selling it across the province.”

Prairie Bee Meadery is located on a farm just 20 minutes west of Moose Jaw and all manufacturing is done on site.

“We start with the honey, of course. Our honey frames actually get sent to another apiary to be extracted, then come back to us, skimmed and barrelled and ready to use. Our barrels contain about 650lbs of honey each, and a rough rule of thumb is that one barrel makes about 1,000L of mead,” Milburn explained.

She continued, “The two main ingredients are honey and water, then of course the yeast that does the work of eating the sugars in the honey and transforming it into alcohol. We start by blending the honey and water (or fruit juices), then it’s just waiting for it to ferment. Then we have several refining, clarification, and filtering steps, making sure it’s clean. Finally, it goes into the bottle.”

Prairie Bee Meadery products are available for purchase across Saskatchewan, but if you want the full hive-to-bottle experience, the Meadery is open for tours from May, around Mother’s Day, to October every year. Book guided tours online, or drop in anytime and take a self-guided tour with the Prairie Bee Meadery smartphone app.

“We currently offer two different tours to introduce people to the world of mead,” said Milburn. “We have our Pollinator Pathway tour, which is all about bees, humanity’s relationship with pollinators and what our history is with bees, and what the future [might] hold as well.”

“Our second tour is called the Honey Wine Highway which is about the history of mead. The process of turning honey into alcohol and where that originated, the history of it and how it’s become what it is now, and the kind of Renaissance that mead is experiencing today since humanity is harvesting more honey today than ever before in our history.”

The app-based tour, available through the Prairie Bee Meadery app, allows you to listen to a recorded tour as you walk through the Meadery and the meadow. The virtual Pollinated Pathway tour also includes an interactive game, prompting small quizzes based on the signage posted along the pathways. The Meadery has its own Wi-Fi network as well, so you don’t have to use your data to access the virtual tour.

In addition to the tours, Prairie Bee Meadery hosts special crafting events and demonstrations throughout the summer.

“We’re going to do a couple weekends where we’ll have honey harvesting demonstrations,” said Milburn. “We have a small extractor, and we’d love for people to come out and see what it’s like to pull a frame out of the hive, get it uncapped, and spin the honey off and get a taste of honey fresh from the hive.”

If you’re in the Moose Jaw area, Milburn encourages you to come visit, book your Bachelor/Bachelorette parties, and bring any guests who may be staying with you from out of town.

“It’s always nice to find something unique and special [to do] that’s right here in your own backyard,” she said. “Our motto here is, ‘Try something different,’ because our products are unlike anything else you’re going to find in the province, and it’s just a really unique Saskatchewan experience.”

Prairie Bee Meadery is also a Harvest Host RV and Terego partner, so if you’re network members driving through in an RV or camper, you’re welcome to park at the Meadery for a night and enjoy a peaceful sleep.

Head over to the Prairie Bee Meadery farm this summer! Event dates, tours, and directions can be found on their website, as well as in the Tourism Moose Jaw guide.

https://discovermoosejaw.com/articles/prairie-bee-meadery-preserving-history-with-honey

Prairie Bee Meadery: It’s like tasting 'Saskatchewan in a cup'

From theprovince.com

The family-owned Prairie Bee Meadery is the province’s first craft meadery.

Mead is a perfect Christmas sipping around the fire drink.
It’s a pretty new venture in Saskatchewan — only a handful of businesses make the fermented honey wine — but more promise to spring up as the province’s cottage wine and microdistillery industry keeps growing.

In 2016, the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority announced forward-thinking changes aimed at these industries. The new regulations were intended to make it easier to get started as a craft alcohol producer in Saskatchewan by providing a competitive mark-up structure, while reducing red tape and streamlining marketplace access.

The family-owned Prairie Bee Meadery is the province’s first craft meadery and takes pride in hand-crafting small batches using the best clover, alfalfa and wildflower honey available from the family’s bees.

Crystal Milburn owns Prairie Bee with her husband Girard and her parents Vicki and Dennis. The honey and much of the fruit comes from the family’s chemical- and pesticide-free orchards, called Grandpa’s Garden, west of Moose Jaw.

Crystal Milburn, along with her family, owns Prairie Bee Meadery. The family’s orchards and beehives are near Caron, while a tasting room and retail shop is open seven days a week at 23B Main Street North in Moose Jaw. Richard Marjan / Supplied photo

Crystal said it’s important to honour the mead making craft, along with the family’s agricultural roots.
“Because we’re working with honey, we‘ve got a real reliance on our bees and our origins in farming and fruit growing. We really want to keep it local. We want it to be something that’s made here: Saskatchewan in a cup.”

Saskatchewan-grown fruits (like sour cherry, haskap, raspberry and strawberry) are added to the wines before fermentation to create a variety of flavour profiles. The meads’ flavour profiles range from sweet or dry, to light or bold. They source fruit from elsewhere in Canada when necessary — such as B.C. cranberries for Christmas mead.

Crystal’s parents began making “really good” mead at home with all the honey from their bees and her mom soon decided opening a cottage winery was the way to go. Crystal, Girard and their four children moved from Alberta to the farm to run the business. They brought in Dominic Rivard, an internationally renowned fruit wine specialist, to help them develop the mead recipes and launched Prairie Bee Meadery in 2016.

                                         Honey bees Gord Waldner / Saskatoon StarPhoenix

The goal is to keep Prairie Bee in the family. That means they’ll stay small enough so that the current family members can maintain the business without requiring a lot of outside help.
“My parents feel strongly that building this business is a legacy for us and for our children,” says Crystal.

Visit Prairie Bee Meadery’s tasting room in Moose Jaw located at 23B Main Street North or the website for online ordering and a list of other Saskatchewan retail locations: prairiebeemeadery.ca.
Group tours and wine tastings at the farm and orchard can also be arranged during the summer and fall.

https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/flat-out-food-prairie-bee-meadery-its-like-tasting-saskatchewan-in-a-cup/wcm/1022c888-1dc0-4f9a-8be5-80fc2d0456ac