Singapore: Lion City Meadery Launches Limited-Edition Mead for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties

From gamerbraves.com

SEGA has partnered with Singapore’s Lion City Meadery to celebrate the release of Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties with a special collaboration mead (also called Honey Wine) available for a limited time across the island. From February 12 to March 11, 2026, fans can try a Hibiscus Blueberry Mead featuring custom Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties branding at selected bars and taprooms in Singapore. The drink will only be available during this period and while stocks last.

The limited-edition mead is described as dark crimson in colour with floral and berry flavours. Brewed in a beer style, it’s meant to match the dramatic setting of the Yakuza game series.

Image Credit: Lion City Meadery

The collaboration mead is available at 11 locations across Singapore:

• Yeast Side (Serangoon Gardens, King Albert Park, Farrer Park, and Trifecta locations)
• Orh Gao Peh Gao (Serene Centre)
• SG Taps Restaurant (Duxton Hill)
• Gulp Riverside Taproom & Bottleshop (Rodyk Street)
• Kōki Alternative Bread Bar (Duxton Road)
• The Coup Bar & Kitchen (Ann Siang Hill)
• The Otherside (Erskine Road)
• Smith Street (Chinatown Food Complex)

SEGA and Lion City Meadery are also running a lucky draw during the campaign period. Fans who participate at participating outlets can enter for a chance to win prizes. More details about the lucky draw are available at the participating outlets. This collaboration brings together Singapore’s craft beverage scene with gaming culture, giving fans a way to celebrate the game’s launch outside of playing it.

https://www.gamerbraves.com/lion-city-meadery-launches-limited-edition-mead-for-yakuza-kiwami-3-dark-ties/

Singapore: Lion City Meadery - How Two Friends Stirred a Buzz

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 two behind 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.”

More information is here:-

https://88bamboo.co/blogs/brand-spotlights/lion-city-meadery-how-two-friends-stirred-a-buzz?srsltid=AfmBOoq6vZ9kWpkGUmSELH5TpQ6yNc3xRZmOEnk3YH7DjVTJa2et4m6W 

Blame Game of Thrones? Mead could be the next big drinks trend for Gen Z

From scmp.com

• The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones sparked an interest in the alcoholic brew enjoyed by thirsty knights
• More than 100 meaderies have opened in the US in the past two years – but making the medieval honey wine remains 8 times more expensive than beer

Danielle Busch admits it wasn’t just the failed attempt at making wine at home that encouraged her and her husband to try making mead. “He was watching Vikings on the History Channel at the time, and he’d played Dungeons & Dragons a lot before that,” chuckles the co-founder of California-based Batch Mead. “So, yes, he had heard of mead, but, like many people, he wasn’t quite sure what it was.”

Indeed, if The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones thrust mead into the spotlight – “I welcome you to our fires and offer you meat and mead in honour of our friendship,” as Bran Stark declares in an episode of the latter – that doesn’t mean viewers had much of an idea what it was either. It was just what was drunk in any series or film that featured men wearing tights or a vaguely medieval setting.

“If people know anything about it, they tend to incorrectly think of mead as being very sweet and syrupy,” says Busch, who, somehow inevitably, is busy putting together an order for a forthcoming 15th century recreationalist event. You know, when people take period dressing – and drinking – a little too seriously.

Actually, mead is neither saccharine nor treacly but can be light, dry, rich, even savoury. It is, to be sure, ancient, with the kind of heritage any marketing manager would play up.

Actually, mead is neither saccharine nor treacly but can be light, dry, rich, even savoury. It is, to be sure, ancient, with the kind of heritage any marketing manager would play up.

The tipple predates beer and wine, originating by chance, it is thought, in China’s Henan province in the seventh millennium BC. Just about every ancient culture would, in time, have its take on mead, which helps explain why it turns up in the writings of Aristotle and in the Old English saga of Scandinavian warriors and monsters, Beowulf.

What’s important is to encourage people to look at mead afresh, as a contemporary drink, and not as the ‘ye olde’ mead that I think makes many people decide it’s not for them before they’ve tried it. They don’t get home each evening and pillage their neighbour

Eric Lui, director of Citibrew. Picture: Jake S. Thomas

At its simplest and most authentic, mead is made from three key ingredients: water, cultured yeast and fermentable sugar in the form of honey – and, in fact, “honeymoon” takes its name from this, as it was traditionally drunk by Nordic newlyweds to incite baby-making levels of amorousness. It is sometimes called honey wine, though that seems to confuse drinkers even more …

But the Busches – who have seen business double year on year since they opened in 2019 – have not been alone in their curiosity about a drink that once spanned the world and then just disappeared, in part because the 17th century international trade in sugar from the West Indies dampened demand for honey, but also because brewing beer and distilling spirits became much more widespread (and neither involved the potential of being stung while collecting ingredients).

Like an over-pressurised beer barrel, the number of mead makers has exploded over the past few years. According to Eric Lui Wang-hong, director of Citibrew, Hong Kong’s first meadery (yes, that’s what they call a mead brewery), the pandemic made beer production especially complicated – not least because the international trade in hops was seriously curtailed – encouraging start-ups to ponder other options. Since Hong Kong has its own apiaries, “the main ingredient was already here”, says Lui. It was still a leap of faith, however, as, “I knew exactly zero about mead at the time.”

Other entrepreneurial meadists were at work, too. Justin Herson, co-founder of Singapore’s Lion City Meadery, says he first heard of the brew as a child reading Norse mythology, which promises dead warriors arriving in Valhalla a celestial draught served by beautiful maidens. Herson had assumed that mead had long since evolved into something else – if the drink ever existed at all – and, like the Busches, eventually came to it through his business partner’s experiments in home brewing.

Royal Imperial Chrysanthemum Mead from Singapore’s Lion City Meadery. Photo: Joel Lim Photography

Mead, like cider and craft beer before it, “seems to have become a focal point for a number of home brewers who have been making it for years in their own silos, as part of their own social networks”, says Herson. He has reached out to a few of them and some co-branded meads are now in the pipeline for next year.

No doubt part of the appeal for these home brewers is the scope for experimentation. If most beers fall within a certain range of bitterness and colour, one of the great selling points of mead is its diversity. Not only is there a huge variety of honeys, each with their own flavour profiles reflecting the terroir of flora from which bees have taken pollen – be that wildflower honey from the United States or plum honey from Japan – but mead’s honey base is then endlessly customisable with other ingredients.

These typically include blends of fresh fruits and spices, maybe flower petals or sea salt. Some producers go as far as offering a garlic or a peanut-butter-and-jelly mead (Britain-based Hive Mind Meadery even offers a small batch, bottle-conditioned baked strawberry cheesecake variety).

The endless flow of novelty styles keeps the market fresh, helps drive sales and is even seeing mead used as a cocktail ingredient. Expect a mead-arita in your favourite bar soon, with the staff waxing lyrical about the revival of melomels and metheglins, cysers, acerglyns, rhodomels and braggots, among the old, more esoteric, wonderfully named versions of mead that really do sound like they belong in a flagon held firmly in Daemon Targaryen’s hand.

What’s important is to encourage people to look at mead afresh, as a contemporary drink, and not as the ‘ye olde’ mead … many people decide it’s not for them before they’ve tried it. They don’t get home each evening and pillage their neighbour

Kit Newell, Hive Mead

Lui also sees the potential for mead to be both mass market – he produces a sparkling mead with a low alcohol content of 4.5 per cent, “which is more familiar, like a cider” – and upmarket, where more traditional wine-style meads with an alcohol content of 10 per cent or more are made with unusual ingredients and positioned as luxury products. Citibrew is producing just such a mead for the Four Seasons Hong Kong from September, and is in talks with the Hong Kong Jockey Club for other varieties. “It’s telling,” says Lui, “that even big hotel groups are looking for something different to offer in their bars now.”

Since the flavour profile of ingredients changes year to year, Citibrew also plans to launch a line of meads labelled with year of production, much like a fine wine.

Hive Mind has the same idea, producing both cans of various fruit-infused sparkling meads, but also, for example, a bottled mead that is oak whiskey-barrel-aged, and another using honey from Zambia, which it sells to Michelin-starred restaurants.

“The great thing about mead is that it can be some­thing to everyone,” says Kit Newell, who co-founded Hive Mead with his brother, Matt, a beekeeper who was looking for something to do with the vast amount of honey he produced. “What’s important is to encourage people to look at mead afresh, as a contemporary drink, and not as the ‘ye olde’ mead that I think makes many people decide it’s not for them before they’ve tried it. They don’t get home each evening and pillage their neighbour.”

David Leung of Hong Kong Whistle. Picture: Jake S. Thomas

Meanwhile, another British meadery, Biddenden – perhaps with a nod to Thor and Odin – labels its product as “nectar of the gods”, positioning its Special Mead firmly as an alternative to dessert wine, to be sipped after a meal with your cheese course.

As marketing manager Anne Jennings stresses, “It may have a screw cap but it comes in a wine-style bottle, with a wine-style label and doesn’t look out of place on the dinner table. In fact, it looks a bit more special than your average bottle of wine.”

The more health-conscious­ – and as studies suggest, buttoned-up younger generations – have been a boon to mead, riding the wave for no- and low-alcohol drinks. While the general aura around honey as a natural product helps to create a positive image around mead, to say nothing of antioxidants and nutrients, the drink is also free of gluten, sulphates and other potential nasties.

It is also what many in the fledgling mead industry like to call “easy drinking”, as fashionable but more palatable than many craft beers. “The appeal to Gen Z and Gen Y is a big factor [in mead’s revival],” says Lui. “They don’t want a big imperial IPA. After all, even a craft beer is still a beer; there’s still that hoppy bitterness and, sometimes, the bloatedness that comes with drinking it.”

Instead, mead becomes, as Herson describes it, “a nice middle ground between beer and wine”, a long drink option for those who aren’t so keen on either. Additionally, despite Lion City Meadery’s “very masculine branding”, it has proved surprisingly popular among women.

“People sometimes ask if there’s any alcohol in mead when they first try it because it can taste more like a soda. It’s not so ethanol-forward,” he says, adding that even a mead with very high alcohol content – 40 to 60 per cent – can taste like a low-alcohol drink. “Naturally, they tend to have a different opinion once they’ve drunk three bottles of it.”

By then, of course, the other appeals of mead have likely been forgotten, too. Its perceived environmental benefits, for example: with the global bee population in decline, anything that encourages natural honey production, as opposed to the industrially produced “fake” kind that might be cut with corn syrup, is a boon. Hive Mind, for example, now operates 180 of its own hives and counting.

“Like so many simple dishes,” says Herson, “mead is very easy to make but very hard to make really well.”

Mr Single Eye Dried Plum Mead from Hong Kong Whistle. Picture: Jake S. Thomas

While Lui jokes that there are still enough wealthy people in Hong Kong who can afford it, mead is expensive to make. Honey is pretty much the priciest form of sugar around, and fresh fruits are not a cheap ingredient either, making mead some four times more expensive than wine to produce, and eight times more than beer. The cost will keep mead out of reach for conglomerates for the time being.

It is time-consuming to make, too, each batch taking two to three months. Then there is the option of ageing, which only adds to production costs and cash-flow problems. In Singapore, for example, customs insist on meaderies having a distilling licence, even though no distillation is involved in mead’s production.

And then there’s selling it. “There still needs to be a lot more education to give the public a better understanding of mead,” says Busch. But, she stresses, educating distributors and retailers – especially those accustomed to high-margin products such as lager – is the first problem.

“Mead doesn’t fit neatly into a category of drink. It’s its own category really,” she says. “That means there’s confusion about how to market it, or the decision gets made to wait until the mead market is better established.”

“That’s why I don’t see mead as some sudden craze in the way that gin was,” says Herson – even if, he notes, over the past two years alone, seven meaderies have opened in Japan and a hundred in the US.

While other drinks swing in and out of style, mead hasn’t been in fashion for 400 years, so its comeback now may be on firmer ground. One study estimates the global mead market will be worth US$1.4 billion by 2032. “I see mead having a long, slow and steady growth trajectory,” says Herson, “but one that’s definitely upwards.”

David Leung Ka-tai, a beer brewer and founder of boutique brewery Hong Kong Whistle, makes a dried-plum mead, a nod to traditional Cantonese ingredients and plum’s thirst-quenching associations. Despite being pulled into mead’s orbit, he says, “Mead isn’t something you’re going to find in your 7-Eleven too soon.

“But then they said that about craft beers.”

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/food-drink/article/3273340/blame-game-thrones-mead-could-be-next-big-drinks-trend-gen-z