'Honey, this isn't my beer.' Two meaderies set to open

Breweries, brew pubs, wineries and even a distillery.

Delaware’s booming alcohol industry might seem like it has all the bases covered.

But one thing it doesn’t have is a meadery.

At least not yet.

Two honey wine brewers are working to change that this year by launching combination tasting rooms and production houses at opposite ends of the state.

Liquid Alchemy Beverages will be the first meadery on the block when it opens in a converted warehouse near Elsmere in the coming weeks.

Brimming Horn Meadery is slated to follow in late summer in a newly constructed building just a few miles east of Harbeson.

Both will be run by avid home brewers who have been working for years to get their new businesses off the ground.

But they may find that opening the doors will be the easy part compared to educating the public about mead.

“I would say 75 percent of the population has never heard of it,” said Jerry Hill, the so-called marketing czar for Liquid Alchemy. “The remaining 25 percent think it’s a wine that Vikings drank or something you only find at a Renaissance fair.”

Others simply misunderstand the word, according to Jon Talkington, co-owner of Brimming Horn.

“Sometimes when I talk to people about mead they think I’m saying meat,” he said. “Everyone knows beer and wine, but there is going to be some education involved when it comes to mead.”

Hold on to your goblet

Mead is similar to wine and beer, but also distinct.

While wine is made from fermented grapes and beer from fermented barley, mead is made with fermented honey.

As with beer, the production process also involves yeast.

The naturally gluten-free finished product is often enjoyed in either mugs or wine glasses.

With alcohol content ranging from 7.5 to 15 percent, a typical mead retains the flavor of honey, while replacing sweetness with the heat of alcohol, similar to the difference between wine and grape juice.

“The flavor really depends on the type,” Talkington said. “It can be dry like a white wine or sweeter from a riesling to a dessert wine, like a sherry or port.”

One of the best parts of mead is how malleable the flavor can be, Hill said.

“With beer and wine, there are only so many flavors you can make that work,” he said. “But with mead, you can make it taste like anything you can think of.”

While mead is still commonly associated with medieval castles, ancient battles and Viking movies, the golden nectar actually pre-dates Nordic culture.

One of the oldest forms of alcoholic libation, the drink is believed to date back more than 9,000 years and, in one form or another, was enjoyed from Russia to South Africa.

More recently, mead has become the fastest growing segment of the American alcohol beverage industry with commercial brewers suddenly springing up throughout the country.

The American Mead Makers Association, a national trade group first formed in late 2011, reports that more than 250 meaderies are currently in operation today – four times the number from just five years ago.

That’s still minute compared to the 1,400 brewpubs, 1,800 micro-breweries, and roughly 8,000 wineries in the United States.

But the segment is quickly picking up steam as drinkers with a taste for the new and unique seek out the latest trend to quench their thirst.

Mead sales jumped 130 percent from 2012 to 2013, according to the latest figures from the AMMA. If those numbers are to be trusted, that means mead is far outpacing the growth rates of spirits, wine, beer and even its fellow blossoming trend: hard cider.

The mead awakens

So if mead was once so prevalent, how did it become relatively obscure until recently?

“Our understanding is that it was a factor of history and economy,” said Jeff Cheskin, who co-founded Liquid Alchemy with his fiancée Terri Sorantino.

“Honey was mostly an item of local trade and people realized they could make beer and wine more cheaply and quickly,” he said. “Honey also didn’t become a mass produced item until the 1800s and, by then, people already had wines and beers, so mead was pretty much forgotten.”

Talkington agreed that basic economics were to play in mead’s decline .

“As agriculture took hold, grapes and grains become more prevalent and less expensive, while cane sugar replaced honey so mead went to the back burner,” he said.

Cheskin, a chiropractor with a practice on Limestone Road in Stanton, had never heard of mead until he and Sorantino, a personal trainer, took a trip to Portland, Maine, in 2012.

“We actually had it for breakfast,” Cheskin said. “You don’t expect to drink booze for breakfast, but our waitress got excited when we asked what it was and brought us a sample. About three seconds later, we had full glasses coming our way.”

Back home, the couple had a hard time finding mead at their local liquor store, so they set out to brew their own – a trial-and-error process made only slightly easier by Cheskin’s microbiology degree from Rutgers University.

“The first couple of tries didn’t taste so good,” Sorantino said. “But then we discovered orange blossom that was spot on.”

A few months later, the couple took a sample of their concoction to their first First State Brewers meeting, where they met Hill, a teacher at A.I. du Pont Middle School, who arrived with his own homebrewed honey wine.

“About 15 minutes later, we were kindred spirits,” Cheskin said.

Talkington said his interest in mead began when he was in high school about two decades ago.

“I was always a big mythology fan and when I was younger I kept reading about mead in Beowulf and Norse or Celtic myths,” he said. “Eventually, I found some recipes and began brewing it at home. I never expected it to become as big as it has.”

Brewing a business

For the last 11 years, Talkington has been brewing beer for a living at Dogfish Head, the Milton brewery that famously touched off the craft alcohol movement in Delaware in the mid-1990s.

Dogfish also has produced a handful of one-off batches of beer-mead hybrids with names such as Beewolf Braggot, Cham’Pain Domain and Jormungadr’s Revenge. The brewery’s Midas Touch Golden Elixir won a gold medal at the 2007 International Mead Festival in Colorado.

Talkington said Dogfish owner Sam Calagione has been supportive of Brimming Horn, a partnership with fellow brewery employee J.R. Walker, even though the new endeavor means the duo will soon strike out on their own.

“Sam has given us some business advice and some good feedback,” Talkington said. “I’ve learned a lot from him over the years.”

Liquid Alchemy has been receiving sage advice from the Delaware Small Business Development Center, a unit of University of Delaware’s Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships.

“Our advisor put us in touch with some students who did everything for us from researching all the meaderies in the country to creating our website, Facebook page and Twitter account,” Sorantino said. “They even did some tastings so we could get some feedback on what they liked.”

After an exhaustive search, Sorantino and Cheskin finally found a home for their future meadery in a roofing contractor’s former warehouse on Brookside Drive, a narrow street off Maryland Avenue (Del. 4) lined with auto repair shops and other light industrial businesses.

The couple bought the nearly 4,300-square-foot building last year and spent most of 2015 rehabbing it. Last month, Liquid Alchemy received its federal and states licenses and successfully completed a $14,000 Kickstarter fundraising campaign. The business is now planning an opening close to Valentine’s Day.

Talkington and Walker, meanwhile, won a conditional-use permit from Sussex County Council last spring. Construction is set to begin on Brimming Horn’s new 2,000-square-foot brewery this month, while the duo awaits approval of its federal and state license applications.

A taste of things to come

Liquid Alchemy will start out with 8 mead varieties, mostly focused on melomels, or fruit flavored mead, and metheglins made with herbs and spices.

That initial slate will include meads like the chili pepper and lime flavored Thai-grrr, a cherry and vanilla combination called Red-Cowabunga, the citrus powered O4 and Pucker-Up-Baby, made with fresh, dried hibiscus.

Brimming Horn is still developing its brews but plans to offer a mixed palette of fruit-and-spice flavors along with more traditional, barrel-aged varieties aimed at the beer-loving crowd.

Both meaderies plan to serve customers on site with a range of flavors on tap. Mead lovers also will be able to purchase growlers and take-out bottles from both locations.

The meaderies’ bottles, similar in size to traditional wine bottles, are expected to range from about $10 to $20, while single glasses will run from $5 to $10, depending on the type of mead.

Each company expects to produce about 2,000 gallons per year to start.

And both promise to source ingredients as locally as possible.

Liquid Alchemy will buy its honey from Harvey’s Honey, a family-owned apiary in Monroeville, New Jersey, while its lavender will come from Lavender Fields near Harbeson.

Brimming Horn will buy blackberries, lemongrass and other ingredients from a local farm near Georgetown. It is still negotiating a source of honey.

Yet neither meadery sees the other as competition.

“Having two of us just means we’re both going to be building a market and that means better business for everybody,” Talkington said.

Hill agreed that a rising tide of honey wine should lift both meaderies.

“Once a market is there, any success we have will translate to them and vice versa,” he said. “I think that’s true among everyone in Delaware’s craft booze industry.”

To help nurture that market, Liquid Alchemy and Brimming Horn each are planning to offer small museum spaces on site where their customers can learn more about the history of mead.

“We want people to leave our place having not only enjoyed the beverage but also having gained knowledge they can share with their friends,” Hill said. “That way, our customers can help spread the word that there’s something more than beer, wine and liquor out there. And it’s delicious.”

Contact business reporter Scott Goss at (302) 324-2281, sgoss@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ScottGossDel.