The question we hear the most when we talk about starting a Meadery is, what is mead? Mead is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey and water. Mead is also known as honey-wine. Growing in popularity mead is becoming more common across the Country showing up in wineries or independently as a Meadery.

Mead can be dry, semi-sweet or sweet. There are several varieties of mead, a few we are testing include:

• Traditional mead is made with honey and water without any additional flavorings.
• Metheglin is a mead made with spices or herbs.  
• Melomel includes a combination of honey and fruit. Examples we have been testing include the addition of cranberries, pomegranate, elderberries and tart cherry.

The following Meads are currently in production and are planned to be available mid summer 2016:

• Traditional Dry - Produced using raw Iowa honey.
• Traditional Semi-Sweet - Produced using raw Iowa honey and back sweetened to the perfect level of sweetness.
• Sweet Bee Lemon Mead - Produced using raw Iowa honey, fresh squeezed lemon juice and lemon zest. Sweet Bee Lemon mead is sweet and reminds us of the honey lemonade you get at the State fair. Perfect for a summer day.
• Aronia - Produced using raw Iowa honey and Iowa grown Aronia berries. We plan to offer a dry version and semi-sweet.
• Elderberry - This is one of our dry meads that uses elderberries and raw Iowa honey.
• Highbush Cranberry - This is a very special mead to us because we hand picked the berries from plants on our property. Our Highbush Cranberry mead will be a semi-sweet mead.
• Chocolate - Our rich dark chocolate dry mead is made with roasted cocoa nibs and has a hint of vanilla bean.