Wine from honey: What it all meads

I had the happy opportunity to tour the Maine Mead Works winery this weekend. And no, I didn't drive two hours out of town to some 100-acre tree-lined vineyard.

The Maine Mead winery is tucked into a small corner of a Portland warehouse on Anderson Street in Bayside. That's right in our backyard.

Mead, you see, is made from honey rather than grapes. And while mead was around long before Jesus made wine out of anything, it's popularity dwindled a few hundred years ago.

Luckily, mead makers like Portland's Eli Cayer and Ben Alexander are helping mead get back to its rightful place at our daytime celebrations and late-night confabulations.

The mead-making process starts with the honey.

The fellows from Maine Mead get their honey locally - from Swans Honey in Albion, to be exact. Eli, who kept bees himself a few years ago, said Maine Mead might get into the beekeeping business in the future but would still need to acquire honey elsewhere. They simply wouldn't be able to produce enough honey on their own to meet their production needs.

These barrels are filled with honey and water - the foundation of mead - and that mixture is sent via tubes into the next room for a cleansing hot bath and some yeasty fermentation.

These wall-mounted tubes are filled with ginger, which the yeast latches onto. The honey/water/yeast mixture tumbles through the tube like an almost-alcoholic lava lamp. Eventually, the blend drains from the top and into 50-gallon barrels in the next room.

These barrels currently take about five days to fill - that's 10 gallons a day - but the speed is expected to increase in the near future.

Once filled, the mead gets up close and personal with some oak chips. But after three weeks that relationship is split and the mead sits chip-free for a few more weeks.




Maine Mead is hand bottled and hand labeled. That's a good deal of manual effort - and without a stock of employees to do the work, wives are likely to get involved.

Here, Ben Alexander's wife Carly peels and presses labels onto bottle after bottle. She was impressively neat and efficient about it. If it were me, a few bottles might've slipped into the boxes with sideways, backwards or missing labels. But then, that's why I don't own a company.



Maine Mead's HoneyMaker Dry Mead is currently on the shelves at Whole Foods, Aurora Provisions, Rosemont, Old Port Wine Merchants and Maine Beer & Beverage. HoneyMaker Semi Sweet Mead is expected to land at those locations the first week of February.




It's a fine concoction, smooth to drink and rather potent too with a 12.5% alcohol by volume. The alcohol content, I was told, is tested with a hydrometer.

It measures the gravity of a liquid both before and after fermentation. But I didn't need any hydrometer. My flushed face after a small sampling said it all (something to the effect of: "Hot damn, that's an effective mead.")

You can taste and decide for yourself starting today at the Great Lost Bear on Forest Ave, where Maine Mead is now available.

Or, check out Slow Food Portland's Writers Night on Thursday, Jan 29 at SPACE. Maine Mead will be hanging out and offering up some samples.

For all the background info on the endeavor, check out mainemeadworks.com