Making Mead with Alex Mendoza – BeerSmith Podcast #323
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Alex Mendoza joins me this week to discuss Hiveworks Mead. This is Spearsmith Podcast number 323.

This is the Beersmith Home Brewing Show, where brewing great beer is our passion. If you want to take your brewing to the next level, visit beersmith.com, where you can download a trial version of our Beersmith software, subscribe to the newsletter, and get dozens of free articles on home brewing. And now, your host and the author of Home Brewing with Beersmith, Brad Smith.

This is Beersmith Podcast number 323 and it's early April 2025. Alex Mendoza joins me this week to discuss Iveworks Mead.

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Today on the show, I welcome Alex Mendoza, co-founder and CEO of High Works Mead in Sonoma County. He specializes in crafting dry, carbonated session meads. With a background in kinesiology, Alex blends science and tradition to reinvent one of the world's oldest beverages for a modern audience. Alex, it's great to have you on the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. It's my pleasure. Absolutely. I'm a big fan of mead, probably as you know that, right?

Yes. Yeah. And so I was wondering, how did you get into making mead? I only started a few years ago, but it's a fairly rare thing. Not a lot of people are familiar with it or have had a lot of it. How did you decide to get interested in this particular thing? Yeah. So I grew up on a ranch in West County, Sonoma County.

And we always had a lot of various fruit trees and so forth. And Sonoma County being kind of the heart of wine country as well. We, you know, always had lots of different wines and friends that made wine, beer, that kind of thing. Really a hotbed for a lot of the first micro breweries like Russian River and Lagunitas as well. So I kind of grew up, you know, with all things fermentation, making ciders and beers, that kind of thing.

just to not let the fruit go to waste. The animals can only eat so much. And as I started making wine and beer, it was fine. It's hard to make a bad beer. It's hard to make a good beer. And so I wanted to try my hand at various things. Cider was delicious. We had Ace Cidery here in Sonoma County as well, which was the very first cidery in the United States. So they were always around, and the owner, Jeffrey, really cool guy,

And I knew what Mead was, right? Through popular culture, Dungeons and Dragons, Game of Thrones. I was like, what is Mead, right? How do you make it? So I tried my hand at it. I was talking about the Renaissance Fair before when we started. We were talking earlier, right? Yeah.

That's probably the first place I ever had it. Yeah. And you see it, you hear it, but not a lot of people get a chance to try it or let alone make it. So I tried my hand at it and it was really cool. It came out different than I had expected. And I started with a traditional meat, just honey, water, and yeast. And it came out very smooth, pretty sweet and unfiltered, obviously. Didn't really know what I was doing with it then.

And I realized that it was this giant blank slate. There was so much that could be done. And when you went online and you found these different forums, everyone had their own take on how to make different types of meats. And everyone was really into experimenting, which was what I found really interesting, is there was no right or wrong way to

to make it. So I just started making it, experimenting with different ingredients, different fruits, different amounts of honey, you know, to create different amounts of alcohol in the batches, different flavor profiles. And it really just grew from there. That's really cool. So that was your hobby. How did you, and when did you decide to found Hiveworks? Yeah. So as you can see, my hobby has gotten wildly out of hand, but-

We basically, as we started making more and more meads and refining our recipe, we saw that there was a hole in the market. We're in the middle of this amazing sort of alcohol industry here in Sonoma County, as I was saying, and there's no meads. There's thousands of wineries, hundreds of breweries, and no meads.

And there is a single meadery in Marin County just south of us and a single meadery in Napa County just east of us.

And we were like, why is no one doing this here in Sonoma County where arguably people are very interested in new and exciting things? So we started to approach it less as a hobby and more as maybe a commercially viable product. And that's when we really started to look into how you could create a commercially exciting mead.

And we looked at all the other types of meads that were out there commercially and what they represented, the slice of the pie, if you would, that they were occupying. And we looked at what wasn't being represented. And for us, that was the lower ABV session meads that we eventually settled on. Interesting. I make quite a few meads, but I make the big, you know, giant fruit meads, high-graveling fruit meads.

the session meads are quite a bit different. I'm actually kind of surprised there was no meadery in Sonoma County at all. Is there a reason why none of the wineries, for example, got into making mead?

So lots of the wineries do make meads, but inconsistently. Pet projects of the winemakers. They occasionally have hives that they get honey from. And so you'll see a mead at a wine tasting event in an unlabeled bottle that somebody's pouring. But...

As far as I'm aware, none of the wineries around here have committed to making large commercial scale meads. I would say the closest would probably be down in Salinas. They have a big, big commercial winery that puts out meads from there. But that's basically it. And when did you start and how did you get started? I know you have a partner working with you, for example.

Yeah, so we officially incorporated back in 2018 to really start locking down our techniques and our recipes and equipment, stuff like that. But I've been experimenting and refining my mead recipes for about the last 10 or 11 years. And it's really just been sort of culminating to this point, whether I knew it or not, the entire time.

And was it difficult to pull together investors and try and, you know, actually start a business that probably a lot of people are not familiar with? Yeah. So it was very much a grassroots thing for us in the beginning with a lot of our own financial contributions and friends and family, that kind of thing.

For exactly what you just said, not a lot of people know what it is. So we're trying to educate people on what this product is. At the same time, we're trying to pitch them on why it is a commercially viable investment. And mead, as a subsector of alcohol, is actually the fastest growing sector of alcohol in the country.

which is a really interesting statistic. I had no idea, really? Yeah. And so as the craft beer and the wine industry sort of cool off, currently mead is seeing this resurgence as this new, interesting, and exciting sort of beverage. And like I said, it's all about education. So people are learning about it. You're seeing more videos on the socials, on TikTok of people homebrewing meads and kind of turning it into these fun little videos.

So people are really learning about it for the first time, which is putting us in a perfect position to be providing it. That's really cool. Well, hand in hand with the education, one of the first topics you wanted to discuss was the cultural history of meat. And as I understand it, meat is actually one of the oldest, if not the oldest, alcoholic beverage, right? Yeah. So the cool thing is,

Mead is about 9,000 years old, and that comes from evidence from a container found in northern China that contained the residue of honey, rice, and fruit. So we know that it was deliberately made at least 9,000 years ago. That puts it about 7,000 BCE, and that predates...

A lot of things. It predates, you know, the agriculture of grapes and grains that would have been used for making wine and wine.

because bees have always been around, right? We've always known that they produce honey. Sure, you had to fight a beehive most of the time if you wanted to get it, but that made the honey just that much more special. And anyone who's had honey will inevitably mix it with something to make it taste better. And with natural yeasts in the air and things like that, it wouldn't have taken much to figure out that you could make something pretty special with it. And culturally speaking,

Obviously, the Vikings have a big space in the whole mead world, as well as the Greeks, and actually countries in Africa as well, like Ethiopia, which makes a mead called tej. The Vikings, they made a ton of it. It was delicious. It really filled a sort of cultural cornerstone of their culture with...

like Yuletide, Christmas time celebrations, things like that. So it's like this celebratory drink to be had. Same with the Greeks. A lot of people connect mead with ambrosia, which was the drink of the gods. It was the mythical drink that basically granted immortality to people and such. And so it had this sort of holy reverence to it in a lot of cultures. And in Ethiopia, it was...

A celebratory drink. So big events, big life events, weddings, things like that, all revolve around the tej. Not the other way around. The tej is what makes the event. It's not the event that requires the tej. So it's this really interesting way that mead has sort of interjected itself into cultures over the millennia, really.

And not to say that it was exclusively in those cultures, it's always been around. To a degree, people don't really talk about the reverence of beer, but it's always been around. And so it always was considered this drink of choice throughout the years, the centuries, the millennia, especially in the Middle Ages, the sort of quintessential Renaissance fare, like you were saying, mead being the main beverage.

So it's really just always been around, and it's interesting to see how it's coming back now. Now, what about the more modern history of mead? It has become a bit of an obscure drink, in modern history at least.

Yeah, so the really interesting thing is mead sort of fell out of favor in the 18th, 19th century because sugar, refined sugar, became more readily available. So it was easier to create alcohol to ferment things that didn't require keeping bees, harvesting honey, things like that.

There was this whole boom of other alcohols being made in different ways. With the innovations that were made in commercial agriculture, grains and crops were so much easier to get, so much cheaper. It kind of came down to this easy. It was easy to make other things. Mead sort of fell away in popularity.

And so more recently, as people start to look for

The next sort of alternative, right? Kombucha has been coming up in a lot of ways. Hard seltzer has been coming up in a lot of ways. And mead is sort of refinding its legs in terms of exactly what I was saying. It's this giant blank slate. People are like, wow, I had no idea you could do so much with this thing that everyone always knew was kind of around, but didn't realize had this much potential. Yeah.

Well, Kraft Mead has been growing. I'm seeing more and more meaderies around my area, particularly the last 10 to 15 years. Why do you think mead's a sort of an up-and-coming product? Well, like I was just saying, it's...

carrying a lot of potential with it. When you set out to make something, you have complete control over exactly what you want it to be. So unlike wines, which are very much expected to be a certain way, depending on the varietal that you're using, or in general, what people expect a wine to be, and same with a beer, right? They expect it to carry a certain flavor profile, depending on how you're making it. And it's hard to deviate from that.

Mead doesn't suffer from any of those constraints right now. So you're able to make high-gravity traditional meads, just honey and water and yeast, or, like you were saying, these explosive fruit meads.

That can be high alcohol and high flavor, high sweetness or low sweetness. Or you can have more like what we're making, a session style or an aquamel, where it's lower ABV but can still carry all the flavor, all that punch, all the nuance of the honeys that it's made from, or the spices that it's using, or the fruit that it's using, but not carry as much sweetness or alcohol and intensity and things like that. So people are finding that it has this huge range.

That leaves them in complete control of how they want to represent the meads that they're making, whether that's commercial or at home. When I'm at events serving mead, most people come up and they're excited. They're like, oh my gosh, there's a meadery here. I make mead at home. We nerd out for a while talking about how they're making it because it's completely different from the way that I'm making it.

And I talk about, you know, how we make it. They talk about how they make it. And we exchange ideas. And that's really sort of the community that's helped foster the entire industry right now. Awesome.

Well, I've previously had podcasts with mead makers like Ken Schramm on who make high-gravity explosive meads. But you were talking about session meads. And can you tell us what a session mead really is? You know, how's it defined and how's it different than some of these big explosive meads? Right. That's a great question. So, like you said, the big explosive meads are high-gravity, often high sugar content and high flavor, right? Right.

And by definition, a session beverage, often called like a session ale or something like that, is lower alcohol, so lower ABV. And it's meant to be consumed in a drinking session, hence the name. And what that requires is that it's not...

too overpowering, right? You don't want to have a small sip or a small glass and kind of be done with it. You want to be able to have a few glasses of it while you're doing something. I think session meads originally came about during the horse race scene. So people could sit there and drink and watch the horse races, but not be completely done in for the day with what they were drinking. They could continue to function or think or bet or that kind of thing.

So we wanted to take what people saw as traditional meads, these high-gravity, high-intensity meads, and bring it down so that they could drink it on a picnic, right? Or go out mountain biking or do something active and still enjoy the beverage itself and not have to consider basically how overpowering it might be. So we really wanted to sort of redefine what people thought meads were.

were and what they could be. And again, that came about because we didn't see anyone else doing it. In the early stages of us planning the company, we got online and we found as many meateries around the country as we could. And we ordered as many of their products as we could online and we sampled them all. And they were all highly unique.

And even the ones that talked about being low alcohol and more accessible and they came in cans like we were hoping to do, they were still very sweet and thick and what you'd expect a mead to be. And so we slowly narrowed in on, I think we want to do a super dry, low ABV carbonated mead in a can because no one else was doing it like that.

Well, can you talk about, I mean, you just mentioned some of it, but can you talk about how your meads are really different than a lot of the commercial meads? You said you sampled as many as you could find. Right. So the way that we make our meads now is we brought them down to 6.5% ABV.

And for two of our flavors and for one, five and a half percent. So very low. It's similar to a craft beer, that kind of thing. We also ferment out all the sugar. So there's zero residual sugar. We don't add any tannins, sulfides, preservatives, and we filter it. So we ultra filter it. So it's super clear and it's super crisp.

And it basically leaves it with just the flavor of the honey and, in cases of our two flavors, the blueberry or the hops. And so you're left with this very crisp and refreshing, nuanced beverage that you can have a pretty decent amount of without feeling that overpowering that you can get from a lot of other meads.

Are you using varietal honeys? I mean, what varieties of honey are you using? Because I know that drives a lot of the flavor, particularly for a light mead. So we use a few different honeys that we blend together. We went with lighter, more floral honeys, mainly because they're easy to get. And because we're using such large quantities, we wanted to maintain the consistency of the flavor.

We experimented a lot with honeys back in the day, and when we went with wildflower, the flavors can change so much depending on the honey that we went with a light flavor that conveys the honey and the nature of it itself, but isn't an overly defining feature that you're going to notice that change.

And that was something that was really important to us because as we tried other meads, especially the more high-gravity wine-style meads, they would carry vintages, as you'd expect from a mead and a wine. So you kind of expected its flavor to change each and every time that you had it. We wanted to provide something that you could expect the same flavor every time you got it.

regardless of where you were. And that's kind of what we went about doing by blending our honeys to create this more lighter flavor. So I'm going to use an orange blossom or what kind of honey are you using? Clover. Clover. Interesting. I find that interesting because clover I find sometimes does have quite a bit of variation. There's a lot of honeys that are marked clover honeys and they often have different tastes to them, but

I guess if you've got a consistent source, you're probably fine. Yeah, we get it in 55-gallon drums, so we're able to use the same batch for a pretty long time to maintain that consistency with it. Now, you're using a moderate gravity mead, 6.5% roughly, and if you ferment it all the way out, obviously it's got no residual sugar. It can be quite dry.

How do you go about balancing the body and the flavor of your meat so that you don't end up with a really super dry finish? Yeah, so that was the other thing that we really had to be careful of during our research and development was not getting that really dry, puckering sensation that you can get sometimes. And what we found with that was the quality of our water, the water chemistry itself leaving

That crisp and natural feeling in your mouth where it doesn't feel like the beverage is sucking the life out of your palate.

And the quality of the ingredients. So the quality of the honey and the quality of the hops and blueberries that we add, making sure that you're not left with this kind of hollow flavor in your mouth where it's just the dryness is what you're experiencing. We wanted you to experience these subtle, nuanced flavors of the honey, of the hops, of the blueberries.

inside of that void that the dryness can sometimes make. And that's the interesting thing about mead is it's so hard to describe sometimes when you're talking about its flavor profile because it is such a unique beverage. So there's been a tremendous amount of research on water profiles for beer, but I haven't seen much on mead. So I'm kind of wondering, you don't have to tell me exactly what you're doing, but what are the kinds of things you do to enhance the water profile for a mead?

So that's the thing is, depending on where you get your water, you're going to have a particular water profile. And what we've found, not just in water sort of chemistry, what we found is that we're having just kind of trailblaze a lot of this because nobody is doing what we do.

And so there's no guide out there. There's no help to really figure it out. A lot of the techniques that we use are wine techniques, and a lot of the techniques that we use are beer techniques. And no one's really ever tried to smush them all together to make something. So we've had to kind of do a lot of trial and error, and that's why our R&D took so long.

We just got to the market last year in 2024, even though we really kicked things off back in 2018. Wow, that's six years, right? Six years. Each time we really started to roll with something, we'd run into something unexpected, like our water chemistry. And we're like, what's happening to our flavor? Why is this happening from batch to batch?

And so we had to start thinking in a more scientific way, a more scientific approach to what we were doing so that we could maintain the sort of replicability of the process. And so we were looking at maintaining and controlling the pH, temperature, water hardness, trace minerals, just to start, right? Just to make sure that we had a...

solid foundation, yeast nutrients aside and things like that. We wanted to make sure that it tasted good from the get-go. And one of the best pieces of advice that I got when it came to water chemistry was when you drink the water that you're going to brew with, it should taste good already. That's true. Whenever you do anything.

If you're detecting off flavors or off gassing or nothing, if it feels like you're drinking nothing, well, that's what's going to be conveyed in the product that you end up with at the end. And so we really started to approach it from that whole like, well, what makes water taste good? And balancing out our starting water so that it was the best it was going to be and it's going to then create the best product that it's going to be.

Do you have the problem that a lot of people in California do where they actually draw water from several different sources potentially for the commercial water?

We did have that. We've been in several different locations throughout the years, but we've settled into a place right now that has really good water. And we ultra filter our water beforehand, which provides us with a pretty solid blank slate to work with. You do lose some of the good stuff, but it gets rid of everything else that you probably don't want in there. So you're using like an RO system or something similar to filter it out, I guess? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And so it leaves us with more control in the end rather than kind of at the whim of whatever's coming out of the ground. Now, I just wanted to very briefly hit on mead making at home because most people don't realize, but a lot of almost anybody that has a beer making system has basically all the equipment they need to make mead at home. So can you very quickly walk us through how you might make a, I don't know, one gallon batch or a five gallon batch at home?

Absolutely. This is my favorite part because I started out making closet meads and I think everyone should do the same thing. So all you're going to need is a container that could be a fermentation bucket or a carboy. I probably would recommend glass unless you have a food grade plastic carboy as well. You're going to need honey, obviously, water, and a yeast of your choice to pitch.

There's mead-specific yeasts out there, but I am preferential to EC1118. It's a champagne yeast, and it will ferment anything regardless of what you do to it intentionally or not. So it's a great place to start. You're going to not be able to kill it in any way. That is a fairly dry yeast, if I recall, right? Yeah. I use, I think it's an Arbonne 7171, 7172B. I can't remember. Mm-hmm.

Works great with fruit meads, but go ahead. Yeah. And so this would be, obviously, if you're going to use EC 1118, a little more dry unless you plan to stop the fermentation early on your own. Then you choose what your ratios are going to be. You're going to have a certain poundage of honey per gallon of water. So if you're doing a gallon batch, that's pretty easy. If you're doing a five-gallon batch, you add the respective ratio.

You can do about a pound per gallon to get a very light meat like we're doing. You can go up from there. You can go way up from there. And the amount of residual sugar that's left over when your yeast is done is dictated by how much honey you put in in the beginning. So if you're looking for a sweeter mead that's going to be high alcohol and high sweetness, you could probably add three, four, five pounds per gallon as your...

deciding on what your flavor profile is going to be. I usually recommend right in the middle, right? Two pounds, one and a half pounds. You don't want to start off with too much until you get a feel for what that flavor profile is going to be once it's done. Once you've decided on your ratio, you can decide on what else you want to add. If you're just doing a traditional show mead with honey, water, and yeast, that's all there is to it.

If you want to add anything else, that's entirely up to you. So we were talking earlier about these big explosive fruit meats where you can add the same poundage of fruit to the same poundage of honey. And it creates these incredible bold flavors, high alcohol, high gravity, and they're really a lot of fun. But you can also add spices. You can add herbs to create flavors.

Methylglyns, which is the name for a spiced or herbed mead. And we've done experiments in the past with chai spices, and it was fantastic. There's no words to describe how good it was. We did pumpkin spice as well, which was really good. One of them actually turned out, it tasted exactly like buttered popcorn, which was a little weird. Nothing like pumpkin spice at all. But that's the fun of it. You never really know what it's going to turn out as, and you just have to start experimenting.

The other piece of advice I would have is write everything down. So if you do land on a winner, you'll have a sort of play-by-play on how to hopefully make it again. Yeah, I mean, you can, obviously. I think you probably know Beersmith has incorporated meat into it, the Beersmith software, so you can very easily create your meat recipe as well and keep track of it there. Just briefly, I want to mention nutrients because nutrients are very important for modern meat baking.

Can you walk us through that? Absolutely. So yeast nutrients, like yeast is a living thing and they need the right foods to thrive. And when a yeast does not thrive, it throws off flavors that you probably might find off-putting. And those can be dealt with by aging or filtering and things like that. But it's ideal to not have them there in the first place.

So when you're pitching your yeast, the particular strain will probably come with a recommendation for the yeast nutrients that you're adding. A lot of different brands out there that are easy to...

find will have a generic yeast nutrient, which is going to provide the trace minerals and nutrients that the yeast needs. You're also going to need yeast-available nitrogens that are going to provide a lot of boost and fuel for the yeast itself. That comes in two different categories. You have

organic nitrogens and inorganic nitrogens. The two popular brands, I think, are like Firm Aid O for organic yeast-available nitrogen and DAP, diammonium phosphate. So you can sort of, there's calculators online, things like that, that'll let you determine based off of your recipe that you're working with the desired gravity and so forth that will tell you how much of each one of these yeast nutrients and

nitrogen sources to add to create a sort of ideal fermentation situation for the yeast. Yeah, I think one of the most popular ones is the Tonsa, T-O-N-S-A, which is pretty easy to Google. You can find that, and it does have, I think, both the organic and inorganic calculators. They're also in Beersmith as well, but go ahead.

Yeah. And that's really all it is, is making sure the yeast is happy, it's at the right temperature. Each yeast strain that you use is going to have an ideal temperature range. Generally speaking, the cooler that you ferment at, the longer the fermentation will take, but the less strange flavors your yeast will throw out. So

If you have the ability to control temperature, that's fantastic. Most people put things in their closet because it doesn't have as much temperature swing as the rest of the house or a garage or something like that. So yeah.

All of those factors mixed together is what's going to start creating your sort of ideal recipe. And some people have been throwing recipes to the wind the entire time, and that's part of the fun for them. But if you're looking for that replicability, that repeat, if you find that true winner, that's a good place to start. Sure.

Well, let's walk through your three main offerings. The first one is called Skyborn, which is a classic mead made with honey and water. What makes this particular mead interesting and unique? Yeah. So Skyborn is, as you said, our sort of flagship. It was the original recipe that we really narrowed in on, and it's just honey, water, and yeast.

And that means that it leaves all the flavor of the honey that we use, the clover that we use. So it's very light and crisp and refreshing. It's this perfect hot day, spring afternoon kind of drink. And that's really what we were going for.

If you think about what bees are doing in the spring, flying around through these beautiful fields of flowers and just soaking up the sun, that's what we wanted to capture in a can. That feeling, that sensation. I think we got really close to it. It's very simple. There isn't much going on in terms of this roller coaster of a palate that some beverages can have. It's just this

pure, honest beverage and that's what I really enjoy about it. And the lower ABV lets you enjoy more of that. Awesome. Well, next we have Crimson Queen, which is made with real blueberries. And I know blueberries have a lot of flavor locked up in the tannins of the skin, but not much in the actual blueberry itself. So, how do you do that and how do you create a good impact from blueberries? So,

A little bit of history again about myself is my family used to own, and we still do, it's still in the family, a blueberry farm along the McKenzie River in Oregon, just east of Eugene. Oh, wow. And so I grew up going there every summer and eating blueberries.

a potentially dangerous amount of blueberries while I was there. And so I grew up with blueberries and understanding that their flavor is super subtle, right? It is. You have to have this tremendous mouthful of blueberries to really get any overpowering sensation of it.

And it's not like the blueberry bubblicious or anything like that that you find in artificially flavored blueberry products. And that's what I wanted to bring to the table with Crimson Queen, was this subtle blueberry experience. And the way that we do that is we blend the blueberries. And so it's, in a way, unlocking a lot of that flavor beforehand.

And then we ferment the blueberries, which pour them right in with the primary fermentation. And so they're roiling in there, they're moving around, and you're getting a lot of surface area and a lot of exposure. And when primary is done, we rack that all off. And so you're not going to get any of that tanniny bite that you'd get from leaving it on that for a long time.

And so we're quickly extracting all this flavor and color. It's a really beautiful crimson hue, hence the name.

And then we let the honey notes come forward as we age it from that point on. So the beverage itself is actually our lightest offering. So it's the lightest flavor. And you have this super subtle, interesting blueberry flavor. It's not, like I said, this bright blueberry, bubblicious kind of sensation. It's this more earthy flavor.

rooty flavor of the blueberries that you really only get if you're using that whole blueberry, right? We're not just using a part of it, it's that whole thing. And then you have this part of the flavor of the honey that comes through and complements it. I don't know if you've ever done this, but honey drizzled over fresh blueberries is an amazing treat any time of the year. And we wanted to put that into a can, and we did. - That's awesome.

Well, finally, you have a hopped mead. That's your third offering right now. So what hops did you choose and how did you retrieve the proper flavor balance without overwhelming the subtle flavor of the honey? Yeah. So the hopped mead was the brainchild of my partner, Sean. And I honestly was skeptical when he pitched the idea. I was like, I don't know if anyone does that.

And true to the nature of our company, because nobody does what we do, we're like, sure, let's try it. We use Galaxy Amarillo in Citra hops as well as a Centennial whole hop for the nose. Really the scent that conveys that this has hops in it.

And we dry hop it. So we don't do a boil or anything like that. We try not to do anything that would degrade the flavor of the honey, the subtle parts of the honey. So we don't do any boils or anything like that. So we essentially put it into giant tea bags and we throw it all into our fermenters for primary fermentation.

And what that does is it leaves this incredible hop flavor without the overpowering bitterness that you can get in a lot of hopped beverages like IPAs and stuff like that. And the whole hops that we use, the entire flower itself, really provides this fantastic floral aromatic experience to it as well.

So when you're taking a drink of it, you're both getting that sort of olfactory scent experience as well as the taste buds going crazy on hops. And none of that overpowering bitterness that might kind of detract from the experience. Not to say that bitter drinks aren't enjoyable by certain people, but that wasn't what we were going for with this particular mead.

And once again, you have the characteristics of the honey coming into the equation during this whole sort of experience with the hops.

And so, like I said, I was skeptical at first. I was like, I don't know if this is going to work. And we brewed up an experimental batch and we were sitting around at my house and we're like, okay, let's try this. This might be a crazy experience. And it was delicious. Oh, wow. And we knew right then, we're like, oh man, we stumbled across something right here. So let's keep working on this recipe. And it slowly evolved into sort of this

incredible product that we now refer to as Emerald Swarm. You know, and it does carry an interesting almost green hue to it, which is cool from steeping the hops in it for so long. So it's really a fun drink. Well, you mentioned you have your meads available in cans. Where can people find your mead? As well as where's your meadery? Do you have a tasting room, for example? Yeah. So we're based out of Roanoke Park in Sonoma County, California. Okay.

And we are in most of the local stores here in Sonoma County, as well as in the surrounding counties, Marin County, Napa, and a little bit down in the Bay Area and Oakland. So the East Bay, more specifically. And so we've been expanding south in that direction for a while now. We're hoping to sort of hit some of the bigger stores in San Francisco soon as well as our production capacity increases. Mm-hmm.

We're able to service larger areas as we go as well. And we are working on a tap room right now that'll be connected to our production facility in Roanoke Park. And so we've, you know, we've rented the space and we're looking at it now and working on the permitting. So hopefully in the next few months, we'll have really big news about opening a space where people can come and enjoy it fresh right off the taps. Cool. I want to mention your website as well.

Yeah. So we can, Oh, great question. So we also do sell online, um, uh, hive works, mead.com. We ship to most States. Um, and you can get all three of our flavors, um, straight through the website. We'll ship it straight to your door. Cool. Um, well, uh, thanks again for coming. I wanted to ask you, uh, can you, can I get your closing thoughts as a professional need maker and how, how's this adventure going so far?

So this adventure has been quite the roller coaster for us. Like I said, sort of trailblazing and creating our own path with this very unique product. But my sort of closing thoughts here is I just want more people to make meat.

I want more people out there to experience meat. So if you're curious about what it's like and what it tastes like, go grab a gallon jug, grab some honey, water and yeast and whatever you want to stuff in there and just start experimenting because who knows what you'll discover. And it's my sort of dream to be able to bring that joy to people's, you know, homes, whether it's through my product or them having fun and making meat.

I think most listeners of the show would tell you that I'm a big fan of meat as well, and I enjoy making it at home as well. It's a lot of fun. Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, and happy meat making. Thanks. Alex Mendoza joins me this week. He's from Hiveworks Meadery in Sonoma County. Thanks again, Alex. Of course. Have a great day.

Well, a big thank you to Alex Mendoza for joining me this week. Thanks also to Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They've recently added a new collection of more than 500 beer recipes from pro brewers to their site, and most let you download the Beersmith recipe file. The new Craft Beer and Brewing recipe site is at beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes. Again, that site is beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes.

and Beersmith Web, the online version of Beersmith Brewing Software. Beersmith for the Web lets you design great beer recipes from any browser, including your tablet or phone. Edit recipes on the go with access to the same full suite of recipe building tools as our desktop version. Try Beersmith Web today by creating a free account at beersmithrecipes.com.

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