Get a Buzz On

Think of mead and you likely imagine ancient Norse gods carousing in Asgard or medieval knights merrily drinking around a sturdy oak table. But here on Vancouver Island, a small but growing number of people are making modern mead and honey spirits, and maybe saving our food supply while they do. 

“Honey tastes good every step of the way,” says Dave Brimacombe, the founder and CEO of Wayward Distillery in the Comox Valley. “It tastes good fresh from the jar. It tastes good the entire time it’s being fermented. You make spirits out of it and it tastes good. It just tastes good all the way.”

But all is not sweetness and light in the world of honey. Vast numbers of bees have fallen victim to disease and climate disasters. As Brimacombe says, “If the bees die, the food system collapses.”

You could call it a bit of a sticky situation.

From medieval to modern
 

Mead, also known as honey wine, can be traced back thousands of years to ancient China, Scandinavia, Egypt, Rome and Greece. Mead has been linked to the foundations of religion—it was literally the nectar of the gods—and was revered for its medicinal and aphrodisiacal properties, hence the concept of the honeymoon.

But over time, beer, wine and spirits overtook mead in popularity, except in a few small pockets of the planet. One of those places was the part of Northumbria where Robert Liptrot’s family lived before his grandfather emigrated to the Fraser Valley in 1919. 

“My uncle and grandfather used to make mead. We had beehives and made honey…and we always made mead for family consumption,” says Liptrot, who has been keeping bees since 1962 and making mead seriously for 45 years.

Eventually he moved to Vancouver Island and in 2003, opened Tugwell Creek Honey Farm & Meadery just outside Sooke—the first licensed, commercial meadery in Western Canada. Now there are about a dozen meaderies across B.C., including Middle Mountain on Hornby Island and Coastal Black in the Comox Valley, which makes mead as well as fruit wines.

Tugwell Creek uses honey mostly from its own 100 or so hives for a lineup that includes sweet, dry, flavoured and fortified meads, including the spiced mead known as metheglin. “Because mead is such an old product, it’s got literally hundreds of different styles,” Liptrot says. “We’ve been making drier meads in our family for quite some time.”

Mead, he notes, is making a comeback. “It’s not on par with distilling or cideries, but it’s definitely a growth industry,” he says. 

A finicky ferment
 

Unfortunately, making mead, which is also the base for honey spirits, isn’t at all easy. “It’s much more difficult than working with grain or grapes, primarily because honey is a food commodity that is quite resistant to spoilage,” Liptrot says. 

For fermentation to take place, yeast transforms starch or sugar into alcohol. But honey is antimicrobial, antibacterial and, a little ironically, contains too much sugar to ferment easily.

“The higher the sugar content, the more challenging the fermentation,” says Kevin Titcomb, head distiller at DEVINE Distillery in the Saanich Peninsula, which produces a clear Honey Shine, barrel-aged Honey Shine Amber and Black Bear spiced “rum.” 

Because of that high sugar content, honey needs to be diluted to create the right conditions for a fermentation that is longer and slower than it is for grain—up to four weeks, rather than three to four days—and creates perfect conditions for contamination. 

The difficult ferment isn’t the only challenge. Just getting hold of honey is, too.

There are few large-volume honey producers on the Island, or, in fact, across B.C. Honey is a lot more expensive than grain. It is transported in cumbersome, 640-pound barrels—“You can’t just squeeze your little plastic bear container,” Brimacombe says drily. And it is sticky to work with. 

On the plus side, our craft distilling rules, which require spirits to be made with 100% B.C. agricultural inputs or face massive markups, have made it easier to make honey spirits here than anywhere else. 

So when local distilleries like Merridale in the Cowichan Valley and DEVINE wanted to add a “rum” to their lineup, they looked to local honey rather than imported sugar cane or molasses. The craft designation also allowed Brimacombe to open Canada’s first honey-based distillery in 2014, only one of four worldwide at the time, and encouraged Salt Spring Shine Distillery to start producing its honey “moonshine” three years later.

“It’s only possible here in British Columbia because we don’t pay any markup,” Brimacombe says. “I’m so happy I could create this product in B.C. because of craft.”

For the sake of the bees
 

But there are other, more important reasons to use honey in wine and spirits. 

“Why honey? It’s to have a positive impact on our food system,” says Brimacombe, whose distillery produces Unruly Gun, Unruly Vodka, Drunken Hive Rum and a spiced honey liqueur called Krupnik, as well as a handful of grain-based spirits. “I just wanted to run a business that was aligned with my values and didn’t just take and take and take.”

Honey is a byproduct made by bees after they pollinate the flowers for the crops we eat; using honey in wine or spirits just encourages more pollination, which in turn protects our food system. “We’re not diverting food from the food system and that makes me feel good,” he says.

When he opened Wayward, he partnered with a farm that, in 2014, had 300 hives and now has 1,500. But in recent years the bee population has been decimated by drought, heat waves, fires, floods, atmospheric rivers and supply chain problems created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“One of the reasons we’ve expanded into grain spirits is there’s no honey right now,” he says. “There are no bees.”

Since honey wines and spirits encourage pollination, and ensure our food security, that’s one good reason to drink them. But an even better one is simply that they taste so darn good.

“Honey makes a nice, clean, beautiful spirit. There’s a natural sweetness and the mouthfeel is nice and smooth,” says Titcomb. “From a consumer point of view, people love them. From a cocktail point of view, people love them. It just makes a beautiful base spirit.”