So, what does it take to make good mead? Good honey, good practices (including careful sanitation), and most importantly, time. Since the bulk of their mead is made of nothing more than raw honey and water, with commercial wine yeasts to control fermentation, they source their honey from a beekeeper who raises queen bees at the edge of the Mendocino National Forest, where there’s little development and not much commercial agriculture. Bees being foragers, there’s no way to restrict their nectar diet to strictly organic plants, but Oren sees these bees as living as natural a life as possible. The day after our interview, Oron and Sarah were planning to drive up to Mendocino in a rental truck, returning with hundreds of gallons of honey for making cyser, for which they'll dilute the honey with freshly soured apple-cider vinegar from Sonoma instead of water. At about 14% alcohol, about the same as your typical Napa cabernet, "It's like getting punched in the face with pies!" laughed Sarah, making it especially good as an autumn cocktail base with whiskey or bourbon.

"We also add spice--cinnamon, nutmeg, clove--so it's like liquid, drunk apple pie. It's amazing! We're so excited about doing it here." The honey base makes a difference, too. "With the Ohio honey we get a really light, almost clear [mead], with kind of a spicy, grassy flavor. But here we get citrus and pine and wood, very earthy. Two different honeys, two different places, totally different mead." Although there are many possibilities, from sweet to dry, still to sparkling, they're dedicated to making a dry product, with almost all the residual sugars fermented out, as a way to "reveal more of the nuanced flavors of the honey," according to Sarah.

The next most crucial part, after sourcing good honey, is the aging process, which Oron says changes the flavor dramatically. "Honey is an incredible, complex, beautiful food...We have an orange blossom mead right now in the tanks--we made it this January." They were skeptical at a first tasting, earlier this summer. But then, Oren noted, "We tasted it a few days ago, and it was like, there it is! It's starting to really develop." Much like wine, all of their meads age in tanks at least a year before being bottled and sold--which means, alas, the cyser they're making now won't be available for drinking until next Halloween.

They started their San Francisco mead making in the Dogpatch, sharing space with Sutton Cellars, near where Magnolia Brewery has their new facilities. But increasing rents and a desire to expand capacity pushed them to find their own 2500-square-foot space in Bayview-Hunters Point, a few blocks east of the Muni T-line on Third Street, this summer. Their landlord, it turned out, was a beekeeper himself, who raises bees and teaches beekeeping classes next door, and helped them build out the garage-like space into a working production facility. Lined with glass carboys (for experiments) and imposingly large plastic tanks, the no-frills space is arranged for maximum efficiency and cleanliness.

Carboys of Mead (experimental projects). Photo: Stephanie Rosenbaum

Their Ohio space has evolved to include a full cocktail bar and lounge with nightly live music, where 200 people might congregate on a weekend evening. Here, in a neighborhood where small-scale industry butts up against rows of single-family houses, they're planning for a much mellower vibe--just a small tasting area up front, open on weekend afternoons for curious customers, while they focus on production and distribution to local stores, bars, and restaurants. They're happy to back in San Francisco, where the drinking (and eating) culture is always on the lookout for the next new thing. They've got plans for a hyper-local Hunters Point mead made with honey from their landlord's bees, as well as meads infused with sage, hops, and other aromatic plants. There's even plans for another meadery, this one down in Los Angeles. But for the moment, their focus is in San Francisco, capturing in a bottle the tastes and terroir of coastal Northern California.

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