Drinking Locally with The Brothers Drake Meadery

Mead may not currently be one of the most popular alcoholic beverages, but that isn’t stopping the passion that the Brothers Drake are putting into their business. The Brothers Drake Meadery started operations in 2008, but their beginnings go much further back. We recently sat down with founders Eric Drake, Woody Drake, Ben Hansen and Betty Fisher to learn more about their locally made line of honey wines.

Walker Evans: Tell us a little bit about your backstory and what led you guys to opening a meadery?

Woody Drake: Our passion for mead started in 1994. At that time I was working in film as a scenic artist in Wilmington, NC. Six days a week, twelve hours a day of hard hard work for three months, and then you are off for two months. So you kind of need a hobby. I’m a real energetic kind of guy, so I needed something to do. Being a man in my twenties, I started off experimenting with making beer. I read through the mead chapter of “The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing”, which I recommend to anyone who is starting out on home brewing. It takes a lot of the fear out of it. Anyway, that mead chapter is only eleven pages or so, but it’s enough to just set your mind on fire. I had never tried mead and I went marching off to the store to buy a bottle. Of course, it wasn’t available… at least not in Wilmington in 1994. So I decided to try making it because I already had all of the equipment for brewing beer. Over time, I got Eric involved because I wanted some historical recipes and Eric was the computer geek connection who had internet access back then. It’s hard to imagine not having the internet, but in those days not everyone did. So he found some recipes online and he got interested in it as well.

Eric Drake: Yeah, I was a non-brewer at the time. I didn’t even drink… but reading through these recipes I was collecting for Woody kind of sparked my imagination. So I thought I’d try brewing one or two things. Not being a drinker, I didn’t know if what I was making was of any quality, so I started sending anything I made off to competitions. The first beer I ever made took the lowest place score, but the first mead I made took the bronze medal at the National Homebrew Competition.

WD: It’s one that we still make today as a matter of fact… our Apple Pie.

WE: So at point did you decide that you wanted to open a business and start selling mead?

ED: Well, we’ve had our doors open since June 2008. We started the LLC in 2004, got this facility in 2007 and got all of the licenses and started making mead in 2007.

Ben Hansen: My wife Betty was a roommate of Eric’s wife when they were in college. Eric and Woody started talking about doing this as a business and we all looked at ways to get it started. We started a search for properties and found this place just at the right time.

WD: As you can probably imagine, there are a lot of hoops to jump through when it comes to making alcohol legally, but they are worth it. Honestly, the laws aren’t that bad. There’s nothing that ridiculous or unreasonable, except for the interstate commerce rules… but other than that, the laws are really there to help you, and to protect the consumer. By and large they aren’t ridiculous, it just takes a lot of time.

WE: Does making the mead itself take a long time?

WD: It takes us about six months to make mead from beginning to end. But we do have meads that are a year and a half old… and we haven’t even bottled those yet because we are using an advanced bottling technique called Surly Aging. It makes the mead more flavorful.

WE: How different is the process from making beer or wine?

ED: The only difference from beer is that it has one extra step… extracting the sugars from the grain. Once you have them converted to starch, it’s all the same from there… it is fermentation. To get our honey to be in to a liquid solution, we water it down. Brewers have to convert and extract the sugars, and wine makers just crush their fruits into juice and then it is in a liquid stage. Once there, with certain percentages of sugar, things like yeast come into play. And things ferment easily. Our simplest traditional recipe is: water down the honey, add water and yeast and let it sit. Sounds very simple. In a way, it really is, but picking the right yeast and honey combination and things like that require some experience. We were each home brewers for ten years before we started this process, so we’ve been able to refine everything that we do.

BH: All four of us have judged mead for at least seven years. We’ve taken our judging experience and really applied it to the products we make here. We want to make sure that we have something that we would be proud to sit down and taste at a competition.

WE: It sounds like a process that requires a lot of scientific experimentation.

WD: I think that it’s a lot like music. It’s a mix of science and art. There’s certainly a science and the mathematics behind it, but there is also a lot of art… like how much of this fruit or that spice. Our Apple Pie is a good example of that. We use the best cinnamon in the world, an organic cinnamon from Vietnam, for that recipe. Because that type of cinnamon was different than what we had used before in home brewing, we knew that we needed to adjust weights and gallonage… and then there’s the art of it… if it doesn’t quite taste right, add a little bit more or a little bit less.

WE: You mentioned earlier that you use some historic recipes. Usually when I think of mead, I imagine old England with knights and kings drinking mead in a castle. Is that the era that your recipes are from?

ED: We do have some old European recipes, but mead is actually far more ancient than that. It’s got the oldest literary reference of any fermented beverage dating back six thousand years ago in some of the Hindu texts. The oldest archeological evidence of the fermentation of fruits, grains or honeys is ambiguous.

WD: Essentially, people used ferment what they had local to them. Mongolians will take yaks milk and ferment it and make an alcoholic beverage out of it. Places along the Mediterranean can grow a lot of fruit, so they use their honey to make other things. So you may think of England and Norse countries for mead because they don’t have as much fruit up there, but they do have honey. So they used their honey for alcohol. There are meads from all over the world though. In Africa there is a traditional mead called Tej, made with a certain tree called the gesho tree. Mead is made all over the world and is popular pretty much everywhere but the Muslim world.

WE: So you sell your meads here at your facility near Crosswoods as well as online, but are there other places where people can find your products?

ED: Yeah, there’s a few places… Palmer’s, Weiland’s, Gentile’s, Vino 100 at Polaris, Grapes of Mirth in The North Market, The Clintonville Community Market, Blacklick Wines, Village Wines in Canal Winchester. We’ll also soon be selling at The Andersons and Whole Foods. We do some events as well. We recently went to a Viking Festival in Ashville. They were very excited about us being there!

WE: Are there any other mead producers in the region?

WD: There are no other dedicated Meaderies in Central Ohio, no.

BH: There are three Ohio wineries that produce just one style of mead and it is just a sweet honey wine. Probably the largest single manufacturer of mead in Ohio is Valley Vineyards, but their one mead is all they produce. We are working on reeducating the American consumer that mead doesn’t have to be sweet and it doesn’t just have to be honey.

WE: Do you have certain lines that seem to be customer favorites or signature flavors?

BH: There are some that sell significantly better than others. We have discovered the American palate is sweeter… but our dry meads have some absolute followers that we want to support as well. Personally, I prefer dry… so we’re not going to quit making it as long as I am in production!

WD: Just like anything, mead has a huge range and variety of flavors… and there is a right one and a wrong one, depending on what your experience is, and what you are going for. Just like you have to pair the right wine with the right food.

More information can be found at www.brothersdrake.com or on Facebook HERE.