Truth be told, this is my first true mead experience. Prior to today, I was not fully aware of what mead is, besides an alcohol beverage with a distinct, slightly sweet flavour. Therefore, I jumped at the opportunity to visit Abbotsford’s only Meadery to learn what is it, how it is made, and why it isn’t readily available at liquor stores and at restaurants by the glass.
Mead is a honey based wine. Basically how you would make wine with grapes, but you use honey and water to ferment instead. Nothing else is added. To fully understand the work that goes into producing mead, which makes it such a pricy product, you must learn about the bees at the centre of it all.
This is the summarized version as told to us by the owner of Campbell’s Gold Honey Farm & Meadry, whose family has been doing this for over 50 years now.
We learned that when it comes to honey bees it is only the female workers that live in the hive. The drones’ goal is to find virgin queens to mate with, so it is the female bees that are doing all the hive jobs. These worker bees live for only about 6 weeks playing the part of nurse, housekeeper, undertaker, guard, etc. But majority of their life is spent as a forager, collecting pollen and nectar. They do this to the point that they die of exhaustion, from over working. And the sad part, all this work to only product 1gram, or a quarter teaspoon of honey. To best put it into perspective: It takes 500 bees to make 500 grams of honey.
During the harvesting process pollen is caught on the tiny hairs on their legs. They comb said hair to get this packed up “baskets” of pollen from off of their hind legs. Of which they head butt it into the hive’s cells for their offspring to consume.
Another fun fact, bees have 2 stomachs. One is the honey sac and the other their regular stomach. The honey sac allows them to slurp up nectar and fly it back to hive. There, the nectar it is passed on from bee to bee, with each pass being an opportunity to remove some of the moisture from the nectar. The result gets put into a cell. The dried nectar is fanned and capped with a wax seal. So that when time, the wax cap is removed and the honey extracted by the beekeeper.
This honey is made into the aforementioned mead, but also bee wax candles, soap, body creams, and wax wraps for sealing food containers.
The outcome of your mead is determined by how long the fermentation process is held for. The longer, the drier and sweeter. A good mead takes about a year to mature, whereas fruit wines take only 3-6 months. Immediately you see the time commitment this process requires. Couple that with the limited quantity of ingredients, the amount of resources it requires, and the dwindling population of bees; this is a steep cost. Mead is the oldest spirited beverage and the costliest of all the wines to make. And now I understand why it is not immediately commercially available.
For those who do not understand the worth of the spirit, they might not be inclined to open their wallets for a glass of it. If you didn’t know what went into producing mead and only saw it being listed on a menu above cost, you might stay away and opt of the house red at $6 a glass instead. And the Meadery will not make any profit if they are offering glasses at an attractive price to first time consumers. Therefore, it is best to leave this as a specialty product; prepared in smaller batches, for those who seek it.
The flavour profile of your mead is dependent on the bees and their honey. The colour of the honey helps to differentiate between the batches. For example, spring and summer is wildflower season, where bees harvest from a great variety of flowers and their various petals, the ones they gravitate towards effects the flavouring and the hue of the honey and therefore the mead.
Although you will not get a mish mash of floral flavours as bees orient to a flower. If bees are in the middle of a field, the first flower they land on is the one they keep to throughout; harvesting the field until the pollen is exhausted. Therefore, it is easy to architect the flavour of your honey through hive placement.
This plays a big part in the complexity of mead, as our Meadery experts combine certain honeys, drawing out levels and other flavours. Then bottled to pair with spicy meals or comforting dessert in mind. The best way to witness this firsthand is through one of their tastings. Campbell’s Gold offers a large assortment of mead in flavours like cherry, black current, apple, peach, and plum. Basically any fruit goes well with honey.
And we haven’t even broken the ice on the types of fermented honey spirits. Campbell’s Gold Honey Farm & Meadery specializes in the production of a premium range of honey wine variations that are as follows. Mead just refers to sweet or dry fermented honey. Pyment is fermented grapes and honey. Melomel is fermented fruit and honey. Cysor is specifically apples and honey. And Metheglin is a category all its own, referring to spices and zests added to any of the above.
Their collection of flavoured honey is also worth exploring. They too offer a large assortment in this, but with more creative flavours like cappuccino, Grand mariner, and liquorice. Their lime and root beer were developed to help disguise the taste of medicine for children. And their jalapeño honey is made with chilies grown on site that are dried and crushed.
It was hard to narrow it down, but we ended up walking away with the garlic honey that we would later pair with a spicy pizza for a savoury yet sweet punch on a basic pie. And their chocolate honey which we used in coffee as an easy sweetener making it a mocha. We also used it as a drizzle over assorted desserts.
To learn more about mead and to try this unique product from a family that has been doing it for over 50 years, and has a passion to continue for 50 years more, come to Campbell’s in Abbotsford for a one-of-a-kind experience. Learn something new and get buzzed (intentional bee pun there) doing it.
Campbell’s Gold Honey Farm and Meadery
2595 Lefeuvre Rd, Abbotsford, BC V4X 1H5
(604) 856-2125
campbellsgold.com
