Brewing Session Mead Q & A

Q: What does it mean that we brew our session mead like beer but “without the hot side”?

A: We use a traditional beer-making process without ever heating the product above hive temperature of 95 degrees in our entire process.

For those familiar with making beer, you know the first step to making beer is creating a mash. This involves heating the grains in water, which allows the enzymes from the malt to break down the starch, effectively turning the grains into simple sugars. The yeast then uses these sugars for food, creating alcohol and carbon dioxide in the process.

Since we start with our fermentable sugar, 100% raw honey, we skip the mashing step of beer-making and begin with fermentation right away.

Q: What about your tea-based session meads, don’t you have to heat those?

A: For these specific products, we boil water to make a concentrated tea and then cool it by adding reverse osmosis water from our well. Once it is below 95 degrees F, then we add the honey and the yeast and the party starts!

Q: Why is heat bad for honey?

A: Raw honey, like other raw foods, has nutrients that are destroyed by heating. Specifically digestive enzymes like diastase, invertase, glucose oxidase, and many others. Diastase specifically “enriches the nutritional and therapeutic function of honey”, while invertase and glucose oxidase act as antioxidants in the body. Read more here!

We believe that these nutrients, while present in low concentrations in our product, are a part of the reason you can drink our product and avoid symptoms of a hangover, feeling great the following day. Because nobody has time for a hangover.

References: Huang Z, Liu L, Li G, Li H, Ye D, Li X. Nondestructive Determination of Diastase Activity of Honey Based on Visible and Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. Molecules. 2019 Mar 29;24(7):1244. doi: 10.3390/molecules24071244. PMID: 30934979; PMCID: PMC6480106.