Mead Maker: Interview with Glenn Lavender

In our second installment of our #meadmonth series we’re looking at Silver Hand Meadery of Williamsburg, Virginia.

We first found out about this meadery in November 2015, when it first opened its doors to the public. At that time they weren’t pouring their own mead, but mead from other Virginia meaderies. We did a honey and mead tasting that day, which was led by Silver Hand owner, Glenn Lavender. We enjoyed our tasting and said we’d be back when they started pouring their own product.

Related Link: Mead 101: What you need to know about this popular honey wine

We’ve been several times in the past couple years – always bringing home a bottle or two to add to our collection. When we decided to release a blog on mead back on Aug. 4 for Mead Day, it was a no brainer to reach out to Lavender for some information on honey wine.

We didn’t talk to Glenn face-to-face, but he did send us a Youtube link of him answering all our questions. And so we decided to share all his insightful information with you. Be sure to visit Silver Hand the next time you find yourself in colonial Williamsburg.

How did you get your start in the whole mead making business? There were a couple things. One was reading historical fiction novels. A lot of them were from the same author, Stephen Lawhead. He wrote a book called The Silver Hand, and in a lot of his books he’d have these Celtic warriors returning home from battle and celebrate by drinking mead. And his descriptions of mead just sounded awesome. I wanted to try it and find some.

At the same time, I was getting into bee keeping, and my bee keeping catalogs would arrive and they always had a page or two devoted to mead making equipment. So, I started to see these two things together and realized this was something I wanted to check out.

It took a while to find some – I was living in southern Ontario at the time – that’s where I’m from. I had to drive about an-hour-and-a-half to the Niagara-area to find some mead. I found a great winery that was making mead. I liked it and loved it. And thought, ‘This should be a business opportunity for someone, someday.’ I didn’t think it would be me. But that’s how things got started.

Fast forward around a decade or more, and I moved from Canada to Williamsburg. I worked at a church for two-and-a-half years, and decided I wanted to open my own business. I didn't know what kind of business I wanted to run. I had a few different ideas, but it was the mead making business that rose to the top. Being in historic Williamsburg, we thought it was appropriate to have it here.

You can see that our logo is inspired by the Celtic knot, which ties into Silver Hand and those old historical novels.

I think we’ve been coming to your meadery since it opened … can you tell us a little more about your opening date?  We’ve been open since November 2015. We had our first meads available to sell in February, 2016. We actually sold mead from Black Heath Meadery in Richmond at our place for the first few months. That gave us a chance to see what people liked. We’re in our third year, and have doubled our space after being open a year. We have 8 employees right now. We have one head mead maker, besides myself.

Silver Hand is a great example of a small business. With around  8 employees, I’m sure most of them are involved in a lot of the process from start to finish.  We try to have everyone involved in the process. Everyone will be involved on production day at some level. Everyone bottles – because that requires more hands. And then there’s our de-gassing and nutrient additions and that kind of stuff. We’re teaching the staff that, so when people come in and do a tasting, I want our staff to be able to say, ‘We did this!’.

What’s behind the scenes? What’s your production like at Silver Hand?  We have 8 tanks and they’re all 115-gallons a piece. We have 4 French oak barrels, that we’re actually aging a cyser in. We also have another 4 bourbon barrels that we’re aging a traditional mead in. When we’re running full-bore we’ll start 2 new batches every three weeks – so that’s around 1,600 bottles. We had to do that in our first year-and-a-half, but we’re now caught up.

There are so many different styles of mead out there. How many different styles does Silver Hand produce?  We actually do a little bit of every style. We do traditional, metheglin, we always have a cyser. We have a pyment right now, which is exciting. It is the first time we had one (which was made in collaboration with Williamsburg Winery).  We have a couple of melomels. We’ve done a bochet in the past.

In the mead world, honey is like grapes. There are so many different types of honey. What are some of the different types of honey used in making your meads?   I like to try to use a different honey varietal for every mead. We offer honey tastings as well, so people can taste an orange blossom honey. Then they’ll taste an avocado blossom honey. They’ll go through all the different varietals, and then they can taste the mead. We try to tie them to the meads. We’ll choose the honey for the recipe to the mead – so that’s how we connect those things together.

Here in North Carolina our mead scene is growing at a great pace. I know the U.S. is over 400 meaderies but here in NC we’re up to around 12. How is the Virginia mead scene?  It’s growing. We have new meaderies popping up here very quickly. I don’t even know how many we have right now. As far as tastes – I’d say they swing towards the sweet side. When we opened, our meads were a little semi-sweet to dry, but we had a couple of sweet meads and they sold like crazy. So, we decided to do a little more sweet meads. We’re a business, so we’re going to make meads that people like. We kind a skewed that way a little more than I originally planned.

Going back to North Carolina, a lot of our beer people love mead. We see the beer drinkers brag about landing meads such as Schramm’s Mead in Michigan. Do you find that the people who enjoy mead in Virginia are primarily beer drinkers as well? We have aligned ourselves more in the wine world. We sell our meads in wine bottles, they’re not sparkling and our gravity is like wine … and again, we kind of treat it like wine. I don’t see the same thing here, from my experience. I find that it’s the folks who go to wine festivals love mead. It’s a big hit for them. Especially if it’s sweet wines – they’ll come here and buy things up.

Sneak Peek: A look inside Vita Vite Midtown

Vita Vite, Raleigh’s wine bar and Southern art gallery, is launching its second location in North Hills later this month. Vita Vite Midtown welcomes guests to a comfortable atmosphere complemented by craft beers, small plates, southern art and local goods.

“Raleigh has come to know Vita Vite for its inviting, relaxed environment, perfect for enjoying a glass of wine with friends,” said Lindsay Rice, founder and owner of Vita Vite. “We’re thrilled to expand and share this experience with North Hills.”

Vita Vite Midtown features a menu of internationally curated wines along with craft beers on tap, small bites and locally sourced desserts. Guests can purchase art from southern artists as well as goods from specialty artisans and vendors. The 6,000-square foot space blends a modern, edgy ambience with a sophisticated charm, showcasing artful Moroccan tiles and found materials from a 150-year-old Virginian church. Marked by a 360-degree bar, the second-story mezzanine affords vistas of Midtown Park through a retractable glass wall.

Mead Maker: Interview with Ken Schramm

Ken Schramm of Schramm's Mead in Ferndale, Michigan.                                         Photos c/o Schramm's Mead

By Dathan Kazsuk and Jennifer Primrose
Monday, August 6

Mead Day was this past weekend, and in honor of this libation that's fermented with honey, we here at Triangle Around Town have decided to make August our own personal #MeadMonth. To pay homage to mead will will be releasing our full Q&A's we conducted with the mead makers that were featured in our blog, "Mead 101: What you need to know about this popular 'honey wine.'"

This week we will feature Ken Schramm of Schramm's Mead in Michigan. Schramm is known for his fruity melomels, is a founder of the Mazer Cup and the author of the book, "The Compleat Meadmaker." If you ever find yourself passing through Michigan's interstate 75 in Ferndale – pay them a visit – you won't be disappointed. 

There are so many different styles of mead out there today. What are a few of your favorite styles? Schramm's does make very few meads that are not melomels or metheglins. We have made a few "show" style meads, but we insist on using spectacular honey, and that can get a little spendy. 

The melomels Schramm's Mead makes are amazing. We really enjoy meads such as The Statement, Red Agnes, and were fortunate enough to try The Heart of Darkness. How much fruit goes into making your melomels? We do use a lot of fruit, and all of our fruit meads are made with real fruit. We make our cysers with apple cider, but that is always 100 percent pressed fruit. I am not really willing to say exactly how much fruit goes into our recipes, but we generally use only enough water to dissolve the honey. More than 50 percent of the volume of the must is fruit, but the density of honey means that most of the fermentable sugar comes from the honey. I will tell you that some of our meads are crafted with more than 10 pounds of fruit per finished gallon of mead. Yes, that is very expensive. It makes the style and profile of meads that we enjoy and want to share with the world.

Honey is, of course, a big part in making mead. What is your favorite type of honey to use? Most of our honey is Orange Blossom, sourced through a broker from a beekeeper in California. We do use some Michigan honey, although the source we were buying from has not had much to sell us the past couple of years. We also use some Tasmanian Leatherwood, some Scottish Heather, and some Michigan wildflower from other beekeepers when the flavor and aroma profiles of those honeys are really wonderful.

Tell us a little bit about how you got your start into the wonderful world of mead? Mead got its big boost in the U.S. from homebrewers.  It was part of the homebrewing boom that Charlie Papazian started in the 80s. That is how I became a fan. I made my first mead in 1988 and got really hooked on the stuff. I started the first mead-only competition with some friends of mine, and that helped boost the knowledge and enthusiasm of the community. My friend, Dan McConnell, and I also did a cool 13-way batch with six different honeys fermented with the same yeast. And then the same honey with six different yeasts. And then all six honeys blended with the first yeast. We presented that at an American Homebrewers Association conference in 1992. People loved it. That led to articles in Zymurgy, and those led to the book.

The book being “The Compleat Meadmaker.” We still need to pick that one up. Being called “honey wine,” why do you suppose that it appeals more to beer drinks than your traditional wine drinkers? There is a much bigger following among beer drinkers, since most of the craft beer makers and connoisseurs came out of the homebrewing world, and most of them knew about mead from Charlie's book, Zymurgy, and the competitions and conferences. There is a growing fan base among wine drinkers. There are both awareness and some quality expectations among wine drinkers that need attention.

Mead is starting to make an uptick in the past couple years – but it’s not near the popularity of craft beers or even distilleries, which seem to be the latest craze. What do you think mead makers and meaderies need to do to get to that level? Mead needs to work its way toward recognition among the wine cognoscenti. That comes with some responsibility. Fine wine makers do not utilize some of the practices that are common among some mead makers, both amateur and commercial. The use of extracts and concentrates is unheard of among top winemakers – and it is one of the distinctions between fine wine and industrial grocery store wine for high end wine journalists and critics. If we are to attain a level of legitimacy among wine makers and wine critics, we will have to be using the finest ingredients and practices that they have come to accept as the lowest common denominator for a high-end wine. We're trying to do that at Schramm's Mead.

Going back to styles, we tried our first braggot last year at a local mead festival. A local brewer and mead maker teamed up to make the drink. We don’t recall seeing any braggots in your repertoire of meads. Do you, or have you ever made one? I have made braggots, and even won a National medal with one. Since they contain malt, they are governed by brewery law in the U.S. We have a brewery license, but we have not even been able to make enough mead to keep ahead of demand, so we haven't ventured into that ground commercially, yet. We are only going to expand when we are able to do that at the quality level that we insist on, and that is not possible right now. 

Here’s hoping you can expand in the near future, at least so it is easier for us to get your meads here in North Carolina. We just heard the other day that the term “honeymoon” refers to a couple receiving mead after they are married. Is that true?

The honeymoon story is widely circulated. The story is that newlyweds were given a month's worth of mead (one 'honey-moon') to ensure that they would get the, uh... romantic aspect of their marriage off to a roaring good start. The Oxford English Dictionary does not give credit to mead for the origin of the word, but the word and the same usage does exist in other languages. It may be that the English term derives from old German or Dutch. The story is known in both of those cultures. The story may be apocryphal, but mead has been around a lot longer than the OED.  

Last question … with this swing back towards mead, what are some great meaderies we should be looking out for at our local bottle shops, or while on vacation across the U.S.? There are a number of other good meaderies in the US, and I don't want to risk offending some folks by mentioning others. I would say that there is a huge range of meads, and they are appropriate for lots of different settings. There are folks making lighter carbonated meads that are much more quaffable on hot summer days, and some making lighter meads that pair well with the lighter cuisine that is the current rage.