Mead makers find a sweet home in San Francisco

Bottles of mead are displayed on a table before a recent tasting Sunday January 5, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. The San Francisco Mead Company is making and producing high quality mead in the Bayview district. Bottles of mead are displayed on a table before a recent tasting Sunday January 5, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. The San Francisco Mead Company is making and producing high quality mead in the Bayview district. Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Mead makers find a sweet home in San Francisco 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Inside a warehouse in the Bayview, a husband-and-wife team is aging 6,000 gallons of mead, the ancient, honey-based drink once favored by the Greek gods.

Mead, with its difficult-to-categorize place between wine and beer, has always been a tough sell, but Sarah and Oron Benary of San Francisco Mead Co. are betting that mead will become the new drink for the libation literati.

The couple also own Brothers Drake Meadery in Columbus, Ohio, where in four years they have been able to turn Millennials on to mead, pouring 13 different varieties and selling 10,000 gallons a year. Their meads taste like a dry wine, and some are flavored. Their most popular, Apple Pie, is fermented with apple cider, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.

Their Ohio customers appreciate that they work with local beekeepers and farmers, so that each of their meads expresses notes and flavors from area neighborhoods. Brothers Drake doubled its business for three years in a row, and its mead is now sold in more than 100 bars and stores in Ohio.

Nationwide, mead sales are showing an uptick. Since Michael and Maria Faul opened their Rabbit's Foot Meadery in Sunnyvale in 1995, sales have grown by 45 percent a year. In 2013, they sold 20,000 cases.

"When we started, there were only four or five companies in America making mead," Faul says. "Now there are 140 to 160 companies. The customers are the younger generation, who grew up with craft brewing and are interested in trying new adventurous things, now that craft brewing has started becoming a big industry."

There is so much interest in mead, that the Robert Mondavi Institute at UC Davis is hosting a sold-out, three-day mead-making course Thursday at its Honey and Pollination Center, led by enthusiasts at the campus Department of Viticulture and Enology.

After a year of making mead in San Francisco, the Benarys unveiled their first West Coast batch in July, and began pouring tastes of California Gold on Saturdays inside their Shafter Avenue warehouse, a site located between peeling Victorians and industrial fabrication shops. The honey was supplied by a beekeeper in Stonyford (Colusa County), whose hives border the Mendocino National Forest.

"Just like wine can reflect the flavor of a place, so can mead through all the different honey harvests, and it's a whole genre of drink that has been entirely missed for hundreds of years," says Sarah, who rowed on the U.S. Olympic team in 2000 and 2004.

"Our goal is to buy and sell locally, so the money stays in the community," says Oron, who used to work for an industrial paint coating company.

The couple met in the Bay Area, and always believed that the crowd inside their Columbus bar felt much like San Francisco. So they returned two years ago to set up shop and start their first batch of mead. In 2013, when it was ready, they relocated.

Mission Cheese now serves their mead to pair with local cheeses, and Whole Foods has just signed on to carry San Francisco Mead Co. bottlings in its Berkeley and Market Street stores. Rainbow Grocery and Bi-Rite Market carry their mead, along with a dozen other independent markets and liquor stores. Restaurants have been more tentative. While Zeitgeist bar and Delfina restaurant have experimented with serving the Benarys' efforts on tap, they found that their customers were confused by mead.

"No one even knows what it is," Sarah says, "but it has an amazing story. It's as old as mankind."

Indeed, Roman warriors drank mead to get pumped up for battle. Odin, the king of the Viking gods, believed mead gave him poetic prowess. The Oracle of Delphi insisted she couldn't predict the future without drinking honey wine first, and the love goddess Aphrodite was said to take bribes of mead to help amorous ladies of the Greek upper class find their soul mates.

At first, Columbus customers started reading their poetry aloud inside Brothers Drake, then brought musical instruments, and now the meadery is one of the most popular music venues in Columbus, featuring local acts such as Skashank Redemption, Shrub and Yo Mama's Big Fat Booty Band. Astronomers from Ohio State University drop by the bar for Astronomy on Tap night talks about outer space, and a woman with a company called Drunk Yoga leads barstool serenity stretches.

"Seriously, we didn't plan any of this. I think it's the mead," Sarah says. "We've never had a bar fight. But we've had plenty of people making out on the bar."

The Benarys are busy setting up sample tables at every food event they can find. Soon they will release their second mead, made with orange blossom honey from the Central Valley.

Because the flavors become stronger as mead ages, all their meads rest for a year before bottling. During the last month, they are finished in oak barrels.

Johnny Venetti, owner of Showdown, a bar on Sixth Street near Market, tried serving the Benarys' mead and found it so popular he now has mead cocktails on his permanent menu. He serves a Meadhattan, a mead-and-Tequila Sunrise, and a drink called Inner Peace, made with mead and bourbon.

"Mead is still a fairly new niche, but the mixology people are going crazy for it. It's a whole new area to expand," Venetti says.

"That's why I'm going to jump on it. I'm going to put it on tap."