click to enlarge Jenn Pries

SF Mead Company's buzzworthy beverages

Although mead is one of the oldest drinks ever made, honey is often eclipsed by grape and grain. The ancient beverage is usually found in Ethiopian restaurants or Medieval texts, but experimental producers like the San Francisco Mead Company are broadening its appeal.“I think it's exciting for people. It's not a niche thing,” says owner Sarah Jones. “It's the oldest thing that everyone forgot to do.” Oron Benary and Jones make up the husband-and-wife team behind the San Francisco Mead Company. The couple also own Brothers Drake , a meadery and bar in Columbus, Ohio. They moved back to San Francisco about two years ago to make meads here. Now in the Bayview, they produce meads that are made with local ingredients.San Francisco Mead Company's meads evoke different parts of California's landscape. The honey that makes the California Gold comes from bees that forage in the Mendocino National Forest, filling the elixir with scents of pine.“Depending on the season and what's in bloom, it's true wildflower [honey] so you're getting the actual native California plants. I love it because when people talk about terroir and what grapes do and how they express what the earth is, I think that is the mead version of it,” Jones says. “This is what California tastes like and you can't really express that any other way. Even if you're growing stuff, like oranges, it isn't native to California so it's still a step removed.”The honey for the Orange Blossom comes from hives of bees that live in the middle of of organic orange blossoms in Ojai. The mead is subtle and pairs well with food, while the fragrance “smells like an orange blossom tree in bloom,” says Jones.If the Orange Blossom is reminiscent of spring, then the Apple Pie tastes like October. Made with raw Mendocino honey, fresh-pressed apple juice from Sonoma, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, the ceyser (mead made with apple juice) is the sweetest that the company makes.The mead can also be used to make killer cocktails. At Brothers Drake, the Apple Pie is mixed with wheat whiskey to create a warm and wintery cocktail.“Even though it's a sweet mead, people who don't like sweet like this,” Benary says.Compared to other meads, San Francisco Mead Company's beverages are very drinkable. Time is an important factor in creating a dry drink that can be paired with food. Unlike some mead-makers, Benary and Jones age their meads for at least a year. This process lets the honey shine instead of creating a sweet product that can be too cloying.“Right after it ferments, [the mead] tastes like a foot. There's a lot of CO2 in it, all the sugar's gone so it's really dry, and the honey is scrubbed really strong so the flavor of the honey is totally gone. What allows the flavor to come back is time,” Benary says. “There are mead-makers that ferment and after four or five weeks, just add honey or sugar, sulfite it, and it tastes like a mead. We don't do that, we just let it age.”Jones and Benary are currently fermenting a blackberry melomel, or mead aged with fruit, and were recently given oak chardonnay barrels from Napa winery Chateau Montelena to age mead in. While experimenting with the diversity of honey, they take part in some modern Medieval happenings. San Francisco Mead Company provides the mead for the Guild of Cookery , a pop-up that recreates feasts from the Game of Thrones books. Graham Bellefeuille, who makes up the Guild of Cookery with Ty Cox, stopped by the tasting room while we were sampling meads and commented that people still don't quite understand what mead is.“Every time you tell people 'we have mead,' they're like 'what's mead?'" he says. "They've heard the word but they don't really know what it is or what to expect. It's just this foreign concept to a lot of people.”Benary and Jones expect that will change. More meaderies are popping up across the country and experimenting with the age-old beverage.“Everyone right now is just starting and no one's doing the same thing,” Jones says. “It's exciting. We age all of these for a year, all three of these are experiments. We just found the best stuff we could and it worked out awesome.”The meads can be found at retail shops like Bi-Rite, the San Francisco Wine Trading Company, and at Whole Foods throughout the Bay Area. Restaurants like Bar Tartine and Mission Cheese also serve the elixirs.