Glenn Lavender stands behind a gorgeous solid wood bar donning a red and white Silver Hand Meadery tee. He’s pouring meads for me to try.
“This is a traditional mead,” he says. It’s his flagship variety, Virginia Moon, which if you know Lavender, is inspired by a song of the same title by the Foo Fighters. His bottle names are all inspired by songs and lyrics, a given since Lavender is a professional musician.
“Whoa, that’s good,” I say, lowering the glass from my mouth. “It’s cool to the taste, but warm going down—and it’s sweet, too.”
He smiles, then he gives me a quick primer on how bees influence the flavor of this drink widely regarded as the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage.
“There are over 300 varietals of honey,” he shares. “Just like a different grape will give you a different wine, different honey will give you a different mead.”
Lavender unscrews the lids off of a few small numbered bottles from a rectangular bin and thrusts a few towards me. “We got this in Spain,” he says. “It’s an avocado blossom honey. This is a goldenrod honey. Then we’ve got a bamboo honey.”
He continues his discourse, “We have a Virginia wildflower honey. Then there’s clover honey—which you’re familiar with—orange blossom, raspberry blossom, blueberry blossom and another one called star thistle.”
Lavender and his wife and business partner, Sherri, bring in honey from across the country and around the world where the plant varieties are most prevalent—orange honey from Florida or California where orange trees grow natively and blueberry honey from patches in New Jersey.
In a class by itself—it’s not technically wine though it’s sometimes called honey wine—mead is the fastest growing segment of the alcohol industry. The American Mead Makers Association reports that mead sales increased 130 percent from 2012 to 2013, exceeding growth rates for beer, wine, distilled spirits and hard cider.
“Mead has the creativity of craft beer and the elegance of wine,” says Lavender. “People are putting everything from coffee to cayenne pepper, to peanut butter, to chocolate in it. There are all sorts of strange things you can put into mead and still get a pretty great drink.”
Once called “the nectar of the gods,” serve traditional mead chilled for those warm spring days. Pair it with pizza for a low-key night at home, or aged cheddar at a gathering amongst friends. Either way, mead is deliciously sweet and worth a first look if you’re a connoisseur of beverages, or just simply curious.
Tastings at Silver Hand are free.