On an early summer morning, to the sound of cheerful bees buzzing, Jason Davis opened one of his hives and removed a frame. The hive was teeming with bees, flying in and out through openings in the colorful polypropylene boxes stacked around it.
“As soon as the bees start landing, you’ll see they have little yellow and orange clumps of pollen on their legs,” Davis says.
Davis keeps more than 1 million bees in 25 colonies in the backyard of his mead brewery, SweetGale Meadworks and Cider House in Homer.
“It’s a great day for bees. Temperatures are already over 50 degrees or approaching 50 degrees, there’s very little wind, it’s sunny and the dandelions are blooming,” Davis said.
Davis turns around and squats down in front of a row of shrubs where he has planted nagoonberries, also known as Arctic raspberries. Davis discovered them in the wild as a teenager and has had a special affection for them ever since. Nagoonberries are similar to raspberries, but have a distinctive tart flavor that Davis now values in his mead making.
“It’s hard to get enough from the wild, so we grow it here,” Davis said. “We have about 20,000 plants. Last year we harvested nearly 500 pounds of berries, mostly my son harvested them, but I help out when I can.”
Davis’ most popular drink, wild fermented mead, is made from just nagoonberries, honey and water. Producing locally produced food and beverages in Alaska can be a challenge, especially when it comes to alcohol, as even in-state brewers often import fruits, grains and yeast. But since he began producing mead and wine commercially, Davis has strived to make his drinks with all local ingredients.
Back in the mead brewery kitchen, Davis explained the fermentation process.
“We make everything in batches of five gallons,” Davis said, stirring a ladle into one of the silver pots. “It’s wildflower honey, and it’s our traditional straight mead, so it has nothing in it but honey and water.”
Pure honey has antibacterial and antifungal properties — bacteria and yeast cannot live in it — but when mixed with water, the yeast feeds on the sugars and ferments, turning it into mead, an alcoholic drink that tastes like mead.
Davis ferments using locally grown raspberries, currants, chaga mushrooms, cider apples, and of course honey. So far this year, his bees are only providing about a third of the honey he needs, but in the long term he plans to produce it all himself. Local honey is expensive – more than five times the price of bulk clover honey – which means a bottle costs more.
“I mainly sell them for about $30 a bottle,” Davis said, “but if I used Costco honey I could sell them for half that price.”
He said he can’t sell much of his mead in stores around Alaska because the profit margins are too low, but he sells it online direct to consumers.
Davis said local produce is worth the higher price tag. He buys berries from local farmers and says they taste far better than what’s sold at the grocery store. He also said local honey is great for making mead.
“If you’re making a raspberry or blackcurrant or blueberry mead and it’s fireweed honey, it doesn’t taste like honey at all,” Davis says, “The focus is on the fruit. Whereas if you buy clover honey at Costco, it’s a fraction of the price, but when you take the sweetness out, it has a very distinct, medicinal taste.”
But Davis said using all locally sourced ingredients isn’t just about taste.
“It’s a desire to support local agriculture and be local,” Davis says, “and then there’s the craft industry aspect of using only local materials here to create a fantastic, what I think is world-class product.”
Davis said it’s hard to find locally produced alcohol in Alaska, and while the state is home to many breweries and wineries, water is often the only locally produced ingredient.
To his knowledge, his commercial mead brewery produces the only alcohol in the state that is consistently grown and produced locally.
And in the long run, producing food and drink from locally sourced ingredients will make businesses and communities more stable, Davis said.
“The more we can do locally, the better,” Davis said, “so we don’t have to ship everything from the lower 48 states, which is a bit vulnerable.”
Davis said if the road system were to fail for any reason, they would still be able to produce everything they needed for the mead brewery.
Davis said each year business is a little better than the previous, and this year has been a good one for his bees. In mid-summer, he temporarily moved some of his hives to higher ground so the bees could gather fireweed pollen in the fields. This has increased productivity, boosting his honey harvest, the backbone of his business.
Related: Anchorage Museum Bike Tour Helps You Discover the City’s Secret Gardens
#Homer #company #local #approach #brewing #mead #thousands #honeybees