The Avant-garde

Owner David Myers has modeled Boulder, Colorado’s

production facility after a craft-beer brewery.

“I WAS AT CHARLIE PAPAZIAN’S

house one evening, and he pulled out a bottle of his prickly pear mead,” says David Myers who owns Redstone Meadery in Boulder, Colorado. “That’s how it all got started.”

Myers made a lot of mead in the nineties with Paul Gatza, current director of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA). The aspiring mead maker was an assistant manager for the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup on the competition side. He recalls the days in Boulder, Colorado, when the AHA was just getting started.

With the help of this homebrew network, Myers discovered one of the secrets to his homemade mead’s success. He brewed two batches of mead—one with liquid ale yeast and another with Narbonne, a wine yeast that he says is good for young, fruity wines. Then he walked through the AHA offices with both meads, asking each staff member which one he or she preferred. “Everyone preferred the Narbonne yeast,” says Myers.

In 2000, Myers considered opening a brew pub on the Colorado Front Range. “I really wanted to be in the alcohol business,” he remembers. “But I was watching this craft-beverage movement take off— saké had a resurgence, the tequila shelf filled up—and I thought mead would have a real opportunity on the market. I already had about thirty-five carboys of mead fermenting in my house, so I decided it was time to skip the Olympics and go pro.”

Instead of a brew pub, Myers opened Redstone Meadery in Boulder, modeling his production facility after a craft brewery. “We’re very [much like a] brewery other than not having a mash tun,” he says.

Redstone’s pasteurization system for its mead involves a stainless-steel kettle that is heated to 180°F (82°C) before the honey is added. The heat is shut off before the honey addition, which drops the kettle down to 160°F (71°C). “And then after that it really is a brewing process,” Myers explains. “We use a heat exchanger to cool off [the mead], we force oxygen to get fermentation started, we have jacketed fermentors, and we infuse fruits and spices.”

Most of Redstone Meadery’s honey comes from Colorado and Arizona. “Just like different malts make different beer, different honeys make different honey beers,” says Myers, “so where the bees have been matters a lot in the flavor profile. For example, when you get citrusy notes you can tell the bees have been out in an orange grove.”

Honey is a highly fermentable sugar, Myers explains, so when left to itself, honey will ferment down to zero sugar content. “In beer you have fermentable malts, which give alcohol content, and you have your unfermentable malts, so there’s your sweet-