Golden Coast Mead
Golden Coast Mead’s CEO and Head Mead Maker Frank Golbeck’s dream is to make a mead from the honey of a place and guarantee there’s nothing in the world like it.
“THE TIMES WHEN I have the most passion flowing through my bones is when I am making mead and sharing it with people,” says Frank Golbeck, the CEO and Head Mead Maker of Golden Coast Mead in Oceanside, California. Golbeck’s grandfather was an apple grower who made cider, berry wine, grape wine, and honey wine in Yucaipa, California. He owned Los Rios Rancho, where he would serve his mead and where Golbeck remembers hanging behind the bar as a kid. “The adults would just be laughing,” he recalls, “and I remember thinking what is this potion that’s transforming these adults?”
Golbeck’s family sold the ranch and the tasting room, and he forgot about that potion until years later when he discovered references to mead in his high-school literature class. “It wasn’t just my grandfather; it was Shakespeare and J.R.R. Tolkien who called it ‘the essence of sunshine and flowers.’ To me that just sealed the deal. I needed to get my hands on some mead.”
Fates aligned when Golbeck helped his grandfather clean out his garage. They found a bottle of fifteen-year-old mead that Golbeck shared with friends when he returned to college that fall. “It was golden perfection, sunshine in a glass,” he says. “I had this rose-colored night, and three years of beekeeping and mead-making in the basement later, I’m sitting with a friend who says, ‘Dude, we could sell this stuff.’”
And so he did. Golbeck formed Golden Coast Mead in Oceanside, California, in 2010 with Co-owners Joe Colangelo and Praveen Ramineni. It took three more years of leased equipment, borrowed space, and fund-raising before this trio’s tasting room and business really got going in the summer of 2014.
Golden Coast meads aren’t pasteurized “to maintain the floral, fruity complexity that you get in raw-honey mead,” Golbeck says. He ferments with ale yeast and bottle conditions to create lighter-bodied meads that come in at a level of effervescence that’s just under champagne’s.
One of the flagship meads at Golden Coast is the award-winning Orange Blossom Mead, made with California orange-blossom honey and Palomar Mountain spring water. At 12 percent ABV, this mead is lighter than the more common dessert meads, with subtle hints of citrus. Another core product at Golden Coast is the 12 percent ABV Savage Bois, a California wildflower-honey mead fermented on French oak chips. And then there’s the Something, Something Sour Mead, a lactic-soured mead that for Golbeck represents “the complex balance between honey richness, tart lactic flavor, and oak fullness.”
“Imagine three tiers of mead,” Golbeck says. The first tier at Golden Coast— which includes the Orange Blossom, the Savage Bois, and the Sour—are entry-level meads that everyone can afford a couple of times a week if not every day, he says. “These meads are consistent, approachable, honey-forward, and balanced with other notes. They ferment with low-ester ale yeast, with added oak or sour cultures to give balance. Their carbonation helps with that balance as well.” These lighter, refreshing meads make great gateway meads for beer and cocktail drinkers who will eventually experience the other two tiers. “Our earliest adopters are homebrewers,” he adds.
The next tier of mead includes meads that ferment longer and age for one to two years before Golden Coast releases them
on the market. Many of these meads are made in partnership with a local beekeeper in San Diego who is collecting varietal honey for varietal meads. Their flavors are fuller and their bodies bigger than the first tier’s, and these meads are usually around 14 percent ABV.
The third tier of meads is still to come. It will be made from honey raised by Golden Coast Mead and will happen “when we get there,” Golbeck says. “The backbone provided by the first two tiers will provide cash flow to fund the vertically integrated products.”
Generally, mead adopters tend to become mead enthusiasts who realize the huge spectrum of flavor that honey wine can fall onto. That variety can be attributed to the terroir of honey, says Golbeck. “I love the ecology of mead,” he says. “Through honey we have a connection with the plant world and the opportunity to experience a place. With this third tier, we can make you a mead from the honey of a place and guarantee there’s nothing in the world like it. As mead makers we can say, ‘Here’s a drink that uniquely reflects this place.’”
Mead as a craft is at its early frontier, Golbeck professes. “We get to invent styles of mead that no one else has done before. We have the opportunity to specialize based off of local honeys.”
The variety and availability of those local honeys depends on healthy beehives, Golbeck says. To help keep them healthy, Golden Coast donates one percent of its gross revenue to hive research at the University of California in San Diego. “One day mead will be an industry big enough to shift the honey industry,” he says. “We hope that empowers our customers.”