Brothers Drake Meadery and Bar

Brothers Drake Meadery and Bar

Mead is an ancient form of a fermented beverage that uses honey as its primary sugar source. It’s believed to be the ancestor of all fermented drinks. Mead predates agriculture and has been found in every culture that has access to honey. Traces were found from around 7,000 BC in China with popular mentions in ancient Greece, pre Bronze Age Europe and Africa throughout history. Modern meaderies in the U.S. have begun to put mead back in the spotlight. Drawing from ancient recipes, concocting new and evolving the process of mead making has produced a consumer drink that has bucked the system a bit on the old beer and wine standards. Mead is available in endless styles from beer style Braggots, to sparkling or still wines. At Brothers Drake we craft a still, wine style mead. While we consider ‘wine’ to be made from grape juice, our meads do draw similar characteristics and flavors from solely grape and juice wines. Mead, however, with honey as its primary sugar source for fermentation has a history of all the flowers from which the honey was made. In fermentation, honey will express a myriad of notes and flavors. Honey becomes our ‘varietal’ in mead making and expresses the terrior of the area from which it was produced. Our mead is simple. We use local honey and local ingredients whenever possible. Much of the work we do is to create an increasingly closer supply of raw materials from honey, fruit and spice to packaging and business partners. Of course, using the best ingredients gives us the best taste. We work with suppliers that use organic farming practices, so nature does most of the work there. We minimally process our ingredients and never add sulfites. The equation is pretty simple – good stuff goes in, great mead comes out. But what makes our meads, our meadery, our team and our customers great really comes more from the WHY we do this, rather than how. The team at Brothers Drake is committed to building a business that begins to redefine all those ‘green’ buzzwords. Local and sustainable are thrown around a lot – we do it too. But to really build a new economy for community that preserves our resources and begins to create more equality and corporate responsibility, we need to act on these values. Brothers Drake is committed to making the most central Ohio based product possible, we don’t distribute our mead outside the greater Columbus area. We’re committed to developing more ways to keep our resources in our community. We’re happy to say, it’s showing signs of success.