VALKNUT MEADERY AUSTRALIA
New Meads Coming Soon!
OUR MEADERY
Our meadery is situated in CROWS NEST, QUEENSLAND. We started in early 2022 and it didn’t take long until we realised we had to upgrade. 9 Months in we TRIPLED our floor space as well as our production, just to keep up with the rapidly growing demand for this ancient beverage.
ALL of our honey and most of our other ingredients are LOCALLY SOURCED. This ensures quality and freshness of the meads. For example, the ginger is harvested and put into the mead on the SAME DAY. This allows the nutrients from the ginger to be naturally preserved by the honey.
Even though we grew so quickly and could easily do with another upgrade, we will never purposely never go TOO BIG. This will ensure that we don’t lose that personal touch every bottle deserves.
Our production site is CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC. We sell our meads at local MARKETS, FESTIVALS, ONLINE and have just started getting them into a few BOUTIQUE CELLARS. Our goal is to continue making small batch meads to the finest quality with local ingredients.
MEAD MAKING PROCESS
The water we use is collected from our skies and filtered without treating, boiling or adding any unnecessary “teeth strengthening” fluoride or chlorine. We use the NORMAL FRESH type of water, the CLEAN wet stuff, the way humans have been doing since the dawn of time.
Next ingredient is the
HONEY! We use over a tonne a year in honey, supplied by
LOCAL
beekeepers who have their hives in & around local national parks to get the good Australian Bush Honey we’ve all grown to love.
Once we mix that with our water, we pitch the
YEAST, add any
FRUITS
we feel like to fruity up the flavour. Once it finishes
FERMENTING, we (super secret method that can’t be revealed) and then let it
AGE
for several months to a year before filtering and bottling. Most of the time our process results in a 14-20% sweet, flat mead with fruity flavours.
HISTORY OF MEAD
Mead is by far the oldest alcoholic beverage, predating grape wine by THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Mead is so old that no one knows who the first person was to discover it, but we assume it was someone who came across some HONEY that had been wet and NATURALLY FERMENTED, drank it, got tanked, told their friends of this magical drink and then threw a party. Probably...
In ancient Northern Europe, it was considered a very
SACRED drink and was incorporated into
PAGAN RITUALS
that are still practiced to this day. Mead would be offered to their
DEITIES, shared amongst men to legally
BIND CONTRACTS, and used for
MEDICINAL purposes by
HEALERS/WITCHES (no, witches aren't all “evil” ones that fly around on broomsticks and eat children).
It is also the drink that put the Honey into HONEYMOON. When a couple would marry, they would drink mead everyday for a whole full moon cycle while ‘getting jiggy with it’ to guarantee a PREGNANCY. Yep, mead has been known for THOUSANDS of years to be a strong APHRODISIAC, so be careful.
When the expansion of
GRAPE WINE spread through Europe, mead a.k.a
HONEY WINE slowly became less popular due to grapes being a lot easier to farm, harvest and supply compared to honey. Mead however is making a mean
COMEBACK, with meaderies popping up all over the globe, especially in western societies.
WHAT IS MEAD?
A very common question indeed. Many will describe it as HONEY WINE, which is somewhat true. Instead of fermenting grapes, we ferment honey with water.
You can get sweet meads, dry meads, fortified meads, fruity meads, spiced meads, light meads, flat meads, sparkling meads, sour meads… I’ll stop there before I start sounding like Bubba from Forrest Gump naming all the kinds of shrimp.
The two main ingredients are
WATER FERMENTED WITH HONEY. Both of those things are technically really good for you so I keep telling myself that when they are combined than the results must be
REALLY good for you! (Drink responsibly) This is probably why it’s been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. That’s right, mead is the
OLDEST alcohol known to man, and much like the mullet, it’s making a comeback!
COMMON MEADERY QUESTIONS
WHERE ARE YOUR BEEHIVES?
We have a handful of beehives at our place but they are mainly used for pollination of our vege garden, fruit trees & the fact that THE WORLD NEEDS MORE BEES so we are doing our bit to help their population. The honey our bees produce is nowhere near enough for what we need. So we source ALL of our honey from LOCAL BEEKEEPERS.
Our little town, Crows Nest,QLD, is located smack bang in the middle of
BUSHLAND, filled with mostly gum trees & wattle.
THE BEES LOVE IT. We have local bee keepers who have hives scattered around in the bushlands, where we now purchase about 3 tonne a year.
We constantly keep in touch with our beekeepers to make sure the hives are away from commercially sprayed
ORCHARDS.
This is because we want to keep checking in to make sure they're not using herbicides and pesticides like what are usually used by big orchards.
The more natural our honey is, the more natural our meads are, & the happier the bees are.