MEAD IN THE
M I DDL E
W
hen Curtis Sims walked into Governor’s Cigar & Pipe in 2016, arms laden with quarts of honey collected from his beehives, his only aim was to share the sweet bounty and kick back with a smoke. As customers billowed in and out, Sims struck a serendipitous conversation with fellow veteran and apiarist Cameron Myers. The duo bonded over their overseas experiences in the military and their overflowing stockpile of honey. “You ever thought about making mead?” asked Myers. The fortuitous question prompted a business partnership, an award-winning product, and the first commercial meadery in Louisiana. Confident that his math degree and heavy background in physics, chemistry, and biology would yield a decent product, Sims accepted the challenge. “How tough can it be?” he recalls thinking. How tough can it be? “He said it the other day,” chimes in Myers to answer my question. “It’s easy do and even easier to mess up.” Sims’ first batch was in 2016. He brought
it to Governor’s, which had become a homebase, with the intention of having folks try it and provide feedback. Initially, the cigar crowd celebrated his batch, but Sims remained steadfast about perfecting his meticulous recipe. Around that same time, Myers found a mead competition he kept pushing Sims to enter. After a month of “haranguing,” Sims finally relented, sending two different meads to the Texas Mead Cup (the second largest mead contest in the United States). Though he pulled two second place awards, Sims deemed it a fluke, so to be absolutely sure what they were producing was top tier, they entered the largest mead competition in the nation, the Mazer Cup. They sent about eight meads to a competition that had over five hundred entries and ended up placing third for one of Sims’ experimental brews--Poppin’ Smoke, an unreleased brew where the honey is smoked before fermentation. The win along with a widely positive reception at that year’s Celtic Festival clenched their certainty in the product, especially for Sims who recalls finally thinking, “Okay, we might be onto something here.”
article by VANELIS RIVERA and photography by KELLY MOORE CLARK
