Not Just for Game of Thrones

Written by TONY REHAGEN

Nathan Price wasn’t sure what he was going to pour into his glass. For years, the St. Louis native ran Burnt Barrel Designs, producing custom glassware, bottle openers and other drinking accessories out of his Lake St. Louis home as a side hustle to his full-time gig at Lou Fusz Automotive. He was also an avid homebrewer and small-batch distiller and figured one day he’d combine his two hobbies and open a drink-slinging business. He was just never sure which type of libation would float his ambitions.

Then one of his glassware customers suggested Price try making mead.

Price was familiar with the drink — essentially fermented honey, water and yeast — from going to Renaissance Fairs and watching HBO’s Game of Thrones. Though it is commonly referred to as “honey wine,” it’s closer kin to beer because of the brewing process, which was familiar enough to Price. He consulted Foxes Den Meadery in Chicago and whipped up a mead with black currant, blueberry and vanilla. Rich and fruit-forward, it was popular among friends, so he made another batch. And then another.

“It just took off,” says Price, sitting at a barrel pub table inside Burnt Barrel Meadery (730 Lakeside Plaza, burntbarrelmead.com), the small-batch production facility and tasting room that he and his wife, Stephandine, opened in a Lake St. Louis strip mall last June. “We already have so many fantastic breweries here in St. Louis,

I feel like the market is going to want mead.”

Price isn’t just speaking from personal observation. According to a recent report from market research company Technavio, the global mead market is projected to reach $2.26 billion by 2026, with a year-over-year growth rate of almost 7 percent. Thirty-one percent of that growth will be in North America. In St. Louis metro mead-making, Burnt Barrel joins recent efforts by Brix Urban Winery (Ste. Genevieve), Four Brothers Mead (Festus), Mead Hall (St. Charles) and Bluewood Brewing (Benton Park).

Obviously, mead is no longer just for medieval cosplayers and fantasy fiction aficionados. But Price and his fellow mead purveyors aren’t exactly peddling something new to the mainstream drinking public. Rather, they are re-introducing humanity to one of the oldest alcoholic drinks in our history. Mead is thought to predate human agriculture and pottery-making, stretching back to the New Stone Age. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a fermented beverage made on honey, rice and fruit in China that dates to the 7th millennium BCE. The Vikings, Greeks and Romans were all known to tiple the fermented honey water, and the drink appears in the Old English epic poem Beowulf and, later, in the works of Chaucer. Eventually, the rise of ales and wine and then the wider availability of sugar to supplant honey pushed mead to the fringes of history.

In many ways, Price’s decision to make Burnt Barrel a meadery was based on the same reasons the drink has re-emerged. First, it’s easier to make than beer. You skip the boiling of wort and go straight to fermentation. “It’s a simpler, shorter brewing day,” Price says. “Less equipment is needed.”

That last point also means a smaller physical footprint and less overhead. For instance, Burnt Barrel uses only 3,000 square-feet of production space, a little more than twice its modest tasting room and a mere fraction of what’s required for most vat-packed brewhouses.

But mead’s biggest advantage is its renewed novelty — it’s something different. With more than 9,000 independent breweries popping up all over the place, consumers are constantly searching for new flavors and spins on traditional styles. Mead provides an entirely fresh medium. It can be fermented on spices, herbs and fruit; served still or naturally sparkling; be sweet, dry or spicy; and range from 3 percent to more than 20 percent ABV.

Of the seven or eight offerings on tap at any given time at Burnt Barrel — not to mention four or five bottles — curious customers can sample anything from traditional mead made with honey from Exit 157 Farm and Apiary in Bloomsdale; the syrupy-sweet Keep It Simple Blueberry, which is aged in gin barrels; the crisp, dry Bacchus with aronia berries from Hannibal; the Dump Bucket mead with Caruba fruit that drinks like a mimosa; and the Cupid’s Box, a decadent mead fermented with dark chocolate, raspberry and a note of peanut butter that tastes like it came out of a candy box.

“All of our meads are flavorforward,” Price says. “You taste what’s on the label.”

Because of the smaller production, cranking out meads in batches as small as 20-gallon, the menu is constantly churning with new must-try concoctions.

Price says the plan for the time being is to keep coming up with new and exciting flavors here and eventually offer food outside of the charcuterie board that currently constitutes the menu. He says he is also working with other Missouri meaderies to form some sort of collaborative akin to the larger brewers’ associations.

But as mead continues to carve out its niche in the drinking scene, both in St. Louis and across the country, Burnt Barrel will always have something unique to other meaderies — custom-designed glassware. n

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