We are so excited to announce that we have started The Buzz Meadery, where we produce a premium, high-quality honey mead using locally sourced honey, hops, fruits, and other fermentables. 

This dream has been a long time coming, and we want to share our story with you.

Brett and Megan met in college at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, and moved to Fort Collins, Colorado for grad school. We lived in Fort Collins for a few years. During that time, we both completed our Masters, volunteered on an organic farm, biked everywhere instead of driving, and adopted our cat, Drekk, and our dog, Ellie. 

We also took up a serious homebrewing hobby and drank some seriously awesome beers. We joined the local homebrewing club ‘Liquid Poets’, and learned a lot about different styles of beers, as well as meads. Megan took a fermentation science class at Colorado State and learned brewing techniques from brewers at several large breweries in Fort Collins. Brett worked for a local hard cider company, Branch Out Cider, who sourced their apples from a ‘community orchard’. And our journey into the craft beer scene began.

When we moved back to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, we continued homebrewing and meadmaking. Brett got a job as the brewer of a startup in Rehoboth, and helped them open the doors to their brewery. Along the way, we also established our small organic farm, Naturally Sunkissed Farm,  in Bishopville, growing fruits and vegetables and raising a handful of goats, sheep, and pigs out on pasture.

If it isn’t clear to you by now, one of the things we enjoy the most is eating and drinking things we’ve grown or made ourselves. Through our travels and our experiences, we’ve learned a lot about the importance of knowing how our food is grown and ensuring that it’s grown locally, using sustainable practices.

As we’ve gotten a little older (and maybe a little wiser?), we’ve realized that the grain used to make beer tends to be sourced from hundreds of miles away, and is rarely grown organically, so it is commonly grown with lots of pesticides/fungicides/herbicides too. We realized the importance of agricultural land use and how the beer we love was contributing to industrialized monocropping, deforestation, habitat-loss, and the release of carbon from the soil ultimately contributing to climate change. 

And so we started looking for an alternative fermentable sugar to make our alcohol.

While living in Colorado, we learned about mead, which is an alcohol that is derived from honey instead of grain. Many meads are made like wine in the 11-14% ABV range, are not carbonated (called ‘still’), and tend to be on the sweet side. And those meads can be delicious, sure. But if we drank one or two of those glasses, we’d be done for the night. So Brett experimented a bit, and tweaked those traditional mead recipes until he found something he liked much better.

Brett’s version of mead is not traditional. Instead of being like a wine with its ABV level, he prefers a mead around 5-8% ABV, so he can enjoy a few glasses socially without getting drunk. And more on the beer side, he prefers a carbonated beverage, because it adds to the mouthfeel. Lastly, he also prefers a mead where the sugars have been fermented out, so it’s more dry and less sweet, and combines other flavors with the addition of various fruits or hops to make it fun and tasty.

He’s been homebrewing this style of mead ever since we lived in Colorado. This style of mead is called a ‘session’ mead, meaning you can sit down and enjoy several glasses in a session. In summary, our mead is a sparkling, session honey mead made with fruits or hop adjuncts.

We’ve always played around with the idea of being able to start our own brewery, because we like beer. (Let’s be honest- Brett has played around with the idea of starting LOTS of different businesses with his entrepreneurial mind, but this idea has always been at the forefront of that brain.) Over time, we’ve concluded that starting a meadery, making this style of session mead, would be the perfect solution. By starting a ‘nano’-sized meadery in the location we’ve selected in Berlin, Maryland, we have the ability to make our mead on a small scale, brewing just a couple times a month, so that we can balance the business with our farm and lifestyle, and of course, enjoying our time with our family.

Beyond just fitting in with our personal tastes and lifestyle, we also know that in order to create a business that the public supports, it also has to have values that are worth supporting. One of our biggest values is environmental sustainability. For this reason, it’s so important to us that our ingredients are sourced from local beekeepers and farmers who support regenerative agriculture. By creating an awesome product using these ingredients, we can actually increase the amount of good farming practices in our area and help increase the honeybee populations. Our supply chain money is used as a vote to these select beekeepers and farmers to grow their businesses. In this way, we can support progressive environmental changes through capitalism.

We are so excited that you are joining us in this journey of sustainability and tasty beverages, and we look forward to meeting you at the meadery!

Cheers,

Brett and Megan