Edible Vancouver Island Summer 2022

This page, clockwise from top left: A bottle of Blueberry Mead from Coastal Black Estate Winery; Tugwell Creek’s honey-based mead; a bottle of Merridale Craft Distillery’s Cowichan Spiced Rhumb (photo by Amy Ayer).

T hink of mead and you likely imagine ancient Norse gods carousing in Asgard or medieval knights merrily drink ing around a sturdy oak table. But here on Vancouver Island, a small but growing number of people are making modern mead and honey spirits, and maybe saving our food supply while they do. “Honey tastes good every step of the way,” says Dave Brimacombe, the founder and CEO of Wayward Distillery in the Comox Valley. “It tastes good fresh from the jar. It tastes good the entire time it’s being fermented. You make spirits out of it and it tastes good. It just tastes good all the way.” But all is not sweetness and light in the world of honey. Vast num bers of bees have fallen victim to disease and climate disasters. As Brimacombe says, “If the bees die, the food system collapses.” You could call it a bit of a sticky situation. FROM MED I EVAL TO MODERN Mead, also known as honey wine, can be traced back thousands of years to ancient China, Scandinavia, Egypt, Rome and Greece. Mead has been linked to the foundations of religion—it was liter ally the nectar of the gods—and was revered for its medicinal and aphrodisiacal properties, hence the concept of the honeymoon. But over time, beer, wine and spirits overtook mead in popularity, except in a few small pockets of the planet. One of those places was the part of Northumbria where Robert Liptrot’s family lived before his grandfather emigrated to the Fraser Valley in 1919.

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