Inside a honeycomb of Oakland Park warehouses, John and Stacey Hoolihan are modernizing a medieval beverage best associated with Vikings, Renaissance fairs and “Game of Thrones” — mead.
Brewlihan Mead Co., the first commercial meadery in Broward and Palm Beach counties, is expected to debut by the end of July, five blocks west of North Dixie Highway, adding to the city’s growing cluster of craft-beer bars, breweries and distilleries. The 1,700-square-foot mead house and tasting room at 3472 NE Fifth Ave. still awaits a certificate of occupancy and its alcohol license, and the first batches of mead will be sold to the public a month after opening, John Hoolihan says.
In July, Brewlihan will first offer prepackaged mead bottles to-go through a club membership. The tasting room will likely debut in January, but already Brewlihan’s mead hall is adorned with honeycomb patterns, science flasks and drawings of molecules, while its exterior is splashed with murals of grape bunches.
Here, Hoolihan spends his days pouring water, wild yeast and Florida honeys — wildflower, orange blossom and Tupelo — into fermentation tanks, and flavoring those batches with sweet blackcurrants, blackberries and raspberries. After beeswax, fruit pulp and other impurities are filtered out, his honey wines are aged in oak barrels for two to five months, yielding rich flavors ranging from bone-dry to dessert-sweet.
The process is not unlike fermenting grapes for wine, grains for beer or apples for cider, he says.
“It’s basically a math problem, and I’m a math nerd,” says Hoolihan, whose tanks can pump out 1,100 gallons per batch. “Wine gets better with age, and it’s the same with mead. Honey wine gets a bad rap because people drink it at Renaissance fairs, where it’s very sweet, and that’s their only experience with it.”
Which is why Hoolihan wants to pluck honey wine out of medieval times, teaching customers that a beverage synonymous with the past can be a 21st century drink offering the same complexity as microbrews or grape wine.
“I think a lot of the work we have to do is consumer education,” says Hoolihan, 38, a former Broward Schools assistant principal and elementary science teacher. “Mead is having its moment, and we have 16 different flavors on tap, so my pitch to newcomers is this: Try it.”
Meads on tap, for the most part, will source their honey from Florida beekeepers and fruits from farmers in the Pacific Northwest and New York. They include Double-Pear Vanilla, made with bosc and bartlett pears, Tahitian vanilla beans and wildflower honey. Hoolihan’s Proper Black is made with black currant, black raspberry and meadowfoam honey. There will be kiwi and watermelon mead and an Arnold Palmer (fermented honey, iced tea and lemons), as well as ciders and wine-mead hybrids using fermented honey and must — or crushed wine juice — from Sauvignon blanc grapes.
So why make mead in craft beer-abundant South Florida? When Hoolihan created Brewlihan a decade earlier, he dabbled in beer-making, winning medals for entering stouts at LauderAle’s Home Brew Competition in Fort Lauderdale and at WakeFest, J. Wakefield Brewing’s annual bash in Wynwood.
It was during one of WakeFest’s bottle-sharing events in 2015 that Hoolihan felt sticker shock after sampling a sweet black currant mead. “It was hundreds of dollars,” he recalls.
He decided to recreate the mead at home and, after experimenting some more, Hoolihan decided South Florida’s craft-beer market, already oversaturated, deserved a local meadery.
“We won’t get lost in the fray,” he says. “We want to help those that drink wine and beer see that there’s more out there, and appeal to connoisseurs.”
Hoolihan isn’t South Florida’s lone meadmaker. In November, Eric Seidmon and Sean McClain debuted Ceiba (pronounced “say-bah”) and its nine-tap tasting room in South Miami, serving mead, cider and fruit wines made on-site.
Compared to craft beer, mead is niche, but in the United States alone, the number of commercial meaderies has exploded from 60 in 2003 to about 450 in 2020, and 200 more meaderies were predicted to open within the next two years, according to the trade group American Mead Makers Association.
Until its mead hall opens next year, drinkers can join Brewlihan’s mead club, the Lab, a $325 annual membership program that includes six bottles, meadery swag and glassware, 10 percent off the tasting room, and an invite to a member-only party. Members can pick up bottles at the meadery, but the club will be limited to 200 people, Hoolihan says.
“On social media, we’re getting 15 to 20 messages a day asking when we’re opening,” says Stacey Hoolihan, a data engineer who handles Brewlihan’s social media and marketing. “We have this national fanbase that we’re ready to tap, because they already see John’s passion.”
Brewlihan Mead Co., at 3472 NE Fifth Ave., Unit 1, is expected to open by the end of July, and sell prepackaged mead to-go a month later. Go to Brewlihan.com.
