Alexandre, the mead maker: Making mead as self-expression
This is my craft
I want to capture the essence of a moment in time, such as flowers and plants of a particular season. This is the most magical moment of this practice...
The first time I met Alexandre was during a local Sip & Shop community event, where he as well as other vendors offered their products in the stores participating.
I remember being quite impressed of him using beautiful glassware instead of the plastic cup everyone received for sipping their way through the vendors. He’s got style!, I thought to myself.
Alexandre is a creative thinker and a dedicated writer, a poet, deeply reflecting on life and everything he’s pursuing, driven by the question: Why am I doing this?
After college he got into the beer brewing business, working for different breweries, soaking in all the knowledge. “I was struck by the complexity of the process and drawn in by what seemed like a unique intersection of creativity, scientific precision, and physical labor.”
What seemed like a lucky coincidence, eventually made him question the approach of his fellow beer brewers. Several nightshifts brewing beer made him realize: What’s the point? What am I adding to the conversation?
Alexandre always knew he wanted to run his own business and have the freedom to brew all the different recipes that he wanted to try.
He started approaching the mead making process as an art form, experimenting with different ingredients and a more free form as opposed to the strict rules he found in beer brewing.
“I wasn't actually interested in making mead per se, but in approaching fermentation as a kind of living improvisational art project.”
Rather than aspiring to the existing traditions of mead making, he approached honey simply as a fermentable sugar, which he believes allows him to understand the mead making process more thoroughly.
One of his now bestsellers Twig is a great example for this creative improvisational process turning a nearly undrinkable beverage after first bottling it into an aromatic interplay after having been aged for 1.5 years, balancing light and dark elements equally, complementing bright honey with dark maple syrup and white tea (bai mu dan) with toasted tea (hoji-kukicha).
This pivotal moment provided the earliest sparks of having his own operation and keeps reminding him of the living process mead-making is.
Another deciding factor to the step into making mead was the production itself. Making mead and cleaning up after is much less time consuming as opposed to beer, he says.
The three main ingredients function as the canvas for his final products: Raw honey, drinking water, and yeast.
Starting with commercial yeast, he now uses a wild strain from a previous apple cider fermentation process that he keeps using for inoculating as well as another mixed culture that he collected from diluting fermenting honey from a local apiary and letting that ferment into a mead.
Adding other ingredients such as wild plants, herbs, teas, spices or fruits from Vermont local orchards - providing a colorful palette of nature’s beauty - to his mead creations is a playful act of expression for Alexandre, turning the artisanry of mead-making into art.
Making mead allows him to use not only local ingredients, but to build community, make different connections, in a thoughtful way.
It continues to teach him, not just about itself but about himself, work, relationship, and life more broadly, he shares with me.
“By working hard and carefully but remaining playful, pursuing mysteries as they arise and having faith in spite of perceived failures - my life's work will provide for me both materially and creatively, and never fail to provide more of itself.”
Golden Rule Mead is based in Middlebury, Vermont. Alexandre’s tasting room is open for the public Friday till Monday, 2-6pm.
More about the history of mead, mead making and the fermentation process shares Alexandre in this video Middlebury Science Cafe: Golden Rule Mead with Alex Apfel