Startup

posted by Ben

Well, Becky and I have been working on starting up our meadery (honey-winery) for over a year now. We've been told and have been telling each other that we need to start documenting everything that is happening, because we wished we could have seen that from someone else. I am finally getting around to starting that here!!

Over the next few posts, I'll catch up with where we are at. At this point, we are opening our meadery in November of 2008 in Saxapahaw, NC. It is the most exciting and scariest thing we've ever done (or maybe tied with childbirth)!

Becky and I have been making mead for a few years now. We like what we make and our friends like free booze, but we weren't sure if our meads were really that good. We ended up entering some of our meads in a few competitions. We ended up winning several medals, including a best in show out of over 200 meads. At that point, we determined a few things. We liked making mead and others liked drinking our mead!

We started looking into what it would take to go commercial. As we studied more and more about it and talked with some meadery owners, we determined that this was something that we wanted to do. I work for Kodak, so everyone knows that the film giant has fallen on tough times. For the past few years, I have wondered not if, but when my lay-off would come. We decided that I when that happened, I would work full time on getting our meadery going and Becky would continue working as a National Training Manager. Well, as fate would have it, I am still employed and Becky got laid off a little over a year ago.

Becky has been working on the meadery ever since.