Connecticut’s Mead creators love their work, and the creation process to turn honey into a new iteration of one of the world’s oldest alcohols.

“I got really obsessed with the process,” says Talon Bergen. “I couldn’t go to the grocery store without thinking to myself, will that ferment?” 

Despite his passion for his craft, he didn’t set out to open a meadery.

What he wanted was to start a brewery. He first started as a home brewer while serving in the Army in 2011 and made a simple deal with his wife: He would only serve one contract in the armed forces, and then they would move back to New England where he could open his brewing business.

Location, he believed, would be the key to their success.

“So, in very much army fashion, I had maps of New England. I had Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, and Vermont, New Hampshire on my table. And I had string drawn to scale for 30 miles.”

He found every brewery in New England and used the string to draw a circle around them, planning to keep his business outside of that radius to serve markets without a local brew.

“When we left in 2011, there were no breweries,” he says. “And then we’re trying to come back [in 2017] and I realized that there was a huge saturation.”

With a boom in craft brewing and convinced that he could not compete with such a density of breweries, Bergen gave up on that dream. That is, until his wife sparked an idea.

“We went to Yard Goats game, and I brought my wife a cider. And she’s like, I’d rather have one of your meads,” he recalls. “And it just clicked with me that there’s a population that doesn’t like beer that would love to be in a brewery environment. And so I really start to obsess on this idea.”

Bergen tells his story now sitting at the bar of Bergen House, the meadery he and his wife opened in Middletown Connecticut in 2020. After four years in business, and seven since he decided to go down this path, Bergen has been surprised by all that it takes to keep things going and the roadblocks he’s faced along the way.

Bergen House wasn’t the first meadery to make its way to Connecticut. That distinction belongs to fellow home brewer Derek Batz who decided to take his small business to the next level in 2016.

“It was a great hobby for me and the people in my community, over a period of years, convinced me that my stuff was good enough that I should go professional,” says Batz, now the owner and head mead maker at Dragonfire Meadery in Coventry.

Where Bergen got started in mead as part of his growing home brewing hobby, though, Batz came to it out of necessity.

“I had a lot of food allergies, and nobody had resources on what was in all of the products that you’re buying commercially,” explains Batz. “So I started making stuff that I could actually drink.”

Not wanting to give up on alcohol but unable to drink beer and disinterested in wine, he turned to this unique alternative – and really went for it.

“I probably did ten plus batches in my first two or three years and then just kept cycling, trying different things, seeing what worked, what didn’t over the next couple years.”

For people more familiar with traditional craft beers or wines, mead may seem foreign, but it shares much of its DNA with its well-known cousins.

“Mead is, essentially, or the way that we make it, is similar to wine,” explains Batz. “But the difference between wine and meadow is wine is made with grapes and meat is made with honey.”

“Logistically, the biggest difference is there’s no hot side,” says Bergen, explaining the difference between the mead-making process and beer. “There’s a process that happens [with beer] where the sugars are actually extracted. And whether you’re making whiskey or beer, you have to do that process. Mead, you don’t have any of that. Honey is a simple sugar, so it’s automatically accessible.”

There is also a difference on the cold side because where beers contain natural proteins, calcium, and nitrogen to feed the yeast that causes fermentation, honey doesn’t. Like the more closely related wines, mead can take years to finish.

“That’s why, for the longest time, mead was thought to be not commercially viable,” says Bergen.

But, he says, that changed for home mead-makers in the early 90s when they learned to add nitrogen as well as other micronutrients, to speed up the process. 

“We can bring product to market in less than two years. And that obviously makes a big, big difference.”

Despite being a home brewer, Bergen didn’t start out as a believer when it came to mead. Quite the opposite, actually.

“A good friend of mine was a home mead maker, and he was actually a beekeeper, and he gave me its bottle. And he told me when he gave me this bottle, he’s like, you have to wait six months.”

Bergen assumed the mead would be too sweet or have a cough syrupy feel so he said waiting that six months wasn’t a problem.

“I kind of hid it in my closet. And then when I did open it, and it was completely dry, super complex, and had all these interesting flavors – that just blew my mind.”

Bergen says that, contrary to what he believed, the honey he thought would over-sweeten the drink is the very ingredient that gives it the complexity he appreciates. 

“You can get honey from the same beekeeper, the same area, harvest the same time of year, and it’ll be different year from year. And it’s interesting.”

Honey from clover tastes different than honey from fruit trees or other flowers and so will the mead it later becomes. Mead can also be made with other botanical ingredients – fruits and herbs – to create a wide variety of flavor profiles. Different mead processes or higher and lower alcohol content can also change the experience.

“Some of my flavors are pretty intense,” says Batz. “I don’t like to play inside the box, so I like to do unusual flavors, and they’re typically pretty flavorful.”

Dragonfire specializes in higher alcohol by volume (ABV) meads, usually 12-14%, rather than the 9-12% ABV of most wines. Batz also appreciates mead’s more everyman personality.

“I try to make stuff that people are going to want to drink,” he says. “Wine, the industry is all about, ‘no, you need to learn how to drink this and how to appreciate it.’ People aren’t putting in that kind of effort anymore. They may have at one point, but people want to drink to enjoy. They want to have a good time.”

In many ways, it’s the same for Bergen. Despite pivoting away from his original dream, Bergen still approaches mead in a similar way to craft beer, seeing it as both a mid-point between beer and wine and an important alternative for consumers.

“I think that people enjoy being in a brewery,” he says. “Not everyone likes beer, so it’s an excellent gluten-free beer alternative.”

Where craft beers allow for a wide variety of flavors on tap, wines exist within a preset list of varieties. You basically know what you’re going to get with wines. But for Bergen, mead allows for much more flexibility of flavor.

“We consistently have eight on tap. And I’m looking at expanding that to 15,” he explains. “And that’s kind of where I think mead has a different opportunity to be as craft as craft beer, as a gluten-free beer alternative that I don’t think any other product does.”

Bergen’s meads are lower ABV – clocking in below 7% across the board – allowing for more of a craft beer experience as well. 

“It’s sessionable,” he explains. “Folks can have more than one and we provide this environment that’s very similar to a brewery, very community-oriented, and allows people to come in in a very casual way.”

While both Bergen House and Dragonfire are thriving, their owners have had to fight some hard-won battles to get there, especially on the legal side of things.

In the same way that consumers might not understand mead the way they do beer and wine, Connecticut and federal regulatory officials lacked an understanding of what sets mead apart.

“There was a lot of arguing between the federal government and the American Mead Makers Association (AMMA),” explains Bergen. “Before 2020, the only ingredients mead could have was honey, water, yeast, and a minute amount of hops. That was their pigeonhole definition of what Mead was.”

Bergen says he had a hard time when attempting to get his first label approved for a ginger mead, because the ginger and citrus he used meant that regulators no longer categorized it as mead. Thankfully for Bergen, those federal laws changed in 2020.

Connecticut business regulation of mead was even more complicated. Until very recently, Connecticut didn’t have a specific legal status for mead-makers, instead lumping them together with other alcohols, but that caused its own headaches.

“We wanted to do a tasting room early on,” says Batz. “Initially, the regulations weren’t in place to be able to taste, period, because of the way they had us categorized.”

For the first four years, Dragonfire was categorized under liquor alongside distilled drinks. But mead isn’t distilled, which meant they couldn’t legally serve it in a tasting room. 

“We were stuck in this loophole,” says Batz. “Now we’re in the category of Mead, Wine, and Cider, so we’re able to produce more stuff.”

Bergen had a different struggle. Since he started the process in 2020, right as the laws were changing, he was able to register right away as a meadery. But that meant dealing with the confusion that comes with changing regulations.

When he initially applied in October of 2019, Bergen was told to apply for a distiller’s license in the state of Connecticut, the same as Dragonfire. Just months later, on January 1^st of 2020, state law changed to allow for mead to fall under its own category, bringing Connecticut more in line with federal regulators.

In February, Bergen was told he had applied for the wrong license under this brand-new law. But when he inquired as to the new category, he was told he couldn’t apply yet because the paperwork wouldn’t exist until June.

“It probably is a good thing that it was painful,” he says, laughing. “We weren’t ready to open in February of 2020.”

With regulations sorted out, both Dragonfire and Bergen House are largely free from red tape. Their current challenge is on the marketing side of the business.

“It was kind of difficult at first because not a whole lot of people knew what it was,” says Batz about his early days. “So there was a whole education piece to it at the beginning, which now it seems to be much more people know about it.”

“It’s really important just to acknowledge that in a lot of ways, it’s a new product to market,” says Bergen. “It doesn’t even matter that it’s the oldest fermented beverage in the world.”

There is somewhat of a built-in audience thanks to fans of fantasy games, literature, and media – think Game of Thrones, Dungeons and Dragons, and The Lord of the Rings – or those with an interest in Vikings. Dragonfire has a regular presence at Connecticut’s Renaissance faires and Bergen House was tapped to join the beer tent at Midsummer Renaissance Faire in Ansonia this June and July. But expanding outside that group can be challenging.

“When I wrote my original business model, I was expecting to see customers three or four times a year, and I was expecting to see a lot more people.”

Bergen says he took a look at the local population and kept narrowing his audience as much as he could. He ended up with an estimated 200,000 people.

“If we had opened in 2019, that might have been the case. So maybe my assumptions weren’t completely wrong, but, yeah, our actual consumer base is way less than 5,000.

They come all the time. I see people in our community two or three times a weekend, and the majority of our customers I see twice a month. And that’s pretty cool.”

So, the challenge becomes about education and expansion. 

“We can kind of compose the flavor to a degree and we can create something that’s different and outside of the box that people may want to drink,” says Batz. “Mead should be playful.”

“Mead is an excellent cocktail ingredient,” says Bergen. “So how can we use it in cocktails to get people exposed and then provide those samples? how can we get into package stores and provide free samples for folks, allow them to taste for the first time?”

Dragonfire has some of that figured out, at least on a small scale. They have distributed their meads in 15 package stores so far. Bergen House has its first label in five, and their second label was approved this past June. Plus, they’ve placed themselves on tap in several nearby breweries to provide that gluten-free alternative. Dragonfire has branched out into farmer’s markets and plans to finally open their tasting room, as soon as they clear a few more regulatory hurdles.

In the last few years, Dragonfire and Bergen House have managed to find an equilibrium in a burgeoning market – even while some of their fellow meadmakers have found it impossible to stay in business. The challenge now is growing their close-knit community into one that stands the test of time. 

“I was very religious for a very long time and when we stopped going to church, it was a lonely space for me,” says Bergen. “In a lot of ways, connecting with people on a personal level that are in our community, and having that sense of community that is deeper than I ever had as an adult in church has been really a beautiful thing.”

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