After a year in business, Mentor’s D&D Meadery has products in 300 markets - The News-Herald
Published by: The News-Herald
By Janet Podolak
Original Article found here
Twin brothers Derek and Dominick Zirkle were teenagers when a beekeeper friend sparked their fascination with making mead — a beverage created from honey, water and yeast.
“It’s the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world,” said Derek, about the wine-like beverage crafted from honey.
Today, the 24-year-old brothers from Madison look more like the football players and wrestlers they were at Madison High School than the professional mead makers they’ve become at their D&D Meadery in Mentor.
“It took us several years to fine-tune the mead we made as a hobby into the gold-standard honey wine it is now,” said Dominick.
Using the original mead as a base and adding fresh-picked fruit hand-squeezed into juices and Amish-made maple syrup, they’ve crafted five mead flavors, from sweet to dry.
Sweetness varies depending on a mead’s temperature during fermentation and how long it’s been aged. During fermentation, the yeast feeds on the natural sugars in the honey and fruits to create a dry beverage with nuanced flavors — not unlike wine.
A year ago, the men established D&D, leaving their college studies behind to become professional mead makers. Now, with help from their family, their mead is sold in 300 outlets, including Heinen’s supermarkets and major wine stores. Many of those attending the recent Vintage Ohio Wine Festival, a two-day event hosted by the Ohio Wine Producers Association, sampled their mead and bought it to take home. Like ice wine, it’s bottled in 375-milliliter bottles (holding slightly more than 1-½ cups) and sells for $19.99.
And on Sept. 10, the men will bring their five meads to Red, Wine & Brew in Mentor for a tasting event set for 6 to 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20.
Since discovering that ancient Vikings considered mead a nectar of the gods and incorporated it into Norse legends and sacred ceremonies, the men learned that their ancestors in Germany were winemakers. Archaeological evidence of mead dates back thousands of years, but eons ago, the Vikings traveled the known world and brought it back with them, possibly from Ethiopia.
Honey is produced by every country in the world except for Antarctica, so mead has been a popular beverage in climates where wine and beer can’t be made.
“Northeast Ohio apiaries produce some of the best honey there is, and combined with our excellent local water and yeasts used by winemakers, we’ve perfected our mead the last few years,” Dominick said.
He’s kept his day job at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant while Derek takes care of business at the meadery, in a small industrial parkway building off Twinbrook Road. Dominick joins him there on evenings and at tastings.
“I also take care of all the required paperwork for the (Ohio) Liquor Control board and the Ohio Department of Agriculture and make sure we’re compliant,” Derek said.
The men, who have long hair, must wear hairnets when they work, and both also have nets for their beards. The men have longstanding relationships with the Northeast Ohio apiaries that supply their honey and know about the bees that make the honey they use, including the types of plants they pollinate.
“We usually buy 1,600 pounds of wildflower honey at a time, but like grapes grown for wine, honey is dependent on weather and other variables and varies from one year to the next,” Derek said.
Between summer’s intense heat interspersed with heavy rain, this has been a difficult year for Northeast Ohio bees to make honey, he said.
“One of the apiaries expected to produce 30,000 pounds of honey this summer but only got 2,000 pounds — just enough for us,” he said.
Bees produce no honey in winter, instead clustering together inside the hive and vibrating their wings to stay warm — a type of hibernation — as they wait for spring.
The Zirkles expect to make mead through the winter, using honey they’ve stored from the warmer months.
“Honey keeps really well,” Derek said. “They’ve found that honey made by the ancient Egyptians and sealed in their tombs is still good after 3,000 years.” The men are laying the groundwork to open a meadery where people can taste their mead, buy it to take home and learn about pairing meads with foods.
“We’ll continue to make it and bottle it at our Twinbrook facility,” Derek said. “But it’s not open to the public.”
They also are investigating other fruits for making into mead. For now, they offer sweet meads in Maple Syrup, Strawberry Raspberry and Honey varieties and dry meads in Blueberry Blackberry and Red Apple flavors.