Meet Our Vendors: Hierophant Meadery

How would you like to try the “drink of gods and kings?”  

As the oldest known alcoholic beverage—made with high quality, rare ingredients—mead has rightfully earned the coolest tagline ever. Mead is an alcoholic beverage where honey is used as the fermentable sugar. Where wine uses grapes, mead uses honey, which results in an incredibly wide variety of flavors. There are over 300 named varietals of honey in the United States alone, and that’s not even taking into account all of the botanicals you can infuse mead with.  

Michelle Scandalis and Jeremy Kyncl of Hierophant Meadery have an appreciation for the art of mead-making that goes deeper than just brewing a delicious alcoholic beverage. They started Hierophant Meadery as a value-based company with the goal of protecting pollinators while honoring the ancient practice of mead-making. Their mead is made with local, natural ingredients from right here in the Pacific Northwest. Jeremy explained that their mead is an “expression of a place over a period of time.” Depending on the time of year, the botanicals that are flowering will change and that will change the flavor of the honey and the mead.  

Jeremy came to mead-making after he started home brewing and fermenting in college. He was making everything from miso to kombucha to pickles. He loved “interacting with the biology of transformation.” The person who was teaching him about home brewing was brewing mead, so Jeremy fell into it almost by default, but he felt especially drawn to it because of the tangible connection to his ancestors and the history of this ancient beverage.  

The concept of mead in the United States often conjures images of 16th Century England and a golden beverage sweeter than wine. The reality is that mead has been made all over the world, with every culture experimenting with different varieties. It can be anywhere from bone-dry to super-sweet depending on the ingredients and the process.  

Mead may be the oldest known alcoholic beverage, but over 75% of commercial mead producers in the United States are less than a decade old. The popularity of mead among general culture fell off in the 17th century when honey extraction became more expensive as the expansion of agriculture made honey less abundant and harder to find. This is when the drink earned its reputation as a decadent beverage only for the wealthy and divine.  

Hierophant Meadery is working to make mead and its rich history more accessible to the general public again. They describe mead as being in the place where cider was about ten years ago, gaining popularity in niche crowds, and believe that it may eventually become a staple on tap at breweries like cider is now. Michelle and Jeremy have been asked to speak and teach other mead makers and brewers because with their business being over a decade old, they are in the oldest quartile of meaderies in the United States. 

Their level of expertise and passion for the mead that they create is clear from the way they speak about it with such enthusiasm and a real joy for learning and experimentation. They are deeply passionate about sustainable agriculture, botanicals, history, and brewing. Somehow, they have found a path that involves a magical combination of all of the above.  

You can try their magical mead at all seven of our farmers markets or at their tasting rooms on Whidbey Island and in Green Bluff!