Wye Valley Meadery Traditional Mead (70cl Bottle), 14.5% ABV

Product Information

Matt has been a hobby bee-keeper for over 15 years and in 2018 left the comfort of full time employment to give commercial bee-keeping a go, upscaling his hive collection to over 150 and producing excellent quality honey from the apiarys all along the Wye Valley. Friends and family would also give it to the bride and groom as gifts for them to drink during their first ‘moon’ (1 moon cycle, or 1 month to you and me) as newlyweds in the hope that they would conceive a child.

In fact, it’s so simple that it’s thought that the first time mead was ever created it was simply a happy accident. Kit left cushy office life and moved from Reading back the Wye Valley where together, they are brewing full time and increasing batch size month after month. It takes six summer berries, with strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blackcurrants, cherries and blueberries, fermented with Spanish honey. The palate initially surprised with its high abv and relative dryness, but the wealth of flavour is maintained with remarkable clarity, even a hint of honeycomb and hive.Parva Farm Vineyard is situated on a south facing slope in the Wye Valley, above the village of Tintern and its historic Abbey.

Here we have a traditionally styled mead, a time-honoured tipple which dates back hundreds if not thousands of years, from Lyme Bay Winery in Devon. Looking further ahead, the business will revamp its branding and move all products to the Hive Mind name, as it looks to widen its reach and appeal. Often described as honey wine, mead can be made with a wide range of ingredients, though it is based on fermented honey and water. In this way, we hope that it can be enjoyed much more similarly to a cider or beer, and therefore make it much more accessible to all.

Convinced we had something worth bragging about, we entered our Hopped mead into the Great Taste Awards and won two stars! You may glimpse some of our wildlife – we have a resident family of green woodpeckers and buzzards are frequently seen. The founders of Wye Valley Meadery take a thoroughly modern approach to one of the world’s oldest alcoholic beverages, having developed a range of sparkling brews far removed from the historic traditional mead made by monks.