We chatted with the lovely Kristeva Dowling, Head Mazer + Owner of Stolen Harvest Meadery in Grovedale, AB to talk about how Stolen Harvest came to be and the exciting world of Mead. Although Stolen Harvest is new to the game, (they just opened in April of last year!) they’re already making huge waves in the industry; taking home three gold medals at the World Mead Challenge in Chicago. Yep, that’s right, Kristeva’s FIRST ever three commercial batches won first place in her first professional competition! Read about Stolen Harvest’s story below:

“What made you decide to start to make your own meads?” Was the first question I asked, launching Kristeva into explaining her journey.

“I started bee keeping about 6 or 7 years ago and in my third year I had a REALLY big harvest for my couple little hives and I suddenly was sitting there with 150-200 pounds of honey and I was wondering what I was going to do with all of this.” Then she goes on to explain how she fell into a rabbit hole of mead making.

“I started doing some research and went down this rabbit hole into the wide world of mead making and I originally was looking at it historically. Like, “how to make mead like a Viking” because I really didn’t know a lot about it. Eventually I ended up on Society for Creative Anachronism pages and they spoke about Mead and the history of it and so forth and I just became fascinated with it.

So, on Christmas day 2017 I decided to try making a batch.” She explains that this was the embryonic moment of the business, and later during our conversation mentions how the bees were a driving inspiration.

“I really wanted to honor the bees and what more beautiful way then something that now is timeless.” – Kristeva Dowling, Stolen Harvest Meadery

Kristeva, honoring the bees work.

“Can you tell us about the variety of products you carry? Are they all meads?”

“Yes, all of our products are 100% fermented with honey. There is no sugar or anything, like a lot of places will do half honey and half sugar. I don’t know if there are very strict rules in Canada yet about meads and the percents and so forth. But traditionally it should really be 100% honey and nothing else other than, obviously, the fruits or herbs, or spices or flowers or whatever that you’re adding for flavour. But in terms of the fermentable piece, it should be 100 percent honey and ours is."

“Do you use ingredients from your own farm for the flavours?”

“We grow some of the ingredients ourselves and I do a lot of actual hand foraging in the wild for ingredients as well and my husband and friends will help. I will source other ingredients locally as well, I just bought my first set of Haskap berries from Brokentine Orchard and I’ve got some Saskatoons from Jason at Country Roads RV to use this year, he has a beautiful big orchard out there.”

“Can you give us a run-down of how the mead is made? Personally, I don’t know much about the process.”

“It’s the same process as wine. So, it is literally a honey wine. The fermentation process is the same. Say I’m making a traditional, a traditional is just water, honey, yeast. So, you put the water, honey, yeast in and you give it a stir, lock it up and then you pray.”

“Haha, pray it works out?!” I thought this was funny, wondering how many other people in her industry have the same ritual of praying to the yeast fairies.

“Haha yeah you hope it turns out really nice. So, with a Saskatoon, all my saskatoons so far have been wild harvested. So same thing, I juice them, and then I add them to the must it’s called (like the honey, water, yeast mixture) in a proportion I think is going to turn out nicely and proceed just as you would with grapes as if you were making wine.”

“How long does that take from start to finish?”

“It really depends, there are so many variables to that. Generally, Traditionals don’t need a lot of time for clearing because there’s no pectin or fruit that needs to drop out. But when you have say, Saskatoons or Rhubarb, in particular Rhubarb is quite a high Pectin fruit, so it takes longer to clear. Then it’s really up to the craft person who’s making it.”

“Some of meads I want to oak age for a certain amount of time so that might take 6-9 months. Some things you just need to wait until the flavours percolate into the mead. If I’m making dandelion mead in which I’m using the petals, it’s a very delicate flavour that needs longer time to infuse. Same with rose petals, I make a rose petal mead and that one is actually coming off pretty soon and that one from start to finish is nearly a year in the making.”

“I’m excited to try the rose petal mead! That sounds delightful!”

“It is delightful! That one is actually is the third mead I’ve ever made.”

“What inspires you?”

“Well, the overabundance of honey and knowing how hard my bees work to make the honey. I thought I must honor their work. I can’t just have this sitting here going to waste. I really wanted to honor the bees and what more beautiful way then something that now is timeless. It’s just like wine, once you make it into a mead it can age for years and still be a beautiful product.”

“So, nature inspired would you say? When I look at your imagery and your website that’s what comes to mind to me. Like, these are beautiful, nature inspired products. I think they are beautiful.”

“Thank you, I think that is one of the things that is really driving my recipe development. Because mead is really the epitome of Terroir. Are you familiar with that term?”

When I tell her I’m not familiar, she explains terroir is a wine term, for lack of a better definition it means “from place.” Like, pinot noir grapes in California will have a different flavour or terroir then pinot noir grapes in France, for example.

“So, mead, because the bees forage throughout a couple mile radius of where they live and they gather from the flowers and the trees in that regional place, that flavour is being brought back into the hive and put back into the honey and when I make it into a mead it really gets expressed in the glass and in the bottle. And why I say it’s the epitome of Terroir Is because grapes grow, and you get one harvest ever year and you get one vintage every year. With honey I pull three times, so I pull in the Spring, Summer and Fall. And those different vignettes of time have very different flavours because of course those pieces of time, there’s different flowers, trees, and shrubs and whatnot in bloom.

“That’s really cool, I never would have thought about that.”

Kristeva: “It is REALLY cool; it is such a unique product. and one of the reasons I’m so passionate about the mead trade in Alberta is because Alberta is the biggest producer of honey in Canada.”

“Another fact I didn’t know!” honestly, I’ve learned more about mead in the last 20 minutes of my conversation of with Kristeva than I ever could with google.

“Yeah, we’re never going to have a grape wine industry in Alberta but a beautiful mead industry we definitely could have, and it could be very regional. And other beekeepers could specialize in mono varietal of flowers. If I could find a beekeeper to do just Borage honey, I would buy every pound that they would make. There’s an opportunity with economic development and diversification with this mead product that’s really exciting.”

“What would you say makes Stolen Harvest different from other meaderies?”

She explains, “I’m truly a micro Meadery, I’m tiny, brand new and probably the direct hands on. Taste of place really comes to mind, like once dandelions rear their head, I feel like I’m chasing the season. I’m running out there and harvesting like mad and I know second week of dandelions the rose petals start coming and then I’m chasing after those.” She tells me about how unique each batch is, and once it’s gone it’s gone. In my opinion, that makes it very special and exclusive.

“One last question, what is your personal favourite product and why? I know it’ll may be hard to choose.”

“That is SO hard. I love my Saskatoon because it’s really Alberta. And that one really has a complexity that would probably rival a Shiraz, or a Pinotage. But then I really love my rose petal and dandelion for different reasons. The rose petal is beautiful, it’s super floral with the rose and then the dandelion mead, it’s humble and surprises everybody.”

Learn more about Kristeva and Stolen Harvest on her website.