Mountain Mead - Medd Mynydd

Mountain Mead is a Welsh meadery based in the foothills of the Snowdonia mountain range. We make batches of premium Welsh mead, sometimes called honey wine. Our meads are hand crafted using  a range of high quality honeys and ingredients. Mead Maker Mike mixes the raw honey by hand and turns the honey into mead, before filtering, bottling and labelling everything on-site. We only offer our honey wines for sale once we are sure they are of a high quality and we pride ourselves on making alcoholic honey meads that are free from most allergens, and only use natural ingredients.

Mountain Mead was started in 2016 by 2 friends, Mike Cooke and Jacob Milner but Mike now runs the business on his own.

Mountain Mead's master mead maker, Mike Cooke

Meet the Original Mead Makers..

                      Mead Maker Milner                           Mead Maker Mike

The Beginning...

One day, whilst sitting in a shed, up a mountain, in the cold, wind, and driving rain of the Welsh highlands, two men, Mike Cooke & Jacob Milner, took it upon themselves to make the meadiest mead of all meads. From that day forth, they formed an alliance with Haf, Queen of the Apis Meliferai, Champion of the Workers, Desire of the Drones, and sworn enemy of the bee mite Varroa Destructor. They vowed to return the drink of the Gods back to it's former glory and offer good, honest work to honey bees across the land.

And so it was that Mountain Mead erupted into being during the long, dark, winter nights of December 2016. Times were hard, the mead samples flowed strong and fast, each more delightful and invigorating than the last. Every day we thank our lucky mead bottles that we were able to overcome such trials and remember our humble beginnings with such boundless clarity.

Ok... so that's not quite how it happened but it's fairly close! 

So.. how did it actually happen? 

Well, we were sitting in a friends shed, (as one does) during the winter of 2016. We were sampling some home made mead wine and contemplating the delights of opening a meadery and transitioning from making mead at home to making mead professionally. 

After some serious Googling, we realised there were several hoops we would have to jump through to make the transition from mead making at home to professionally made mead. We were both working existing jobs; Jacob is a tree surveyor; Mike is an electrician, so we could only devote one day a week to our hopes of opening a Welsh meadery. 

It took 18 months of working 1 day a week to get all the licences, inspections, and equipment in place before we had our first mead bottled, corked, labelled and ready for sale. 

Our Honey Mead

We have experimented with various types of honey along the way, and fortunately for us, we found our local Welsh honey made one of the best meads. To complement these local meads, we also use a range of high quality honeys from around the world to diversify our range of mead wines. We source our raw ingredients as locally as possible and value the relationships we have with our suppliers and retailers. 

What is Mead?

Many people think it is a honey beer or perhaps a honey wine, and although you can make a beer or a wine that has been flavoured with honey, a traditional mead contains neither grape nor grain. It is fermented using nothing but honey, water and mead yeast.

Our two staple meads are traditional meads, made by fermenting honey. Melyn Yr Eithin is a dry traditional mead which is very similar to a dry white wine and Telor Y Coed is a medium sweet traditional mead which is ideal in place of a dessert wine.

Our Grugiar Ddu is a spiced mead using Spanish orange blossom honey, cinnamon, cloves, and vanilla and our Gylfinir is a blend of Mexican honey and Spanish orange blossom.