On an early summer morning, amidst the heavy buzz of energetic honeybees, Jason Davis opened one of his hives and pulled out a frame. It was dense with bees and more crawled in and out of the entrances of colorful stacks of polypropylene boxes that surrounded him.
“As soon as they start landing, you’ll see that they have little balls of yellow or orange pollen on their legs,” Davis said.
Davis has 25 colonies, over a million bees, in the backyard of his meadery in Homer, Sweetgale Meadworks and Cider House.
“This is a happy day for the bees because it’s either above 50 already, or it’s about to be, and there’s almost no wind and it’s sunny and the dandelions are out,” Davis said.
Davis turned around and squatted down in front of a row of low bushes. He’s planted rows of nagoonberries, also called Arctic Raspberries. Davis said he discovered nagoonberries in the wild as a teenager and has had a special connection with them ever since. They look like raspberries but have a distinct tangy flavor that Davis now treasures for making mead.
“It’s hard to get enough from the wild so I grow them here,” Davis said. “I have about 20,000 plants. And last year I harvested almost 500 pounds of berries- mainly my son harvested, but I help him when I can.”
Nagoonberries, honey and water are the only ingredients in Davis’ most popular drink, a wild fermented mead. Producing locally-grown food and drink in Alaska can be challenging and it’s especially true of alcohol, which often relies on imported fruits, grains, and yeasts, even when they’re brewed in-state. But since he began commercially producing meads and wines, Davis has pursued making them with all-local ingredients.
Davis walked back to his meadery kitchen to explain his fermenting process.
“We do everything in five-gallon batches,” Davis said, stirring a ladle in one of a cluster of silver pots. “And this is the wildflower honey, which is our traditional straight mead. So there’s nothing in there but honey and water.”
Pure honey is antibacterial and antifungal, which means bacteria and yeast can’t survive in it. But when it’s mixed with water, yeast can eat the sugars and ferment it into mead, an alcoholic drink that tastes like a honey wine.
Davis ferments with local raspberries, currants, chaga mushrooms, apples for cider, and of course, honey. As of this year, his bees only provide about a third of the honey he needs, though his long-term plan is to produce all his own. Local honey comes with a steep price tag: it’s more than five times the cost of bulk clover honey, and that increases his bottle prices.
“I sell it mostly for around $30 a bottle,” Davis said. “But I could sell it for half that if I was using Costco honey.”
He said he can’t sell much of his mead in stores around Alaska because the profit margins are too low, but he does sell directly to consumers online.
Davis said a higher price for local ingredients is worth it; he buys berries from several local farmers and he said the flavors far surpass anything you can find in a grocery store. He said local honey is also much better for making mead.
“If I make a raspberry or black currant or, or a blueberry mead, if it’s fireweed honey, you don’t taste the honey there at all,” Davis said. “The focus is all on the fruit. Whereas if I get clover honey from Costco, it costs a fraction of the price but it has a very distinct medicinal flavor that comes out once you remove the sweetness.”
But Davis said using all-local ingredients isn’t just about flavor.
“It’s a desire to support local agriculture and to be local,” Davis said. “And just the craft industry aspect of making an amazing, I think, world class product just using local ingredients from here.”
Davis said it’s hard to find locally grown and produced alcohol in the state. Alaska has many breweries and wineries, but he said water is often their only local ingredient.
As far as he knows, his commercial meadery makes the only consistently locally grown and produced alcohol in the state.
And in the long term, Davis said making food and drink with local ingredients makes businesses and the community more stable.
“I think the more we can do here locally, the better it is,” Davis said. “So we don’t have to ship everything up from the Lower 48 where it’s a little bit vulnerable.”
Davis said if for some reason the road system failed, he could still produce everything for the meadery.
Davis said every year business gets a little bit better than the year before and this year has been good for the bees. In midsummer, he temporarily moved some of his hives to a higher elevation so they could gather fireweed pollen in open meadows, boosting their productivity and giving him a higher yield of the honey that is the backbone of his business.
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Rachel Cassandra covers health and wellness for Alaska Public Media. Reach her atrcassandra@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Rachel here.
