this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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I'm in biotech and my wife and I keep talking about quitting our jobs and opening a meadery.
I spent a few years bouncing between the ideas of opening a coffee shop, and ice cream shop, or a fruit stand.
the most important bit is we have a small stage for live music and open mic nights.
and of course i ended up making custom musical instruments for a living instead of any of that.
Oh cool, it sounds like you were able to boil it down to what you really wanted to do.
drive my wife batty? yeah
Intriguing!
Probably more as a small scale personal project than a business venture (the bureaucracy around food-production would kill me) for me though.
Do you make it already on your free time? Can it be made without honey?
Wouldn't be mead without honey.
Mead-ish? Meadly?
Ha! Only 2 questions in and you are already in "you won't believe it is butter" territory.
Haha unfortunately it comes with the territory when refusing animal products but still wanting to eat similar to everyone else - I CAN have my cake and eat it too, kinda (with soy cream).
I'll slogan my homebrewed syrup-beer: "you won't believe it's mead! (it's not)".
Honestly, while I love eating butter, I'd rather not look for similar looking replacements.
I can very well go with peanut/coconut oil (for cooking) and blended peanut for spreading, instead of using randomly processed industrial idk-what-oil based stuff that was originally developed with the intent to reduce costs to companies and then half-heartedly attempted to cater to those who care about nutrition, with a whole fake health campaign to make it work.
Forget that, I'd rather just eat my bread with water.
There are plenty of good substitution products available nowadays - even found one not-butter tasty enough to make my whole family switch to it, until it went out of production... probably as well for our arteries. But I've yet to find a good replacement cheese though, so I'd rather go without.
Out of curiosity, where do you live? I'm in Scotland with occasional visits to Hungary, and both have a bunch of kinds of vegan cheese now. In the UK it's more mainstream, but in Hungarian "organic shops" I found some interesting ones, like strawberry-flavoured cream cheese, that we don't have in Scotland.
Back when I became vegan in 2012, the Scottish vegan cheese situation was dreary, but by the pandemic it got pretty good.
There are options, but none that hits that simple joy of a cheese sandwich. But I might be persuaded to take a quick trip over to Hungary for some strawberry creme cheese! I've never tried that.
My simple answer to substitution is to just eat something else and not look for a substitute.
Most of these substitutes are just substrates made out of whatever can pass as similar and with "added vitamins" to check boxes, a lot of which don't even end up properly working like the vitamin in the form as it is in the original object. And this is on top of the manufacturing costs of the ultra-processed foods which seem low because of how normal food prices have been inflated.
There is a huge variety of diets that has historically worked for people and any can be chosen or even mixed and matched to complete dietary requirements.
For instance, you don't need dairy with your bread. Just make good quality pulses and beans with gravy (can be eaten with rice) and use some of the remaining gravy to make your bread tasty or just have bread with those pulses. Quite a few of the remaining nutrients can be obtained from accompanying salads and fruits. On top of that, fruits contain many more components (often lost when processed) whose effects have not yet been properly appreciated and quantified, making it hard to give them as supplements.
For some remaining nutrients unavailable as components of vegetable food, historically, people used fasting. Although this depends upon the specific gut microbiome and whether fasting will cause the specific nutrients to be produced, so I guess this cannot be lightly recommended across geo-cultur-racial boundaries. (Now of course, if some rich people really wanted to help with this, someone could come up with some probiotic drink that permanently enabled people generate those nutrients on fasting)
That may be.
But I want cake, so I'll eat cake (with the available substitutions) because I can.
When I want beans, I eat beans because I can.
When I want cheese, I suffer 'til it passes because I can't.
Easy-peasy!
Great. Now I feel like eating cake.
Hope you get a good tasty cake!
Fun mead fact: The word "mead" descends from the Proto-Indo-European word for honey.
I'd have to call it Sirop (sugared drink) or something... Maybe "sugar meadley" or "agave meadley"!
Agave makes the basis for tequila, before distillation.
But if it's just sugar water and yeast, it will be a bit gross.
In my foggy memory, mead tasted like very sweet beer, so I assumed some grain would be involved, but perhaps not.
If the flavour comes only from honey (and the process), it'll probably be a lot harder to imitate.
Raw honey has a lot of flavor. And beer has barley and hops for flavor.
Also the yeast contributes a lot. There are so many varieties of yeast.
But the problem with pure sugar is that it's one dimensional. The yeast go into overdrive and starts spitting out off flavors.
are we talking like, the white granulated shit? because we gave processed sugarcane and sugar beets to the cows as treats. also stole a little for ourselves (it still had plenty of sugar in the cane and beet after they'd extracted the sugar juice somehow. i don't know how you juice a cane. then they sold it to us. don't ask me how it works, i was a kid and this is what i was told) and they tasted great. i think it's that we had the plant the sugar came from rather than just the sugar. the plant gave the sugar flavor depth. think how brown sugar (sugar without the molasses extracted) has a different flavor than white sugar.
i'd still call the cane or the beet "pure sugar", since that's what they made the white granulated shit out of. that's me tho, and the contexts i'd be using it in pure would mean more natural/unmodified/untainted than homogenous.
Yeah, the white granulated stuff gives off flavors.
brown sugar has molasses that adds some depth, or just add different flavorings.
Different yeasts can sometimes save white granulated, but it's more hassle than it's worth, just add different sugars (in addition even) and you'll get something that will have a chance of tasting okay.
Also, yeast nutrient. Add some yeast nutrient. That can save a brew as well.
I have friends who've made mead out of skittles
Isn't sugar, water, and yeast basically the ingredients for hard seltzer? Add some flavoring after the fact and I feel like you're having a pretty good time
Our area is filled with local breweries, so I think a meadery as a local business would work.
We do! We've been doing ~1 gallon batches which gives us 5 or 6 bottles of finished product. We've been buying honey from the big box grocers but I want to switch to buying from a local beekeeper.
I've never tried using not honey, do you mean like Agave nectar or similar?
If you make alcohol out of agave, you're just making tequila at that point
Youd still have to distill it to get tequila. I am kinda interested in trying a fermented agave batch now.
True! I'm sure there's a word for agave "beer." (or would it be a wine?)
If any of the small time beekeepers I've met are anything to go by, they'll be happy to make a deal where you take some of their honey to make mead with, a portion of which they'd sell.
The beekeeper I dealt with was a moron. He texts me and says he's got a bucket of honey that he thinks started to ferment with wild yeast. So I offered a reasonable price for the bucket and he counters with full price, like I'm just gonna take a full risk on his fuck up. I finished up what dealings I had with him and haven't talked to to him since. They're just people, in other words.
Maybe even a beekeeper who also could retail your mead, if they already have store space and customers and an assortment of honey-related products..!
Yeah, I don't eat honey so haven't even thought about mead in a decade, but the one time I had it, it was delicious! I suppose the market of buyers with allergies or dietary restrictions against honey is too small, but I wonder if it could be possible for home use (where no one cares that it's not "real mead").
Depending on where you are, selling booze is a massive financial undertaking. In the US, you better have 6 figures hanging around to blow. And years to wait.
Where I live you can sell like small batches of self-produced stuff (like a bottle or two after a tour or tasting), so it's not very expensive to get such a permit, but too much paper work for my taste.
The little bit of looking into it that we've done, we know anything sold must be produced in a commercial kitchen, and that would be a big expense because real estate around here is ridiculous. It's really a pipe dream at this point but gives some hope to hang onto that there is something else out there for us.
Yeah... And in the meantime you always have something to gift people.