Published October 2001

Meadery goes high-tech
to make age-old drink

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

Mead — the honey wine long known as the “nectar of the gods” and believed by ancient cultures to have divine powers — is finding new life in Sultan.

It’s there, just off Highway 2 and housed with honey packer Pure Foods Inc., that Denice Ingalls and husband Derek have combined a love of the drink’s past with the technology of today to produce Sky River Mead.

The meadery, which started as an idea in 1992, came about as “a confluence of stars — or something,” Denice Ingalls said, chuckling.

She had come across mead in the old English literature that she loves; her husband’s family had owned and run Pure Foods since 1982; and she joined the Pure Foods team in 1993, a year after she and Derek married.

“My husband and I were essentially bathtub brewers or kitchen winemakers, just playing around and stuff, and everything just started to come together. I was now surrounded by honey,” said Ingalls, who is Vice President of Pure Foods.

In 1992, the couple started researching formulations, packaging and related laws; in 1997, Sky River became bonded; and two years later, the Ingalls produced their first bottle of the honey wine.

Using a cold-filtration technology, Sky River creates three “true meads” — meads that are made of honey, water and yeast — that range from sweet (with 6 percent residual sugar) to dry (with less than 1 percent residual sugar).

The Sky River meads are lighter and drier than traditional meads, Ingalls said, which, because they were boiled to sterilize the honey, were darkened from caramelization and sweetened to balance the caramel flavor.

“The reason we can make them so dry is that we don’t heat the honey,” she said. “We remove the wild yeast without ever superheating it, and basically, that’s just by virtue of the age we live in. Grape winemakers don’t have to hire people with big feet to walk on their grapes, and we don’t have to boil our honey.”

Once it goes through its fermentation process, which takes anywhere from four to 10 weeks, in a 500-gallon fermenting tank, the mead is bottled and stays in the meadery for about six more months while it recovers from “bottle shock” and regains its prime flavor.

From there, it is distributed around the state — 90 percent along the I-5 corridor — to QFC, Larry’s Markets, Top Food, Haggen, PCC Natural Markets and Albertson’s supermarkets, as well as smaller wine shops, such as Wick-Ed Cellars in Everett. Sky River also sells its mead on site.

Because of its close association with Pure Foods, Sky River can access choice organic honeys from around the world — from Okanogan to the Argentine — as well as decades of knowledge about the complexities of the different honeys, Ingalls said.

“It puts us in a position where we can bring to (honey) winemaking what a vineyardist can bring to grape winemaking — because we know honey,” she said.

And Ingalls has the medals to prove it, from wine competitions of international stature to county fairs. In many of the competitions, she has gone head to head with grape wines, even though the taste characteristics of a tannic Cabernet — dark and robust — and a sweet mead are so dissimilar. It’s a competition that plays out in the marketplace as well.

“Yes, we’re head to head (with grape wine), but by the same token, we’re such very different wines. We’re head to head in the sense that most people don’t like to carry around two glasses at one time,” said Ingalls, who participates in a number of activities through the Washington Wine Commission.

Now in its second full year, Sky River is making a “steady climb upwards,” said Ingalls, adding that the meadery produced about 2,500 cases last year.

“We’re technically going to break even this year, I think, which is really good for the second year out,” she said, noting wryly that a number of failed dot-coms can’t say as much.

Besides, “it’s a fun wine to work with, because it’s got a history that’s really intriguing,” Ingalls said.

For more information on Sky River Meadery, call 360-793-6761 or visit the company’s Web site, www.skyriverbrewing.com.

Related: Snohomish County wineries are part of a maturing statewide industry

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