Traditional Mead - Palmer's

13.6% Alc./Vol.

Palmer's Meadery, the home of Esquimalt Vermouth. Our meads are exclusively sold online and at the Meadery in Nanaimo. In addition to our main Esquimalt business, we are also dabbling in a bit of small scale farming, growing garlic, artisanal crafts, honey and mead making. Super small-scale experimentations into the world of traditional mead making. If you want to better understand how Esquimalt is made, it all starts with mead.

A Traditional Mead, sometimes called a Show Mead, is the purest representation of a mead maker's work and his honey. The recipe is simple honey, water and yeast. Oftentimes most mead is then flavoured with various fruits, herbs and roots, but this is nothing but a showcase for our honey. This is also the same 'base mead' that we use in all of the Esquimalt products. So if you want to understand the brass tax of what makes the base of Esquimalt, this is it. 

Fermented completely dry, meaning the yeast consume all of the available sugar from our honey and turn it into (honey) wine. It's all the honey flavour, with none of the sweetness. Drinks like a great white wine, serve chilled.

Like grapes, there is a huge range of 'single varietal' honey that is determined by the primary pollen source of the bees. For example, in BC's Fraser Valley, the primary pollen source for the bee industry is blueberries, so you get a single variety blueberry honey that is a deep dark almost molasses like colour. Our honey is from Fort St. John with the primary pollen source being alfalfa, clover and wildflower. The region is one of the best honey producing locations on the planet and yields a honey that when cold and solid is snow-white and when liquid, nearly water clear. The flavour is outrageously good.