It sounds like an ancient ritual is about to go down in here. On a recent Thursday afternoon, tribal music is being played over the speakers inside Ravenwood Meadery. The chants sounds mystical. Like they predate time, similar to how the roots of mead have been traced back at least 9,000 years. Mead is an alcoholic beverage created by fermenting honey with water and yeast. It’s the stuff of Norse myths.
Huntsville is a city known for its contributions to aerospace engineering and technology. Still, it also feels like the perfect place for a new business making an ancient libation once consumed by Vikings. The city has a soft spot for nerdy and quirky. Vinyl records. Craft beer. Pop-culture cons. Standup comedy. Cigar-box guitars.
Carboys filled with mead at Ravenwood Meadery in Huntsville, Ala. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)
On Black Friday, owner Roo Kline and manager Michael Wilson will open Ravenwood for business. The meadery’s located in an airy space with a cozy and slightly witchy vibe on the second floor of Huntsville arts center Lowe Mill, a converted textile mill built around 1900.
The interior at Ravenwood Meadery at Huntsville, Ala. arts center Lowe Mill. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)
On Monday, Kline and Wilson, who are partners in life as well as business, were up early. They bottled 20 batches of mead, siphoning from five-gallon carboys the cloudy goldenness that’s been aging inside for about eight weeks, and into 750 milliliter wine bottles.
“The older the mead gets, the darker it gets,” Kline says. “After a while that yeast will drop down and collect in the bottom as sediment. So sometimes the mead will turn very clear depending on what variety you make. Our traditional mead does not turn perfectly clear or translucent. It’s a little bit cloudy.”
Carboys filled with mead at Ravenwood Meadery in Huntsville, Ala. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)
And like wine, the taste of mead gets more complex and interesting as it ages. It will taste good after eight weeks and bottled up. But hold on to that bottle another three months and it becomes special, Kline says. That effect is multiplied furthermore at intervals of six-months and a year. “What happens is it begins to mellow out and becomes softer,” Kline says. “After that, it will age but you don’t see the jumps in it like you did during that first year.”
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They can make three batches or so an hour at Ravenwood. Sanitizing all the hoses, carboys and other equipment is the most time-consuming part of the process, and crucial because otherwise an entire batch can go yuck. As far as the actual making goes, Kline and Wilson use a metal pot that looks like something a family would cook a batch of jambalaya or chicken-noodle soup in, to mix the honey and water. They mix pot after pot, emptying the mixture into a carboy. “And when it’s full we just put the yeast in and it does its thing,” Kline says.
Ravenwood accurately classifies themselves as a micro-meadery. Meaderies in general are still a small thing in Alabama. According to Kline, “A few breweries may make mead, but we are the only meadery in the state that focuses solely on making mead.”
Bottles of mead at Huntsville, Ala.’s Ravenwood Meadery. (Courtesy Aurora Jordan)
Half of Ravenwood’s initial 20 batches have already been presold via social media. Still that leaves another 200 to 250 bottles up for grabs. This traditional or “house” mead is coming in at about 12 percent alcohol by volume, or ABV. So it’s a sipper. Bottles run $30 for the house mead. As Ravenwood gets into variations made with, say, wild violet or dandelion, those bottles will cost around $40, as working with those ingredients is more time-consuming.
In addition to to-go bottle sales, Ravenwood will also have a small tasting bar. A four-ounce pour is $7 and six-ounce $9. They also sell drinking horns, from buffalo and oxen, lined with beeswax to enhance the mead’s flavor. (Full size drinking horns are $35.) Opening day, Nov. 26, Ravenwood is open noon to 7 p.m. Normal hours will be 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. More info at ravenwoodhuntsville.com.
They’re located on the same corner of Lowe Mill, address 2211 Seminole Drive, as fantasy-themed Dragon’s Forge Café, giving them a simpatico neighbor. Ravenwood and Dragons’ Forge are already planning special events together, including one for New Year’s Eve.
Michael Wilson bottling mead at Huntsville, Ala.’s Ravenwood Meadery. (Courtesy Roo Kline)
Once filled with mead, Ravenwood’s bottles are corked, then sealed with a wax stamped emblem that looks straight out of “Game Of Thrones.” (Interestingly, Kline’s never watched “GoT,” she says.) Ravenwood’s name was inspired by the ravens that serve Oden, the king of the gods in Norse mythology, and by Moonwood Farm, a fiber business of Kline’s.
Kline has a charming accent. There’s a tattoo of scorpion on the inside of her right forearm and a seahorse on the left. She was born in Holland but spent a majority of her life in Australia, in Brisbane and Queensland, just up from the Gold Coast. She’d been working as a graphic artist and then decided to take a year off to spend time in Miami. She loved the South Beach culture, where she got work designing event and club flyers. She got the nickname Roo from her new American friends because, yep, there are kangaroos in Australia. She wasn’t crazy about the name but it stuck.
Drinking horns used to consume mead, for sale at Ravenwood Meadery in Huntsville, Ala. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)
About three or so years ago, she met Wilson at a festival. He was living in Nashville at the time. “Me and my friends in Nashville, it’s kind of our culture, mead-making,” Wilson says. Before Ravenwood, he mostly worked warehouse and factory jobs.
Back when Kline and Wilson met, a lot of homemade mead was being consumed in his circles. She’s tasted mead before back in Australia, “but it was a commercial mead and like any commercial mead they’re not that great.” Wilson’s homemade mead though was rich and full-bodied. “You can taste the honey through it,” Kline says. “What I like about it too, is that it ranges anywhere from very sweet to very dry depending on how you make it.”
She’d been making homemade wine for a couple years, after red concord grape seed planted in her garden turned out to be muscadine instead. After tasting her new friends’ meads for a while, she decided to switch lanes. Kline and Wilson started making their own mead together, and they received some emphatic thumbs-up from friends who’d tried different versions they made. Some friends even suggested they should make mead professionally.
Kline has been a juried fiber artist at Lowe Mill for around four-and-a-half years. Then about 15 months ago, she secured a larger studio space that included two ample storage rooms, which she initially used for fiber, yarn and other supplies.
Ravenwood Meadery at Huntsville, Ala. arts center Lowe Mill. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)
She started thinking about turning the storage rooms into a micro-meadery. Use one for a fermentation room and the other a cellar-styled salesroom. Last summer they connected with the health department to confirm it would be legit for them to do mead there and got an OK.
It hasn’t been easy though. The licensing was confusing. “Mead is just not known well enough,” Kline says. “It doesn’t really fall under beer because it is not a beer, there’s no grains used. Does doesn’t really fall under wine because technically it’s not a wine. They have beer, wine or spirits so where does mead fall? The closest thing is wine. So we are classified a winery and our little fermentation room is a bonded winery.” There was also the matter of obtaining a $25,000 surety bond, a recent requirement in Alabama for new businesses selling alcohol, Kline says.
Bottles of mead at Huntsville, Ala.’s Ravenwood Meadery. (Courtesy Aurora Jordan)
Wilson’s interest in mead went deeper than alcohol, and into Viking culture and religious practices. His long hair is shaved on both sides, revealing tattoos of Anglo-Saxon style ravens. He was introduced to Viking culture through the sword-and-sorcery lyrics of the heavy-metal band Manowar.
“Once I started listening to them,” Wilson says, “they started singing about Odin and Thor and the Norse gods and I was like, ‘Man, these guys are pretty cool,’ so I started reading into it. And then I realized there was a whole culture around that, a revival of that stuff. So I started diving in and reading everything I could.” The deep history of Viking/Norse culture and mead was appealing. There’s an elemental allure too, Kline says. “It’s very organic. I’m very much a nature person anyway, so that just speaks to me.”
The Ravenwood recipes Kline and Wilson have come up with have been refined over years, through trial and error. For example, they found plum mead was delish. Banana mead, not so much. This being the 21st century, ye olde internet research has also been involved. “There are lots of things that you can throw into mead, to experiment with it, play with it,” Kline says. “Berries, flowers, spices, teas, all these kinds of things. It’s been a real adventure.”
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