Local Live Wild Mead (Honey Wine) in Sonoma County. Please help make it happen!

[@byrnegreen]

Last weekend, I launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for Phase I of bringing a Meadery to Sonoma County. This funding will provide for upfront costs (for bottles, ingredients, and facility contracting) to make our first batch in a wine-making facility and make this local artisan craft business a reality while supporting the bees and the apples. I'm reaching out to the community to help spread the word about this endeavor in order to raise money and help to make it a success.

I invite you to check out the campaign via the link below, contribute if you feel moved, and please forward on to your networks of like-minded folks.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/local-live-wild-mead

*There are perks offered - bottles of mead! - that cannot be shipped. For those of you that can not pick up in Sonoma County, please don’t let the perks stop you, and you can gift your bottle to a worthy cause or individual in the area! Also note: this is not a pre-sale, but a THANK YOU for helping us produce this first batch.

Our mead is innovative in three main ways:

It’s WILD: fermented with the yeast already present in the alchemy naturally created by combining honey and water.

It’s LIVE: our mead is bottled “live” in reuseable swing-top bottles to make a naturally effervescent beverage without artificial carbonation.

It's RAW: most modern mead-makers seek to standardize the final product by boiling or pasteurizing the ingredients in order to kill the "wild" yeast in the honey. Our mead is made
without boiling, so it preserves the natural, live micronutrients in raw honey.

Here are the ways you can help:

Visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/local-live-wild-mead and pass it on to your networks by email, social-media, and good ‘ol fashioned word of mouth.

Donate to the project, and get mead as a perk.

(This is where I get verbose about my excitement, so if you’ve read this far, you’ve gotten the core message. Read on, or share now!)

I'm very excited about this campaign, as I believe--in addition to it offering a fantastic product-- it brings some much needed economic and cultural counterbalance to the destruction of the local apple heritage while also encouraging bee-friendly habitat in Sonoma County. Apples are an ingredient in one of my favorite recipes (in fact, that very “Ciser” will be the first batch funded by this campaign.) And, mead is a social, bright, and delicious experience. This project is good for the bees, good for the apples, and good for the buzz!

Furthermore, this is a local, artisan business that will provide right-livelihood and an ecologically responsible and regenerative business model. The glass swing top bottles will be re-used. We will encourage and support planting bee-friendly habitat. Our market will always be local. Should we be so fortunate, success will take us to new regions, but only by opening new, small-batch local meaderies, not by scaling beyond regional production and human scale. And, the facility I have found to do these test batches has a stainless steel vessel for fermenting, as it is important for me to not ferment in plastic. My ecological and local ideals are infused into every aspect of this project.

These are the first steps of a realization of a dream of mine, and I appreciate your support in whatever form is true for you!

Together on Earth,

Chris

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/local-live-wild-mead