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Honeytree Meadery
Dru Sousan and Ross Welbon had been brewing mead out of their house for years when they opened their own bar in 2019. They knew it would be a challenge, but nothing had prepared them for a tornado and global pandemic. The original article can be found here.
Honeybees & Harmony
Dru Sousan and Ross Welbon started Honeytree Meadery in 2019 for their love of brewing, beekeeping and bringing people together. Now after a tumultuous 2020, they’re ready to get back to sharing their signature mead with Nashville.
Honeytree Meadery founders Dru Sousan and Ross Welbon didn’t even learn about the 13 holes in their tasting room roof until a few months after the tornado hit. After sporadic leaks in the ceiling in the weeks after the devastating storm, a contractor broke the news of the freshly peppered rooftop, adding another to-repair item on their list that already included a wrecked patio and ruined HVAC unit.
However, the splintered wood and toppled walls pale in comparison to the real loss that hit the two brewers and long-time friends: their entire batch of mead, and along with it, months of work.
“The tornado hit, and we lost almost our entire facility’s worth of product. So we had to start over anyway. The building is ambient temperature controlled, and that’s how we keep our mead at the proper temperature. [After being exposed to the elements from the tornado] the temperature fluctuations upset the yeast very, very much,” laments Dru.
As if a devastating tornado wasn’t enough to rock a community, weeks later the COVID-19 pandemic immediately forced the entire service industry to shut down, eliminating revenue streams and support at a time when the Nashville service industry needed it the most. And for Dru and Ross specifically, slowing down awareness.
But now after a year of building their mead supply back up and establishing their brand in the community, they’re ready to take this summer by storm and share more of their mead out with the world.
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Honeytree Meadery started much like you’d imagine many other bars do — with friends that love to drink, make drinks, and do both with other people.
Ross and Dru are longtime brewing partners and experienced members of the Nashville restaurant/bar industry — Ross as a brewer at Little Harpeth and Dru as a bartender at Pharmacy Burger Parlor & Beer Garden.
After growing tired of pursuing music, Ross felt that he needed something new to do when he wasn’t working at Little Harpeth. He began to think back to his next-door neighbors from childhood, and a beehive that fascinated him at such a young age.
“Growing up my neighbors — I was best friends with their daughter and I’d go over to their house for dinner and whatnot — and they had their hives set up in the backyard. Right next to their dinner table they had a giant window, so you could sit at dinner and see the bees go in and out of the hive. I thought it was the coolest thing and I always wanted to be a beekeeper,” says Ross.
“I had been a musician for a long time and I’d been in a dozen bands. Nothing I was doing was really working out, and I was like ‘you know what, I need something different.’ So I came to this inflection point where I was like ‘I’m going to do what I’ve always wanted to do — get some bees.’”
In 2013, Ross started taking classes and found a mentor, learning the ins-and-outs of beekeeping before actually acquiring his first hive, which he won from finishing top in a class. He and Dru decided to keep it in an alley behind their house and over time found themselves with a large stockpile of honey. As brewers, they were already throwing large parties at their house for their friends to sample their home-concocted beer, so it wasn’t long before the stockpiles of honey entered the fold.
“We used to throw these huge parties and brew beer at the house, and we ended up getting more and more people that were coming over and drinking our beer and watching us brew these crazy beers in our kitchen,” says Dru. “The whole time, being beekeepers, we had honey stockpiled, and so we’re like ‘okay, we should start messing around with this. What are we going to do with all this honey? Are we going to sell it, or are we going to turn it into booze?’ Because that’s what we do — we turn stuff into booze, apparently.”
After tinkering with the recipe for three and a half years, they finally perfected it in what is now dubbed their “Basic Batch” and felt that it was strong enough to start a company producing mead. After months of developing the brand and logistics, Honeytree Meadery opened in East Nashville in May 2019.
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“We started looking for a building. And when we found [their location on Woodland Street], we were like, ‘That’s it. There it is — we’re in. It has to be here,’” says Dru.
It turns out that that building was the key to getting their feet off the ground. Ross and Dru’s initial plan was to make their money through distribution — much like most alcohol companies, and they quickly used their industry connections to find a mix of 14 bars and restaurants to sell their mead while their taproom served as marketing and a home base for production. But with the foot traffic from the Basement East across the street and other neighboring bars, they soon found that the taproom was their main revenue source.
“The tasting room was doing so well, it wasn’t a huge deal for us to sign distribution. We couldn’t even keep up just with 14 bars and restaurants and the tasting room being open five days a week,” remembers Dru. “We were like, ‘oh my gosh this is crazy — the tasting room has become a destination spot.’”
This is perhaps even more unexpected simply because of mead itself. While it’s hard for any restaurant or bar to be successful, even if it’s in a crowded location, running a restaurant around a niche product is even harder.
Mead is one of the world’s oldest beverages but is dwarfed in popularity by beer, wine and other common spirits, despite its sweet taste and affordability. Often associated with the medieval era, Liquor.com notes that it is referenced in numerous pieces of Literature, notably “Lord of the Rings,” the poem “Beowulf” and “Canterbury Tales." The ancient Greeks even described it as the “nectar of the gods.”
But outside of Renaissance festivals it largely faded from popularity until recent years, where it’s seen a brief resurgence with meaderies, like Honeytree, popping up in cities across the U.S. Dru and Ross are hoping to keep it a mainstay in East Nashville by educating customers and using their place as a quasi-clubhouse for other independent mead makers to gather as a community.
“[For people] making mead on their own, or who want to make mead on their own, the more mead makers we can make, the easier our job will be because there are more people out there teaching people…what mead is.”
Since the tornado wiped out their supply last March, they’ve taken a hiatus from distribution and focused on engaging with the public to build their brand and stockpile more product for a full Spring resurgence. Since they already planned to have distribution when they first opened, it wasn’t hard for them to put the pieces in place to start again. Only this time, they want to have it work in conjunction with their tasting room, which they’ve renovated to include outdoor seating and a stage.
“We had to immediately go from all of our business being [in a] tasting room, to now there being no tasting room business at all,” recalls Dru in February. “We’ve been restocking. We’ve just been making product trying to keep our heads above water so that, come Springtime, we do a full launch back into the world. [We’ll have a] sales team, grocery stores, liquor stores, hotel, bar/restaurant, just spread back out.”
And it feels like mead is set up well for success. At its most basic level, mead is simply honey and water fermented with yeast — there are many variations you can use to flavor it, but it’s largely devoid of additives and artificial components. In a world that values natural ingredients and understanding where they came from, mead seems like a perfect fit. Dru likes to convert people that complain how other alcohols don’t sit well with them for dietary reasons and thinks that it could contribute to mead’s burgeoning popularity.
“Just because some alcohol messes with [people with digestive issues] doesn’t mean they don’t want to drink. It’s just that everything they’ve had so far affects them negatively one way or another. And then they drink mead and it’s like ‘oh, this — this one I can drink.’”
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Everyone that saunters into Honeytree Meadery, whether they’ve never had honey in their life or regularly sip mead at Medieval reenactments, receives an enthusiastic greeting from Ross and Dru. They love to educate people about their passion and they live to share it with the East Nashville community.
Despite the damage they sustained during the tornado, their building still fortunately had running water and enough infrastructure so that it still stood.
With the Basement East completely destroyed across the street, they knew how lucky they were and opened up their doors, letting people charge their phones with a generator, use the bathroom and pick up and drop off supplies.
Producing mead on a commercial scale allows Dru and Ross to financially support beekeepers in a much more efficient way than previously known. While most beekeepers make their money by simply selling honey in small batches, Ross and Dru have started to buy in bulk from neighboring apiaries, in addition to what they make themselves.
Humans found ways to manipulate cows and chickens for consumption and sale, but beekeepers relinquish control when producing honey. Each batch can taste slightly different from the last, and if a queen wants to leave, the hive will follow her — leaving the beekeeper empty handed. It’s a volatile craft that Dru and Ross think deserves more recognition.
“Our longest expense by a long shot is honey. Most of the time the beekeepers, they sell the little tiny bears [of packaged honey], which is great, but that’s just as much [cost of] packaging as it is honey. We come in and say ‘how many five gallon buckets or drums do you have?’” says Dru. “We’re trying to directly fund what they’re doing. When we first started as beekeepers, they said ‘if you want to make a million dollars being a beekeeper, get ready to spend two million.’ That’s bulls**t; that’s not the way the world should be. Beekeepers should be coveted.”
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A fellow beekeeper stopped by to catch-up with Dru, and he asked how long it had been since he worked at Pharmacy. Dru, who seemed amazed by his answer, replied that it had been almost a full year.
But it’s clear from his answer, that even though that year will go down as one of the most tumultuous in Nashville history, despite the fact that they completely had to start from scratch with their product, repair their tasting room just as it was building steam only to shut their doors again with the onset of an global pandemic, that it was one of the best years of their lives.
“We’re all in, we’ve dedicated our lives to [mead].”
Ross and Dru have been doing just fine — making mead for the people of Nashville, educating the community they love, and supporting beekeepers. Anything else is just icing on the cake.
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