About Lowkey

Meet Keith and Ruby

Keith and Ruby Sutherlin, both Central Washington natives, founded Lowkey Meadery in 2024 with help from family and friends. They used their passion and skills to bring the business to fruition, and they now have a tasting room in East Wenatchee's Trades District. Their space was created to pair Keith's mead with food from Ruby's Lowkey Kitchen.

Keith started as a homebrewer in his early 20s and fell for mead in 2019. His love for the craft has led him to experiment with ingredients, processes, and yeasts to develop his own methods and recipes. He loves robust and unique flavors and focuses on mead made with fruits, botanicals and spices. Keith runs the production floor, develops new recipes, and pours in the tasting room, where he shares his knowledge.

Ruby has enjoyed brewing since Keith introduced her to it. She encouraged him to turn the hobby into a business. She uses her business skills to run the meadery's day-to-day operations, and helps Keith in production. The tasting room let her turn her love of cooking into the Lowkey Kitchen, where she builds a menu around locally sourced ingredients that pair well with the mead. She pours in the tasting room along with Keith.

Stop by the tasting room and say hello.

Meet Mead

Mead is Honey Wine!

Mead, put simply, is a a fermented honey beverage. Some people refer to it as Honey Wine. To be considered mead, the product must have at least 51% of the fermentable sugars be pure honey. We do our best to use 100% honey.

Mead is fermented similar to cider, wine, & beer and can vary widely in alcohol, residual sugar content, acidity, and flavors depending on the type and source of honey and the processes used to ferment it. The most basic of mead is 3 simple ingredients: Water, Honey, and Yeast.

There are many different types of mead and mead can range all the way from approximately 3% to 20% ABV (Alcohol by volume). They have different names depending on what other ingredients or process is used to make the mead.

The most common versions of mead are below:

Traditional - Mead with only Water, Honey, and Yeast. The most iconic of the meads.

Acerglyn - Mead with Maple Syrup

Bochet - Mead made with Caramelized Honey for richer, darker flavors

Braggot - A Beer and mead hybrid, co-fermented with grains and at least 51% Honey

Cyser - Mead with Apples

Melomel - Mead with Fruits or Berries

Metheglin - Mead with Spices and herbs.

Pyment - Mead with Grapes

Hydromel (Session Mead) - A low ABV and usually carbonated mead, usually within 3.5-7.5% ABV

Not every mead is sweet.

Mead uses the same sweetness gauge as wine. Mead can vary in sweetness by quite a wide range from completely dry to dessert sweet.

A lot of people have only tried one mead that may have lead to them forming an opinion for all mead based on that previous experience. Some of those experiences are good, some bad. We always encourage trying more.

Mead can be incredibly different from product to product. With a variety of techniques and conditioning, including using oak, fruit, spices & herbs, you can create a beautiful balance of flavors, sweetness, and acidity while still preserving the natural variety & complexity of flavors that can come from the different types of honey.

We create mead in all ranges. Some of our offerings may be completely dry with no residual sugars left over after fermentation. Some may be semi-sweet, and some may lean on the sweeter side. Just because the source of the alcohol comes from honey does not mean that the end product will be sweet.

YES!

Honey is naturally gluten free! So, when you make mead, it is Gluten Free!

However, there can be exceptions such as mead that has been aged in beer barrels, or any mead hybrids such as a Braggot: a Mead and Beer Hybrid that is co-fermented together with grains while maintaining a 51% Honey fermentable ratio.

Mead Is for EVERYONE

Let's say that again. Mead is for EVERYONE.

A lot of people have a misconception when it comes to Mead, most of the time due to a bad prior experience.

Not everyone likes every mead. Just like how people prefer different beer or wine.

Mead is extremely versatile and can have a wide range of flavor expressions and aromas depending on the type of honey, where the honey is from, what yeast is used to ferment the mead, what processes we use and what ingredients we condition the mead on. We make mead in all styles. From Dry to Sweet, traditional flavor to experimental flavors, and exotic ingredients, we are always pushing the boundaries and are here to change peoples perspective of what they believe Mead can be.

We are firm in our belief we can change peoples mind about mead and its place amongst the rest of fermented beverages in the world.

Once opened, it comes down to style and how you store it

Still, higher-ABV or sweet meads (12%+): about 2–4 weeks recorked in the fridge, sometimes longer. Sugar and alcohol both slow oxidation, so a big sweet mead can still taste good a month or more out.

Still, lighter or dry meads (under ~10%): roughly 5–10 days in the fridge before they start going flat, dull, or a bit sherry-like.

Sparkling or carbonated meads: best the same day. With a good champagne stopper in the fridge you'll get 1–3 days before the bubbles are mostly gone. It's still drinkable after that, just flat.

Fruit, botanical, or unfiltered/low-sulfite meads: these fade fastest, so aim for the shorter end of whatever range their strength falls in.

A few things stretch the life: keep it refrigerated even if it's a mead you'd normally serve at cellar temperature, recork tightly right after pouring, and if you've got a partial bottle, pour it into a smaller container so there's less air in contact with it. A vacuum pump or inert gas spray (argon) can add several days to still meads.

It's time to toss it if it smells like vinegar, nail polish, or wet cardboard, or if a still mead has started fizzing on its own.

Mead is very versatile and can be enjoyed at a range of temperatures.

We prefer to serve most of our mead at close to the same temperatures as white wine, which is approximately 45°F to 55°F. This allows the wine to slowly warm as you drink it so you can experience a wider array of flavor and aroma expressions as it breathes.

Mead can be a cool, refreshing drink on a hot day or served hot mulled-wine style during the winter.

There is really no wrong way of enjoying it.

Its up to the product

A lot of people are of a belief that mead needs to be aged for months to years before consumed.

This is simply not the case. Mead can absolutely be aged for many years if stored properly, but should not be required to make your product drinkable.

Mead is a fermented product similar to how beer, wine, and cider is made. During Fermentation sugars are consumed and converted into Ethanol, along with various other compounds, esters, and alcohols. Most "off flavors" in fermented products are caused by these various other compounds and alcohols produced by the yeast. Some yeast strains produce more of these off flavor compounds than others, and a stable environment & healthy yeast are essential to having a clean ferment. If not, you may need to age your product so that the undesirable compounds can be converted slowly over time. Sometimes, aging a product will not improve it's condition, if the goal is only to age out undesirable compounds and flavors.

Put simply, if you have a happy, healthy, nutrient fed yeast and you understand its preferred environment and can keep said environment stable, they will reward you with a clean ferment. Most fermented products should be able to be drank within a few weeks of being produced depending on the condition of your ferment and your process.

We are always improving and applying best practices and techniques from all forms of fermentation including: wine, beer, and cider to try and achieve the cleanest ferments and best products possible.

A Short History of Mead

The drink that made itself

Mead may be the oldest alcoholic drink humans have ever made, and it's easy to see why. All it takes is honey, water, and time. Honey diluted with rainwater, left in a hollow tree or a clay pot, will start fermenting on its own thanks to wild yeast in the air. Long before anyone understood fermentation, people were probably stumbling onto mead by accident and liking the results.

Ancient beginnings

The earliest hard evidence comes from Jiahu, a Neolithic village in China, where pottery about 9,000 years old held traces of a fermented drink made from honey, rice, and fruit. Around the same era, a cave painting in Spain shows a person climbing to raid a wild bees' nest, a reminder of how prized honey was. For most of history it was the only real sweetener people had, so turning it into a drink was a luxury.

Gods, heroes, and mead halls

As civilizations grew, mead took on a special status. The ancient Greeks wrote about honey drinks, and some historians think the "nectar of the gods" in their myths was inspired by mead. The Romans drank mulsum, wine sweetened with honey.

Mead really shines in the stories of Northern Europe. In Norse mythology, the "Mead of Poetry" gave anyone who drank it the gift of wisdom and verse, and fallen warriors in Valhalla drank mead that flowed endlessly from a magical goat. In the Old English poem Beowulf, the heart of the kingdom is a great mead hall where the king feasts with his warriors. Sharing mead meant loyalty, celebration, and belonging.

You may have heard that the word "honeymoon" comes from newlyweds drinking mead for a month after the wedding. It's a charming story, and a popular one in meaderies, but historians consider it more legend than fact.

Mead around the world

Mead wasn't just a European drink. In Ethiopia, a honey wine called tej has been made for centuries and is still a national favorite today. Poland developed its own mead tradition, classifying meads by how much honey went in, from lighter styles to thick, rich ones aged for years.

The long decline

So why did mead fade? A few things happened at once. Beer and wine were cheaper to make at scale, since grain and grapes were easier to grow in quantity than honey was to collect. Then sugar from cane plantations flooded Europe, and honey was no longer the only sweetener. In England, the closing of the monasteries in the 1500s hurt too, because monks had kept many of the country's beehives, mostly for candle wax, with mead as a welcome byproduct. By the modern era, mead had become a curiosity, remembered more from old stories than from actual cups.

The comeback

In the last few decades, mead has made a real return. Home brewers rediscovered it, and craft makers followed, experimenting with fruit, spices, hops, and bubbles alongside traditional honey-only recipes. Across the United States, meaderies have multiplied from a small handful to hundreds, and people are discovering what the ancients knew all along: that honey, water, and a little patience can make something remarkable.

Today, when you raise a glass of mead, you're drinking one of humanity's oldest traditions, one that has passed through cave dwellers, Viking halls, monasteries, and now your local tasting room.

Quality Ingredients makes Quality Mead

We try our best to use as many local ingredients as we can. We often work directly with local farms and apiaries in Central Washington and the Pacific Northwest to source, and sometimes hand-pick, our fruit and honey. It is our firm belief that quality ingredients is what makes quality mead.

We appreciate and salute all our Local Producers who make what we do possible.