Edible Food Finds: Crave Mead
Photos by Little Outdoor Giants
Crave Mead grew out of curiosity. Sean Humphries became obsessed with brewing beer after getting a brew kit for Christmas in 1993. Every year he’d brew so much that he’d have parties as a way to share what he made but also make room to brew more beer. In 2012, he drank his first mead and a new obsession began. He started experimenting with the ancient alcoholic drink made from honey. Then Sean met Ken Tubman and the two began outlining a business plan to open a meadery. They drew up a simple logo of a neatly drawn bee with perfectly rounded edges. They needed a space to begin filing their paperwork to get the venture off the ground. That’s when Rachel, Sean’s then-wife, called. She’d found the place.
“When I found this little place, I was, like, ‘This is the place to start off in,’” Rachel Humphries says from the little taproom in Blackstone that Crave has called home since it opened in 2014.
The wall behind her is painted blue with the rounded bee logo neatly displayed. There are tools and supplies everywhere. The taproom is also the production facility and really it’s no bigger than an office. A few fermentation tanks line one wall, barely fitting under the tight ceiling, and buckets of honey with warming belts around them are on the other side waiting their turn to transform. She found it when taking the dog to the groomers, which is in the same building—the dogs’ barks can be heard through the walls.
“We’ve had a lot of hurdles to get through, so we’re still here, but it’s almost perfect for us, you know,” she continues. “There are things that we need. We need ceiling height. We need to add more tanks. We need a bigger sink. We need a floor drain, but are there things we can’t work with?”
For now, the answer is no. Crave is small. Its products are sold in some local package stores, and Rachel does her best to get the word out at farmers markets. The other investor, Ken Tubman, left. Now, it’s strictly a family operation, even if the family dynamic has changed over the years. Rachel and Sean are separated and working on a divorce, but their dynamic functions. They have a history, and even if it doesn’t operate as it should for their busy lives as a couple anymore, it works for the business. Each knows what the other needs and they know how to push each other. Rachel handles the day-to-day: the sales, the mixing of the mead, the picking up of the honey from Merrimack Valley Apiaries, the bottling and labeling. She’s a relentless force with a job teaching English to students in China, and she makes jewelry on the side. Sean, who has a full-time job in Hudson, is the one who thinks through the recipes.
Mead is made from fermented honey, water and yeast. At Crave, they use only Japanese Knotweed honey. The honey is cultivated for two weeks in the fall when the invasive species blooms. The beehives are moved to the fields, the honey is collected at the end and stored. Crave uses knotweed for its consistent flavor profile, coming from honey made by bees that are fed only on one type of plant instead of clover or wild flowers, which can bring different flavors and aromas depending on the season and the plants in bloom. Knotweed is also a darker and a deeper caramel flavor that holds up after fermentation.
Crave’s mead has underlying notes of vanilla and strong aromas of butter and caramel. Its base mead, a traditional dry, settles in flat and clean. It’s not too cloying and only a touch astringent for being between 12% and 14% alcohol by volume. Rachel and Sean have worked on countless variations to go along with his base recipe, including strawberry blueberry, black currant and crème brûlée, which is made with burnt honey. But, as Rachel tells the people she meets at farmers markets, “I’ve always found that it takes three sips of mead to know if I like it or not.”
This story appeared in the Winter 2021 issue.
