The News & Record featured a great article about us in the July 10, 2011 Sunday paper on the front page of the Life Section! The text of the article is below (since they don't post Life articles on the website - Sorry it's so long!):

Mead Makers

By Robert Lopez - Staff Writer PITTSBORO

’Twas the beverage of Norse heroes.
Beowulf was known to imbibe it.
And Harry Potter also has a nip now and then.

But mead, the stuff of legend, is by no means confined to the realm of fantasy — or to history. One North Carolina couple is helping to bring the ancient libation into the modern world.

Ben and Becky Starr run Starrlight Mead in Pittsboro, producing seven varieties of the honey wine, including an apple mead, or “cyser,” that took best-of-show honors at the International Mead Association’s festival five years ago in Boulder, Colo.

“The people who find us go, ‘Yay, mead. Cool,’” Becky Starr said. “Because most people associate it with knights and castles. We’ll even have ‘meadieval’ days, where we’ll dress in costumes. We’re having a lot of fun with it.”

Like a winery but with drinking horns

The meadery, which opened in September, is housed in a 2,800-square-foot building behind the Village at Chatham Mills arts and business complex. The Starrs have a pair of hives out back and another 18 at area farms. With its fermentation tanks, wine racks and bar, the place looks much like a traditional winery, but with bee motifs strewn about and drinking horns for sale.

Ben, 47, and Becky, 50, moved to North Carolina from southern California in 2000. A Kodak minilab technician and a former corporate trainer, respectively, they have been married 24 years, have one son and are longtime Renaissance re-enactors.

“We had mead for the first time at a Renaissance fair,” Becky Starr said. “This was years and years ago, when it wasn’t easily available. But after a while, we ran into some friends who were making it. And we were like, ‘Cool, you can make it at home? Legally?’”

Indeed, they could, and they found the process was fairly simple — combine honey with water, add some yeast and “let it go.”

“We got a wine kit and started on our first batch,” Becky Starr said. “And we had so much fun with it that we started our second batch the next weekend and the third batch the weekend after that. We were pretty much hooked. And, of course, you start producing alcohol at home and you become very popular.”

Friends started bringing empty wine bottles for the Starrs to fill, and the two decided to enter their meads into competition.

“Our very first competition that we entered, the International Mead Association’s festival (in 2006), there were 212 entries,” Becky Starr said. “And when our cyser took best in show, our jaws hit the floor. We were like, ‘What?’ And we started thinking, ‘All right, we need to do this for a real job. Let’s start working on our business plan.’ ”

Chaucer and Vikings

Mead predates ancient Egypt, and according to one legend that Ben Starr likes to tell, the first batch was created accidently by a hunting party that was fetching water.

“They saw some bees flying out of a hollow stump, and so they knew there was honey there,” he said. “So they took their empty containers and filled it with as much honey as they could and started eating as they went. The next time they were at a stream, they filled the containers with water, but they never got all the honey out of there, so the diluted honey fermented.”

Mead cultures developed in Africa, Asia and the Slavic countries, as well as northern Europe, honey being an easily available and easily storable fermentable sugar.

“You can have access to honey throughout the year, especially in Africa, where it’s not so much of a seasonal issue,” Ken Schramm, author of “The Compleat Meadmaker,” said in a telephone interview. “For much of human history, it was the only year-round sweet we had other than dried fruit.”

During the Middle Ages, it was drunk in the courts of Europe,and Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about it in “The Canterbury Tales.”

Vikings also had an affinity for the drink.

“It was a celebratory beverage,” Schramm said. “You read the Heimskringla (a collection of Norse stories dating back to the Middle Ages), they were using it to celebrate military victories. They were using it to celebrate weddings. Beer had a role in those cultures, as well, but mead was more of a prestigious beverage.”

Its popularity diminished beginning in the early 1700s as other forms of alcohol became easier to produce and more readily available and as the role of beekeeper in society declined.

“The beeswax candle was pretty much the premier lighting source for many years, and the beekeepers were held close to the top members of the church and aristocracy,” Schramm said. “But, as paraffin wax became more ubiquitous, bees kind of fell out of favor.”

Mead continued to be regularly consumed in Africa and certain European countries, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that many Americans were introduced to it.

“A lot of it had to do with the growth in home brewing,” Gary Glass , director of the American Homebrewers Association, said in a telephone interview. “A lot of people who are making mead got their start as homebrewers. And, it was easier to make than beer or wine.”

A drink with mystique

The meadery attracts many wine enthusiasts, the Starrs said, but a number of visitors are drawn by the mystique of the beverage.

“Most people if they’ve heard of it, they read about it in ‘Beowulf’ and might have been told in high school that it’s a beer-like drink,” Ben Starr said. “They were interested, but they hadn’t known where to look for it.”

Schramm said about 60 to 80 meaderies exist in the United States. The Starrs said they know of at least one other full-time meadery in North Carolina — Fox Hills Mead near Asheville — and two traditional wineries that make mead on the side. But they said a number of other local wineries, as well as beekeepers, have expressed interest in producing the beverage.

“It (mead) is very similar to white wine,” Ben Starr said. “With white wine, you squeeze the grapes to get the juice, check the pH and so forth. The big difference is that grapes are at about the sugar content that the winemaker needs. Honey is about 80 percent sugar, so you have to dilute it to get it to ferment. So I dilute it (with filtered water) to the point where it’s about 25 percent sugar.”

At Starrlight, the mead ferments in two 1,000-liter steel tanks in the back. The Starrs don’t yet use oak barrels for aging, though they do add some oak chips to the off-dry blackberry to give it a warm, woody, spicy flavor.

An off-dry traditional mead is the Starrs’ main product. The beverage is golden in color, and though the honey flavor is definitely discernible, it has only a slight sweetness with, as the Starrs describe, “light floral notes.” When lightly chilled, it pairs well with lemon chicken, fish and spicy food.

The Starrs also make a sweeter version of the traditional mead and, in addition to the cyser and two varieties of blackberry, produce a sweet peach mead and a “meadjito,” which incorporates lime and spearmint flavors.

Thus far, the drink is available only at the meadery and the adjacent Chatham Marketplace grocery co-op.

“We’ve run out of everything twice since we opened,” Becky Starr said. “We can’t keep it in stock just in our place, so we’ve got to be making a whole bunch more before we can do widespread distribution.”

Becky Starr, who worked for two years at Chatham Hill Winery in Morrisville before starting the meadery, said her former career in corporate training has served her well in the new venture.

“Doing tours and tastings is training as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “I’m teaching people about mead. I’m still doing what I love. Only it’s for fun now.”

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com

We were featured, with our friends at Brothers Drake Mead in Columbus, OH, in a story on NPR about Mead! They came out to the North Carolina Renaissance Faire in April to interview us! Check out the article here!! (There is a button to listen to the recording of it also!)

We were featured in an article about mead, written by Associated Press writer Allen Breed, that made not only national, but international news! It was featured in over 900 papers and online news sites, including the News & Observer in Raleigh, the LA Times, ABC News website, Forbes.com, and as far away as the Daily Telegraph in Australia and the Taiwan News!!

Allen also shot a video of the facilities!! You can check it out here.

In an article about the growing availability of alcoholic beverages in Chatham County, we were featured as part of this new trend. "Now you can arise a glass of wine, beer, even mead, created in Chatham, at Chatham establishments." See the part of the article about wineries here: http://chathamcountyline.org/pdfs/CCL.dec10.web10.pdf