Mead Day was declared by the American Homebrew Association in 2002 as the day to celebrate the making and drinking of our favorite beverage, Mead! Mead Day takes place on the first Saturday in August. Since we didn’t start making mead as home mead makers until 2004, we heard about it a few years after it’s inception. We started celebrating with our friends, serving up lots of tastings of meads we’d made or meads we’d happen to find in stores. (Not nearly as many then as are available now!)
As things progressed, and more and more of our friends found out we were making mead, we ended up with larger groups joining us for the fun, including other home mead makers. As we were building out our space at Chatham Mills for our new meadery, we invited friends and future customers to join us for the fun, often serving up 15-20 different meads as more were available commercially. In August of 2010, one month before we opened our new meadery, we invited everyone in for tours of the space that was soon to open in September.
All dressed up for Mead Day 2011!
Our first Mead Day in our new meadery, Aug of 2011, we decided to ramp it up and have a mini-renaissance fair! We all dressed up, invited our favorite knights, a few vendors, and had Thunder and Spice singing pub tunes. It was a hit. In 2012, we rented space in the main Mill building as the event started to outgrow our little meadery and added vendors outside!
Our Mead Day celebration continued to grow! From the estimated 450 guests and 3 vendors in 2011, it grew to an estimated 1000 guests and 22 vendors in 2016. In 2018, we made the decision to rebrand our celebration to Mead Fest and move it from the hottest day of the year to the fourth Saturday in September in hopes of cooler weather. (I have had more than one knight laying on my office floor overheated from fighting in full armor!) This year it will be on Saturday, September 23rd.
Moving our big fair to September meant we had to do something different on Mead Day. We started continuing to celebrate mead with a mead making demo and tours of the production facility. One thing that we’ve continued to do is to serve meads from other mead makers. We love doing this for several reasons - it shows the variety of mead that is available, and it supports other mead makers. We have always believed that because there are so many varieties and styles of mead, everyone can find a favorite, even if it isn’t ours.
This year has posed a question for us and the celebration of Mead Day. This year, the new Mead Institute (started in 2022) along with the American Mead Makers Association announced that National Mead Day should move to the first Saturday in October, due to lower temperatures for shipping meads. (Apparently, International Mead Day is remaining on the first Saturday in August and in the US will become Home Fermentation Day.) Because we already had our Mead Day plans in place this year and the October date is only two weekends after our Mead Fest, we decided to leave Mead Day alone and celebrate on August 5th. The question becomes, what to do in the future? Moving Mead Fest isn’t as easy as it sounds due to the NC Renaissance Festival starting annually on the first weekend of October.
What are your thoughts?