It Began, As Most Things Do, With Someone Else's Terrible Idea
My grandfather made homebrew. I use the word "made" generously — the production process could more accurately be described as willing something into existence and hoping for the best. Attention to detail was not the priority. Atmosphere was.
His brews were not, by any objective measurement, good. They were, however, absolutely unforgettable. Not in a refined, nuanced way — in the way that evenings involving them tended to produce stories that people were still telling years later. One guest, on a perfectly ordinary evening, made several attempts to leave the house and somehow ended up in a wardrobe. We have never established precisely how.
The point is: a drink that creates memories is doing something right, regardless of what it's doing wrong. That principle has guided Bear & Bulldog from the beginning — make something that means something. Everything else is craft, and craft can be learned.
For the Uninitiated: What Is Mead?
Mead is fermented honey and water — the oldest alcoholic drink in human history, predating wine and beer by several thousand years and a great many opinions about both.
At its most fundamental, mead is simple: honey, water, yeast, and time. In practice, it is anything you want it to be. The honey provides fermentable sugars and a flavour base that no grape or grain can replicate — floral, warm, complex, and entirely its own thing. The yeast converts those sugars to alcohol. Time does the rest.
The category we work in — melomel — is mead made with fruit. This is where things get genuinely interesting. Fruit brings acid, tannin, brightness, and character. Good mead should taste like the ingredients that made it, expressed better than they could manage on their own. That's the ambition, anyway.
Bear & Bulldog makes no claim to ancient tradition. We make forward-thinking meads — built with modern technique, driven by curiosity, and named for people and places worth honouring.
From Flower to Bottle
The Honey
Everything begins with honey. Not any honey — the right honey. The character of every batch is defined before a single piece of fruit is added, because the honey is the soul of a mead in a way that no other ingredient can be. We source with intent, looking for honeys from BC and the Pacific Northwest that bring their own story.
Wildflower, clover, or varietal — the choice shapes everything downstream. A bold, resinous honey will fight with delicate fruit. A light, floral honey will lift it. Getting this right is the first decision and arguably the most important one.
The Fruit
Sourced locally where possible, and occasionally from whatever the market had in quantity at an unreasonable price that seemed, at the time, like an unmissable opportunity. Victoria and the surrounding region offer extraordinary seasonal fruit — and seasonal fruit makes better mead than anything that has spent a fortnight in a refrigerated container on a ship.
We use real fruit. Not concentrate, not extract, not essence of something that once looked at a strawberry. The difference is immediately obvious and we would have it no other way.
The Fermentation
Honey, fruit, water, yeast — and then we wait, with varying degrees of patience. Mead ferments more slowly than beer and more deliberately than wine. The yeast we choose matters enormously; different strains carry different characteristics and leave different imprints on the final drink. There is a great deal of tasting, adjusting, and notebook-filling at this stage.
We do not rush. Rushing mead produces mediocre mead, and we did not start this to make mediocre mead. We started it because the idea wouldn't let go — which demands a better result than average.
The Ageing
After primary fermentation, the mead rests. This is where the rough edges smooth out, where disparate flavours find each other and decide to get along, where a promising drink becomes a genuinely good one. Secondary fermentation, clearing, conditioning — each stage is an opportunity for the mead to become more fully itself.
We taste throughout. This is non-negotiable, and also one of the more enjoyable aspects of the job, which is a coincidence we have absolutely no qualms about.
The Bottling
When the mead tells us it's ready — and it does; you develop an understanding of the signs — it gets bottled, labelled, and released. Small batches, by definition. Each bottle represents a genuine, specific piece of time and intention.
There is no formula. There is no production line. There is one person, a great deal of honey, and the accumulated knowledge of everything that didn't work before this. That's the whole operation, and we rather like it that way.
A Note on Honey
The most important ingredient. The most overlooked. The one that makes mead what it is and nothing else what it isn't.
Why Honey Matters
Grape wine tastes of grapes. Barley beer tastes of grain. Mead tastes of honey — and every honey is different: different flowers, different regions, different seasons, different hives. This is not a complication. It is the richest possible starting point.
What We Look For
Clarity, character, and something worth building around. BC offers extraordinary wildflower honeys with a depth that reflects this particular piece of the world. We source with care and change when we find something better. We are not sentimental about ingredients, only about results.
The Philosophy, Such As It Is
Bear & Bulldog makes forward-thinking mead. We are not interested in tradition for its own sake, only in what works — in what produces something interesting, something genuinely enjoyable, something that earns its place in the glass.
That said: we are deeply interested in story. Every recipe here started with a memory, a person, a place, or an event. The craft exists in service of those things, not the other way around.
"A good mead, like a good story, is meant to be shared. The occasion doesn't have to be special. The drink makes it so."
My grandfather never made mead. He made questionable homebrew and extraordinary evenings. We're just trying to do both at once, with somewhat more intentional results.