Making wine from honey is one of the oldest ways to make alcohol and certainly the start of the Celtic people’s fondness for a wee drop of drink. Our pyment style mead starts life by dissolving honey in water and introducing our yeast, which under a watchful eye produces a pleasantly sweet and rich wine.
We brew our Mead in small batches at Kilnasaggart, in the famed Gap of the North. In doing so we honour the ancient Celtic and Monastic tradition of making mead as Kilnasaggart or Church of the Priests is the site of an early monastery and Ireland’s oldest surviving Christian monument, an inscribed stone dedicated to St Peter dating from the 8th century AD. In fact, the medieval Irish manuscript, An Leabhar Breac, records our local St Brigid, who was born and reared on the hill overlooking our meadery, turning water to mead. One of her family and a previous local mead maker promised mead to The King of Leinster but she gave it all away to the poor. Alas, when the king showed up there was no mead, St Brigid went full Jesus-like and kindly got God to turn water into the finest mead. For the record, in the absence of reliable divine intervention, if the stock is promised to a powerful monarch; the modern Kilnasagart mead makers will not give away any mead.
