Anchorage Daily News

HOMER -- Back in the days of legend and myth, it was believed that drinking mead made a human immortal. Actually, it was true then and it's true today -- at least until you wake the next morning.

Mead, in its purest form, is a golden elixir of fermented honey, water and yeast and a sure cure for beer boredom. It's also the oldest alcoholic beverage ever to inspire the ancient warrior to throw down his sword and dance naked with a necktie around his forehead.

The history of mead includes claims of medicinal properties, most notably a role in procreation.

Big surprise there.

Variations of this story abound. One of them is that fathers in ancient Babylonia would furnish their newlywed daughters and sons-in-law with mead for a month to boost fertility and assure the birth of a boy. And since this was before month-at-a-glance calendars, people kept track of time by cycles of the moon.

Which explains the "honey" and the "moon" in that postnuptial-bliss phase, the "honeymoon."

As old as mead is, a lot of people don't know a thing about it. Mead fell by the wayside for a variety of reasons: when sugar began replacing honey, when honeymooners developed a taste for wine.

But mead has been making a comeback lately, including here in Alaska. Anchorage just got its first meadery, Celestial Meads, in May. And a year ago, Alaska got its first, Ring of Fire Meadery in Homer.

For the man behind that first one, Ring of Fire, it's been a full-circle venture, one so close to where his path began that he could practically hit it with a popped cork. And yet he's come a very long way.

Because something like 15 years ago, mead man Laurence Livingston was so eager to brew, he'd drop down into the cold, dark, subterranean storage space that once held the town morgue to do it.

ALL'S WELL WITH MELOMEL

On a recent sunny afternoon in Homer, in the bright and orderly brew room of Ring of Fire Meadery, the Z-men were making their work look like the most pleasant job in the universe.

The "Z" in Z-men stands for "zymurgy," the branch of chemistry having to do with fermentation. And fermentation -- the way the yeast goes to town on the honey -- is what makes the difference between sweet water and "nectar of the gods."

That afternoon, Eric Clarke, a friend of 20 years and part-time Z-man, was helping Livingston with a batch of strawberry-rhubarb melomel, a term for mead that in addition to those three simple ingredients also contains fruit. Or, in the case of the rhubarb, vegetables. Or in the case of this particular melomel, a balanced diet of both.

Livingston, decked in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and knee-high rubber boots, his long ponytail topped with a ball cap, was manning the single-head bottle filler, also known as the beer gun. Clarke was capping and sticking on labels.

The mood was light. The sample glasses were filled. The Grateful Dead was blaring from the boombox.

Life was good.

On the other side of the wall, Rachel, Livingston's wife and partner in the meadery, was manning the tasting room that doubles as a local art show venue.

"We usually start you off with the driest and work you up to the sweetest," she tells a taster.

Life was good out there too.

Augustine Volcano inspired the meadery's name. Livingston did his undergraduate studies in geochemistry and has long been an amateur volcanologist.

"The Ring of Fire is the geologically active plate boundary that pretty much encircles the Pacific," he said. "And we're part of it here; we live right in it. It affects our lives.

"We also think the Ring of Fire is kind of metaphor. No beginning, no end. Lots of neat images."

LOCAL INGREDIENTS

You could say Alaska's first commercial meadery came to be because Rachel doesn't like beer.

"Never have liked beer," she said.

That's a shame when you're married to a man who founded one of the first microbreweries in the state and the first in Anchorage, Cusack's Brewpub. (It closed in 2002.) This former fisheries biologist turned brewer went on to found Great Bear Brewing Co. in Wasilla and from there to work as a brew master in Hawaii for a year, for what he calls his tropical brewing sabbatical.

The government classifies mead as wine since it's fermented rather than brewed. And Rachel does like wine. Dry wine. Mead ranges from dry to sweet, from still to sparkling.

"Really, a lot of home-brewers make mead as well," she said. "You get bored with beer after a while and go for something else. He started making mead long ago, and I just loved it."

Besides what they call their traditional "Cosmic Mead" and a variety of melomels, the meadery also has a line of cysers, including Augustine Apple Cyser, made from organic apple juice and wild blackberry honey and fermented and aged in American oak barrels.

Cysers are carbonated and a lot like hard ciders. The meadery makes several flavors, including brandy barrel-aged pear, raspberry-pomegranate and black cherry-blueberry. It's on tap and sold in refillable growlers.

"The beer drinkers really like it," Rachel said. "And I really like it."

But there are other reasons for the switch to mead beside Rachel's aversion to beer.

"For me it was the next step," Livingston said. "To make mead, you need to have a little bit of everything going on. Because mead has elements of both beer and wine."

Another plus side of mead is that, unlike the hops and barley of beer brewing, many of the raw materials can, and do, come from local sources. Blueberries from Tutka Bay. Sitka white strawberries from Homer. Rhubarb from just about everywhere. All organically grown.

"We can produce honey in Alaska; we can produce fruits and berries," Livingston said. "And that's what we use to make our product, and pretty much nothing else."

As the meadery motto says, it's "summer in a glass."

Q & Q DAYS

Livingston launched his career in libations as a home-brewer and founder of Q & Q Brewers Guild in Homer in 1992 -- the two "Q's" standing for "quality" and "quaffability."

He'd spent that summer doing fisheries work and was waiting for a cabin he'd arranged to rent to open up for the winter. In the meantime, he was living in a room in the old Inlet Trading Post, built around 1936, now home to Bunnell Street Gallery and Old Town Bed & Breakfast.

Beneath the gallery was a dingy basement used for storage. Before it was refurbished, the only way in was through a 3-foot-square coal chute that once fed the furnace. Livingston and his fellow brew geeks didn't care. It was a space and it was available and it was free in exchange for a little help fixing it up.

On brew nights, they'd slide down the chute and drop into that dark, dank and dusty basement and simmer their brews atop crab cookers. And that wasn't even the creepy part. There was a vault in one corner that at one time served as the town morgue.

"I carried out the last two caskets," Livingston said.

Besides Livingston's contributions, several Q & Qers went on to found microbreweries around the state -- Homer Brewing Co. and Kodiak Island Brewing Co. as well as others Outside.

So full-circle it's been for him, from brewing beneath Bunnell Street Gallery to brew pubs near and far, right back to Bunnell Street, a stone's throw from the old Q & Q headquarters where it all started.

And the meadery did "really, really well" its first year, Rachel said.

As it enters its second, there's talk of expansion.

"Mead is real exciting because it's a different kind of thing," Livingston said. "It differs from wine in that it's much less acidic, 20 times less than wine. And it's less tannic. Mead is very smooth. So a lot of people who don't drink other products find it very pleasing.

"It's experiencing a renaissance right now, all over the country, and the world."

Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney.

IF YOU GO: During summer, the Ring of Fire Meadery's tasting room in Homer is open noon to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call 1-907-235-2656. For a list of bars, restaurants and liquor shops in Homer, Soldotna and Anchorage that sell Ring of Fire products, go to

www.ringoffiremeadery.com

ANCHORAGE'S CELESTIAL MEADS, which held its grand opening in May, has no tasting room yet, but owner Michael Kiker offers meadery tours by appointment; the warehouse is at 700 W. 41st Ave., off Arctic Boulevard between 36th Avenue and Tudor Road. Celestial products are available in liquor stores and restaurants. Call 250-8362 for information or go to

www.celestialmeads.com