Grandpa’s Garden

Grandpa’s Garden is our parent company, and the birthplace of our meadery. Grandpa’s Garden was a u-pick farm that opened to the public in the summer of 2012. We grew sour cherries, strawberries, raspberries, haskap berries and melons. We also had a selection of market garden vegetables for our customers to enjoy field-to-table deliciousness.

With all those fruit plants blossoming, it was inevitable that we would need bees on our farm to help turn those blooms into glorious fruits and vegetables. So in addition to delicious organically-grown produce, we also soon had honey to harvest – and lots of it!

Grandpa’s Garden Fruit Honey was the result. A blend of our farm-grown fruit with our light local honey made a fantastic and versatile spread, that we continue to offer at both our farm and our storefront in Moose Jaw.

Bees are miraculous and productive little insects, so even with the production of our fruit honey, we still had lots to play with. So – mead. We started at home, in carboys, and what we made was so delectable and thoroughly enjoyed by our friends and family, that we decided to take the plunge and produce it commercially for all to enjoy! In February of 2016 we were granted our license as a cottage winery, and in June of that year, Prairie Bee Meadery was open to the public!  The U-Pick is no more, but much of the fruit growing continues (weather permitting) as input to our wine.

What is Mead?

The simplest explanation is that mead is any beverage created through the fermentation of honey. We all know that yeast causes the fermentation in grape-wine by dining on the sugars in the grape juice and transforming those sugars into alcohol. The process is the same with a mead, except that the yeast consumes the sugars in honey rather than in grape juice.

Mead has been enjoyed for thousands of years in every corner of the world. It has been made in so many different ways, by so many different cultures that, as with grape-wine, there is a vast vocabulary of terms used to describe different types of mead. For example, a melomel is a mead made with the addition of fruits, like our own delicious Strawberry Splash. And a metheglin is a spiced or medicated mead.

Mead is arguable the world’s oldest fermented beverage; it has been consumed for millennia across Europe, Asia and Africa. Imbibed by ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, by Vikings and Celts, this Old World libation is making a comeback across the modern world.