‘Unique to Meadville’

By Mike Crowley

MEADVILLE TRIBUNE

Two hundred thirty-four years after the city was founded, mead has come to Meadville.

While David Mead’s small party of settlers made their way west in 1788 from the historic Wyoming region near present-day Scranton, Blissful Meads, the city’s new mead bar, moved east from Conneaut Lake in June.

But like Mead’s band of plucky frontiersmen, the group behind the Blissful Meads venture is not just surviving after six weeks in the new location on Market Street, it’s beginning to establish a future.

“We’re starting to build a pretty regular customer base,” said Mike Walker, one of five co-owners of the mead production facility and bar. “It’s starting to catch on, I think.”

That more people are developing a taste for their meads has a lot to do with the methods used to produce the drink, according to Tom Goldsmith, another co-owner who, like Walker, works full time on the Blissful Meads project.

“It’s just copious amounts of fruit and honey — that’s what we use. Nothing artificial,” Goldsmith said from behind the bar on a recent Friday afternoon. “Ancient Viking recipes with modern sanitization processes.”

It’s the fermented honey, of course, that makes the drinks mead, as opposed to wine, which is produced from fermented grapes. The fermented honey is mixed with fruit for flavor and produces a potion that is sweet like a dessert wine and slightly thicker in feel than wine. Each of the meads produced at Blissful Meads, including flavors such as blueberry vanilla, honey traditional, black currant sauvignon and others, contain 12.5 to 14.5 percent alcohol, about the same as an average wine.

So far, the most popular flavor is raspberry. Goldsmith noted See MEAD, Page A2

Tom Goldsmith, co-owner of Blissful Meads, mixes a drink containing their locally made mead.

SHANNON ROAE/Meadville Tribune

Continued from Page A1 that the tartness of the berries complement the sweetness of the honey.

As Goldsmith touted the raspberry mead, Diane and Roland Mariani of Conneaut Lake were sampling a flight of four flavors. The couple, celebrating their 51st wedding anniversary the next day, had heard about the winery and decided to give it a try before meeting friends for dinner.

“This is a great way to start off,” Diane said, dubbing the new winery “unique to Meadville.”

“They’ve done a nice job,” Roland said as he glanced around the renovated interior. “It looks really kind of cool.”

The couple’s reaction to the mead was positive as well. They had tried and liked mead years before in Ireland and enjoyed the Blissful Meads variations as well, they said. The raspberry, Diane confirmed, was the biggest hit of the flavors they sampled.

The location that made an impression on the Marianis is as unique to Meadville as the mead-making venture it contains. It may not look like much from the outside — “don’t judge a book by its cover,” Diane said — but in addition to containing an unexpectedly hip space for socializing or hosting an event, it is the first property developed by the Northwest Pennsylvania Investment Cooperative, a 50-member organization incorporated in 2017.

The former law office at 847 Market St. that Blissful Meads rents was purchased by the cooperative last year for $57,000 with support from a Meadville Redevelopment Authority loan of approximately $50,000, according to Autumn Vogel, the cooperative’s president. The co-op also invested about $20,000 in renovations to the building’s first floor, where the winery operates, including upgrades to wiring, flooring, ceiling and restroom. The basement, which houses the mead production equipment, was also renovated, with a new ceiling and water heater among the improvements. Office space on the second floor is being rented to the Crawford County United grassroots political organization.

The co-op originally had hoped to find a building to renovate and then rent to a developing business in 2018, but the process took longer than expected, according to Vogel and Vesta Silva, the organization’s founding president. The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the delay, but other factors played a role as well, particularly the unfamiliarity of the investment cooperative concept.

The co-op’s bylaws allow any Pennsylvania resident 18 or older to purchase a $500 share that gives them a vote on how the co-op uses its funds. Additional money can be invested as well, but each shareholder is limited to one voting share. Additional shares can earn low rates of interest. The co-op is an investment, not a charity, but it’s designed with community development in mind rather than as a path to getting rich quickly. There have been no dividends yet, according to Vogel, who also serves on Meadville City Council. In fact, she said, 2022 will be the first year the co-op has produced any revenue.

“Potential investors have often never seen a model like this, so it takes time and effort to help people understand how their relatively small investment can make a difference,” Silva said in an email. “I think for a long time people have felt that community development and community wealth building was the province of the wealthy or large institutions. Our group is one of many that are now part of this region who are working to help empower individuals to see themselves as the changemakers in their communities.”

Finding a property that was available and affordable as well as a business that fit with the group’s approach and ethos took some time, according to Vogel. It may not have been kismet exactly, but the fact that it involved mead definitely resonated with the co-op’s members.

“We could be the ones to bring mead back to Meadville!” Vogel joked. More importantly, she added, the owners are all local and have already begun to establish the business, which currently is open Wednesday through Saturday.

“They’re working hard and they care so much about our community,” Vogel said. “They’re making a great product and we wanted to be able to support them in expanding that — supporting people who are here, doing good stuff.”

Mike Crowley can be reached at (814) 724-6370 or by email at mcrowley@meadvilletribune. com.

Roland Mariani of Conneaut Lake purchases mead from Mike Walker and Tom Goldsmith, two of five co-owners of Blissful Meads.

SHANNON ROAE/Meadville Tribune