The Road to Bone Hill: A Journey into the Modern Renaissance of Mead-Making

By Kenton J Moore

In early 2020, amid the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kenton Moore discovered the hobby of homebrewing humanity's oldest fermentable beverage: Mead.

What follows is a passionate exploration into the art of mead-making as Kenton recounts the story how he came from homebrewing in a small apartment on British Columbia's West

• Language: English
• Publisher: Soulforge Media
• Release date: Jul 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781777086640

Kenton J Moore

Kenton J Moore has been telling stories his whole life, from the moment he could speak. Whether that means recounting his adventures as a Veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy, or the many other anecdotes of his childhood growing up on farms in the British Columbia interior near Kamloops. His passions range from wordsmithing to archery and to the home-brewing of Meads, Wine, and beer. He currently resides near Kamloops BC where he keeps bees on the family farm, works as an Inventory Analyst, and does his best to keep up to his dog Duke. Kenton writes predominantly fiction, in a range from children's fantasy to horror. His favourite genre is science-fiction, especially the Steampunk and Dieselpunk sub-genres. He holds a certificate in Writing for Animation, and a Diploma in Video Game Design.

Book preview

PART ONE

Chapter One

The COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 Pandemic had a massive impact on lives all around the world when it began in 2019. Many people found themselves on new journeys, and some ended. Directions changed, dreams sparked, and unfortunately some dreams died. The world was just entering the grip of the pandemic as the New Year of 2020 started. I was fortunate to have kept my employment during the mandated isolations in Canada, but I soon found myself trapped in a 620 square foot apartment, working remotely and unable to see friends or colleagues in person anymore. The world had become unrecognizable almost overnight. A deep divide occurred among people in Canada. While some people plead others to isolate and consider the safety of the whole, others chose to deny and ignore mandates and public safety measures.

Watching the chaos in isolation through the lens of media and internet, I decided to go with the flow. I simply watched it all happen, and as the days became weeks, I realized the pandemic isolation orders meant something entirely different in my little personal bubble. I had made a promise that I was no longer able to keep. My parents had given me a mission, and I was about to fail them through no fault of my own. I was supposed to be jarring and selling a five-gallon bucket of their fall-harvest honey from their farm.

Mom and my stepdad Al had been beekeeping for almost four years by that time. Al had some experience with beekeeping in his youth, and in their retirement years before the pandemic began, they had sought to do something that helped the environment and themselves. Al is a type one diabetic, and his doctors had told him honey was good for him as a sweetener substitute, plus the bees would give him something to take care of and keep active. Initially, only Al had taken the courses to become a beekeeper, but Mom was with him every step of the way and learned by osmosis like she always did. They had started with two hives, but through splits and catching swarms, they were up to eight; and they were already harvesting more honey than they knew what to do with.

Enter Son number… four? I guess? Al has three sons from a previous marriage, and Shirley - my mom - had my younger brother and I. I was the second youngest of the blended five. All of us had left home and gone our separate ways, building careers and lives all across British Columbia and Alberta. I was no different. At twenty-two, I had enlisted in the Canadian Navy and left home to travel the world, which eventually led to me planting roots in Victoria, British Columbia. Despite this worldliness and knack for adventure, I was also the son who always came home. Every vacation, home. Every long weekend, home. Every reason I could find, home. Christmas 2019 was one such trip.

We had no idea COVID was coming, or that it would become what it was, as we spent that Christmas together. All we knew was the bees were doing well, everyone was in good health, I had a great job in Victoria, and life was good. So as 2019 came to a close, and we were packing up my car in order to head back home to the coast, Al came out of the house with a five-gallon bucket filled with their raw wildflower honey.

Take this home too, he had said to me. See if you can do something with it. Maybe jar it and sell it to your friends for us. Such famous last words, now that I look back on it.

Have you ever seen five gallons of honey? Felt how heavy it is? Spoiler alert - it is a lot heavier than water! But I took it, with the honourable intention of purchasing jars and labels and doing exactly what Al had suggested. How hard could it be to sell raw unpasteurized honey from the picturesque mountains of British Columbia’s interior? I was up for the challenge, and I bore the bucket of liquid gold home with great enthusiasm. I remember the look on my room-mate Tim’s face when I brought the bucket in. He gave me one of those laughs that only a friend who has known me a long time would give. It was that laugh that said - ‘oh my God man, what have you gotten yourself into this time?’ Little did either of us know that within a month, that bucket of honey would be sitting in my closet; a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up everything I thought I knew about my self and my future.

When the COVID-19 Pandemic was officially declared, I had little other thoughts on my mind. I was supervising a warehouse back then, for a massive international defense contractor working for the Canadian Navy. I had seven staff reporting to me in my team, in a building of at least thirty people. Not all of us agreed with what was happening. Some of us thought the company and the government were not doing enough. Others thought they were doing too much. No one was happy. People were scared for themselves and their loved ones. Those of us who could perform our job tasks from home were sent home to work remotely in isolation, while those who had to be at work remained under strict new guidelines.

It wasn’t too bad for me in the very beginning. My job swung both ways. Some days I had to be in the warehouse, which was great because I am an extrovert and needed the social interaction, even if it was often toxic and upsetting. Most days though, I worked from home. But to truly understand what that means, you have to understand my living conditions at the time.

As I mentioned, I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate. Our suite was quite small, in a building built in the 1960’s heated by a hot water boiler. It was always hot, even in the winter. We were on the second floor, looking out into the parking lot and onto a high school field. Across that field, the blue metal trim of my warehouse’s roof could be seen. Our suite had a small bathroom directly left of the entrance door, and a walk-through kitchen - more of hallway, really - that led into a small square dining area. By dining area, I mean a square of linoleum flooring, the same as the kitchen and the bathroom, that all together formed the front half of the suite. If one continued straight from the entrance, passing the kitchen hallway and bathroom, there was another hallway running perpendicular the length of the suite. Tim’s room was to the left at the end of the hall, and my room was directly in from the front door. Rounding out the floor plan on the right, delineated from the dining room by a strip of metal carpet edging, was our living room with a sliding door that opened onto a tiny deck.

The suite may have been cramped, especially for two adults, but we did a stellar job of making it a home. Tim and I had so much in common, that things were civil and easy for the most part. We had seven bookshelves, most of which were filled top to bottom with my large personal library and collected trinkets. The others held our consolidated collection of board and tabletop miniature war games. I had a reputation as being a bit of a hobbyist, and more often than not, my hobbies were expensive. I was into Archery, Hunting, collecting books and comics, miniature gaming, video gaming, and the list goes on and on. We had a dining room table crammed into our little dining room, as well as a deep freeze, one of our bookshelves filled with board games, and extra chairs and TV tray tables. Tim and I loved entertaining and would host game nights often. To achieve that, we had built a huge four foot by five-foot table surface covered in pool-table felt that could be placed over-top our dining table to create a larger gaming surface. That top was also stored in the dining room up against the wall.

Our living room had a lazy-boy chair and a full-size sofa that faced across the room so we could watch movies on our flat screen TV and entertainment system. Two bookshelves to either side of the TV displayed the war gaming miniatures. In the left-over space to the far right of the TV, in the corner where the wall met the sliding glass door of the balcony, I had built a small painting studio out of an old table and more shelving units. This was where we did most of our assembling and painting for miniatures and models. We had so little space that even a coffee table was not feasible. I even shoved three bookshelves into the hallway between our rooms just to fill with my books and library collections.

So in all that, have you guessed yet where I would have had to put a home office? If you guessed my bedroom, you’re absolutely right! But before I finish this painted picture of squashed life for you, here’s another little piece you should know: I used to be married. And I have children. Two to be exact.

My daughter had already graduated high school by this time in her life, and in fact lived in her own suite in the same building, just around the corner from us on the second floor. She had her own room mate, and they lived in their little apartment in bliss along with their two cats. We saw one another all the time. They would come over for dinner, to borrow things, to get food, to watch movies, to ask questions. Basically, all the things young ladies do to their parents when they live alone for the first time.

My son lived with his Mom and would come visit on the weekends and pretty much whenever else he wanted to, which was a lot. His mother and I had an amicable breakup, rare in these times, and therefore there was little to no animosity about who my son got to spend his time with. These facts have very little to do with working from home and my cramped apartment. The key here is that it has to do with my bed.

In my small bedroom, I had a standard sized closet, a waist-height chest dresser, a bookshelf of course, a small office desk with my computer on it, and a bunk bed. It wasn’t a standard bunk bed. It was the studio-apartment type with the double bed on the bottom and single bed on top, but the double bottom is actually a futon. It was a perfect piece of furniture to have when I only had a single bedroom to provide a place for me AND my son. For a time, we even put a third TV in my room with a third Playstation system so that Tim, Korbyn, and I could all play games together at the same time. But this story isn’t about my life and how I lived it. This story is about that bucket of honey tucked away in my closet, and how small my world became with the isolation of COVID-19.

So now you should at least understand what I was dealing with. When the call came down from my employer that I would be working from home, I had to find a way to make the little desk in my room sufficient for 37.5 hours a week. I had to, because so many others across the country were losing their jobs. The world was a mess, and I had to survive it, and was fortunate enough to keep my job, so I made it work. I shuffled things around some more, bought a better chair, stuffed more into my closet, and made the desk hold both my personal AND my work computers. And that bucket of honey? Well it found itself a new home on the top of that chest dresser I mentioned earlier.

I saw that bucket every day. All day. My alarm clock was on the dresser right beside it. Every night I turned the alarm on it was there. Every time I hit snooze in the mornings, it was there. A few times we had filled our own honey jar from the bucket. A few times we had filled my daughter’s. But without seeing anyone, it wasn’t draining fast enough. At that time in the beginning of the pandemic, people didn’t want to interact. They wanted isolation. I couldn’t sell a jar of honey for pennies then, and Tim worked in a grocery store. So it sat there. Staring at me every day, until one day when Tim came home from work and I was just finishing up my own day glued to the screen of my laptop.

Tim wasn’t just a great room mate. He was one of my best friends. We had known one another for close to fourteen years already at this point. He knew my ex wife, and was even at our wedding. He’d known Korbyn since his birth and both of my kids call him Uncle Tim to this day. Every day Tim would come home with a bag of groceries he’d bought at his store at the end of his day. He’d always put the groceries away, and then knock on my door if it was closed or just come in if it was open. He’d ask how my day was,