4-27-21 This week on Gotmead Live we're going international! Our guest is Stian Krog, owner of Mjøderiet in Norway, the first meadery to bring back mead in that country. This episode is not live, we got together with Stian yesterday so he wouldn't be up at 3 am!

Stian started brewing beer in 2011 and got curious about mead around the same time. He and Erlend Johnsen (now one of the Mjøderiet partners) made their first traditional in 2012 and increasingly made more and more batches during the next few years. This was partly due to the fact that making a batch of mead took far less hours than brewing a batch of beer, so every time he felt like brewing but didn’t have the time, he just made a batch of mead instead. In the beginning, few of them were good but eventually he bought Ken Schramm’s book and started upping his game.

He started toying with the idea of opening up a meadery around 2014, as there were no other meaderies in Norway at the time. In 2015, he decided to put a crew together and try to materialize my dream. He resigned from being the leader of Bergen Ølfestival, the biggest beer festival in Norway to run the meadery. In the fall of 2016, after a lot of planning and paperwork, Mjøderiet (the name simply means “The Meadery” in Norwegian) was launched as Norway’s first meadery.

Although it has been quite a struggle being alone in the mead business in Norway, with customers having no realistic notions of what mead is and can be and running our operation small-scale and part-time (except for Benjamin, all of the five people running the meadery have had full time jobs all along), he is pretty happy with what they have achieved. In 2019, they won two gold medals in the first Mead Madness Cup (for “Barrel Aged Meadlife Crisis” and “Julemjød”). They have opened up the beverage market in Norway for the public in terms of mead, with an increasing number of people being conscious about mead as an option on the menu. He also feel really pleased that we have resurrected mead as an ancient cultural drink in Norway – a country that actually has a rather famous historical relationship to it through the viking sagas and era. It’s a shame that modern-day Norwegians to a large degree still don’t know much about mead, but this is starting to change now, largely due to their efforts and hard labor. Also, two other meaderies (Askheimer and Marlobobo) were launched in 2020 and are doing well, so mead is slowly starting to come back from the veil of history in Norway. Stian is positive and excited about the future of mead in Norway and internationally, as well as the prospects of Mjøderiet. Mead is back, and it’s here to stay.

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If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @GotmeadNow and we'll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT Join us on live chat during the show Bring your questions and your mead, and let's talk mead! You can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323), or Skype us at meadwench (please friend me first and say you're a listener, I get tons of Skype spam), or tweet to @gotmeadnow.



Upcoming Shows

May 11 - Jeroen Krikke - Kollektiv Mead - Netherlands
May 25 - Kon and Julie Paseschinikoff - Bee Boyzz Honey and Meadery - Manitoba, Canada
June 8 - Anders Reising & his partner Jarl- Askheimer Meadery, Norway
June 22 - Gert Smet - Blacksmiths Meadery, Belgium

Show links and notes

Top, Middle and Base Notes: A Comprehensive List
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