The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Great stories often start with a man and his dog. In Dayton, it is the story of an entertainer and his winged pollinators making a run at an ancient art.

"I'm a farm kid," said Mike Collins, owner and mead maker at Bard and Bee Meadery. "I grew up, part in Milton Freewater, with my grandparents."

His grandparents owned Kessler's Catering, and while the business kept them plenty busy, there was much to be done at home on the nearly 400-acre farm. The planted acreage attracted local beekeepers, who would place hives in alfalfa, pumpkin, and wheat fields.

"It is customary, though not a necessity, for beekeepers to give you a jug of their product from each location," Collins explained, saying his family's honey hoard of gallon jugs eventually grew to a few hundred pounds of product.

"Given honey's viscosity, each gallon jug weighs about 12-14 pounds," he said.

When the honey started to take over the pantry, Collins began experimenting with honey fermentation. Failed bottles exploding and sour, diesel-tasting concoctions were just a couple of the mistakes from his early fermenting years. These experiences earned what he described as a 'gold star in what not to do.'

In 2011, Collins began working on a mobile-bottling crew through Express Employment Agency. He spent his free time traveling to local wineries, bottling local wines, and getting to know owners, cellarmasters, and other industry workers. While working a job at Leonetti Cellars in Walla Walla, Collins was introduced to Mike Moyer.

Collins and Moyer worked together often, and Moyer quickly recognized that Collins wasn't the typical mobile-bottling crewmember. As a former instructor of the Walla Walla Community College School of Viticulture, Moyer wrote a letter of recommendation to the program on Collins' behalf. Collins was accepted to the college program shortly after.

Winemaking, beer brewing, and mead fermenting involve a deep understanding of microbiology and chemistry. That was what Collins was looking forward to learning from the two-year program. The college provides a depth of knowledge that most homebrewers would find challenging to discover and understand on their own. Collins gained valuable hands-on experience before graduating in 2013, with high points and several awards.

During his second year, he completed a required internship with Blue Mountain Cider Company, based in Milton-Freewater. That internship turned into a four-year gig for Collins, where he focused on fermentation as a part of the cider-making process. During the height of production, Collins was making anywhere from 10-12,000 gallons of cider per week.

He went on to work with Mark Ryan Winery and, later, Willamette Valley Vineyards. After COVID-19 hit the community, Collins decided to take the opportunity to branch out on his own.

Mead is, arguably, the oldest alcohol known to man. It is fermented from honey, water, and added yeast to speed up the alcohol process. There is evidence of a drink fermented from honey, rice, and fruit dating back to the 7th millennium BCE in China.

While others still debate the ultimate origin story, Collins said he likes to think that centuries ago, someone found a hollowed-out tree with a left-over hive filled with water. After taking a drink from the hollow, they were surprised by the flavor and the effects of the liquid.

After that experience, civilizations began brewing mead for the flavor and intoxicating effects, with limited understanding of how the beverage was made.

Collins said that once humans understood that they could combine ingredients to create the alcohol, they would use a stick to stir the mixture. Some referred to the stirrer as the 'magic stick,' believing that spirits from the implement created the mind-altering effects of the beverage. Of course, the magic was caused by naturally occurring yeast produced on surfaces, including fruit and plant skins, soil, and wood. We still acknowledge this early happenstance with modern-day references to alcohol as spirits."

Since opening Bard and Bee in 2020, Collins has made it a point to provide top-of-the-line mead and an educational experience when interacting with his customers. To keep this connection with customers, he limits the availability of his product to his storefront at Blue Mountain Station and The Thief in Walla Walla.

"I'm not really looking to go into grocery stores or anything," Collins said. "I like the idea of this being face-to-face, you know the owner, you know the brewer kind of thing, as opposed to being one of a thousand labels on the shelf."

Collins has had visitors who come in just to talk bees without tasting or purchasing mead. He is also more than happy to speak about bee husbandry with new and potential beekeepers who happen by.

"Let's be honest, the more capable beekeepers we have, the less of an ultimate issue we could have in the future," Collins said, acknowledging declining bee populations due to disease, molds, and predators, including the Asian Giant Hornets (AKA Murder Hornets).

Collins believes it won't be the commercial beekeepers who carry the future of bees but the home beekeepers with one or two hives covering three to five square miles of land. He's happy to "nerd out" about the winged pollinators, even more so when he gets to share his labor of love in the liquid gold form!

Bard and Bee Meadery is open Friday from 3:30-5:30, Saturday from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m., at the Blue Mountain Station, 700 Artisan Way, in Dayton.