In the world of Coronavirus, voluntary quarantine, and social distancing, it can be hard to celebrate; it might even be impossible to be together, but humans still need community.
Today is about honoring families, celebrating growing things, and observing the brightness of the world while acknowledging the slow, steady, turning of the year back to cold and dark.
While most people can buy our mead online, that’s not what we’re going to recommend today.[2]
We’re an open source company and have been since the day of our founding. All of our recipes are available for free online, as well as all of our brewing techniques.
Many years ago, Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone which tracked the collapse of the American community. Since he first published his work two decades ago, the trend has only accelerated.
With homebrew clubs relegated to Zoom Meetings[3], it’s harder than ever to feel connected. So today we urge you to reach out to the people in your close community, and if you can manage it, get together with your kith and kin, safely distanced if necessary, and brew together.
It may seem strange that we’d recommend brewing mead yourself over buying our stuff online. Actually, it is strange.
The thing is, through all of this, we’ve been separated from our work family and birth families, and we’ve developed a deeper understanding of how important it is to make something real, physical, tangible, and meaningful with people you love.
Making mead is so incredibly simple – all it takes is a bucket, yeast, water, and honey – and the mead you make is something that you can enjoy with your community for years to come.
We absolutely understand that many of you may be unable to be in the same physical location as the people you love. If that’s the case, pull up Google Hangouts, hop on a Zoom call, FaceTime, or just stick a phone under your ear, and stir up some honey and water while talking to your family.
Obviously you don’t need to brew mead to stay connected to your friends and family, but making something tangible together, even if you’re apart, is as powerful now as it has been for the history of our species.
Why mead? Because you can get the ingredients at the grocery store, and it will still be good whenever you’re able to gather together again. Also, it happens to be the thing we’re experts on.
And, to be completely honest, it seems like we all need easy wins right now. Watching those bubbles come through the airlock and imagining drinking a pint with your friends and family is better than constantly refreshing Facebook, binge watching anime, or trying to learn what a TikTok is.
So, dear Meadiacs, stay safe, stay healthy, and brew together whenever you can. It means more than you can possibly imagine.
[2] We’re a small business and, of course, it would be a great Father’s Day gift to Ricky, but not the point of this article.
[3] And book clubs, Girl Scouts, Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, Catholic Mass, local gourmet clubs, Doubles Tiddlywinks, beaches, philately organizations, and… pretty much everything else.
