When we were doing our business planning for Ancient Fire we found a lot of occasions where we could see how our work as authors and educators could be intertwined with the business of making & selling beverages and operating our tap room. Building an engaged community around our brand takes many different tactics, and because the world of mead and cider are still largely unknown to most people, engaging fans with learning opportunities and immersive experiences is an exciting way to share the story.

We agreed that we needed to focus more on the production and tap room areas initially, and work towards expanding the educational mission of the brand as we felt more confident about the business. There were some obvious “quick hits” that we knew we could integrate early on, like the honey tasting bar, but we also knew there was so much more we could do; much of it needing more time to evolve though.

We’ve reached a point where we would like to tackle the next phase of the mission which involves classroom and hands-on activities on making mead & cider, a return to competition judging and more frequent collaboration with other organizations who host educational events.

And we aren’t wasting any time! So far this year we have the following activities scheduled:

WineMaker Live Chat hosted by Winemaker Magazine on Feb. 13th

Survey Of Modern Meadmaking at Ancient Fire – Feb. 24th – SOLD OUT
We are excited to host our first class at Ancient Fire! We will be talking about a wide range of topics in mead and will make a batch of session mead as a group!

Judging at the 2019 Winemaker Magazine International Competition in April

Speaking & Hosting Bootcamps at the 2019 Winemaker Magazine Annual Conference in Michigan in May. I’ll be speaking about Adding Fruit to Mead and hosting two bootcamps on cider and mead-making.

Attendance, Speaking & Judging at the 2019 National Homebrewers Conference in Providence, RI in June.

Later in the year we plan to host additional classes (more topics too) on site at Ancient Fire as well as at locations such as Musto Wine Grape in Hartford, CT

We won’t be limiting our activities to just content and topics of interest to home-brewers or home mead-makers, but will also include more on honey, food pairing, cocktails and who knows what else we think will be fun!