If you Google “beer on tap,” you’ll get 859,000 results. “Wine on tap” nets about 80,000. Mead on tap? A lowly 17,500 — substantially edged out by “margaritas on tap.”
So when Oron Benary of Brothers Drake describes it as a novelty, he isn’t kidding.
But down a few glasses while Oron explains things, and it starts to make sense. The crux of it is accessibility: more mead on tap means more people drinking it, for a number of reasons. In addition to scrapping the bottle, label, and cork, kegging is a 90% labor savings over bottling. This has enabled Brothers Drake to offer an awesome happy hour (of which I’m a regular), and allows consumers at restaurants to sample a glass without committing to a bottle. Oron says kegs cost their customers about as much as a beer like Hopslam.
However, there’s more to putting mead on tap than just hooking up the keg to an empty slot. All the fittings are stainless steel, and wine lines must be used instead of beer lines. “When we first started, we could taste the beer lines in the mead. These don’t leach anything into the mead,” explains Oron. In addition, mead is served warmer than beer (around 60F) and pushed with nitrogen instead of beer gas or CO2. This represents an investment of two to three hundred dollars, with Brothers Drake footing the bill for bars.
Brothers Drake rolled out their small three tap system in January, tripling that to nine in April (at any given time, you can find six meads on tap alongside three Ohio beers). You can currently find them tap at Bodega, World of Beer, and Double Happiness. Oron plans to roll out more in the next few weeks, with a goal of twenty by the end of the year. They recently built a two tap mobile mead cart, which you can find with Hopped Traditional (unfiltered) and Bergamot Blue on tap at Park Street Festival this weekend.
