Clear Skies Meadery

OUR STORYClear Skies Meadery is the dream of two friends who decided to put all of their passions and energy into a business that will celebrate their local community.

After drinking some sweet meads at Renaissance festivals, Yancy figured he could do better and started brewing mead in his basement. He put his chemistry background to use and after several trials he perfected the art of making delicious meads. About twenty-five years ago, Yancy’s wife Laura introduced him to a friend she knew from grad school, Manisha.

When Manisha and her husband David returned to Maryland after their military tours, they really enjoyed drinking Yancy’s meads and asked him to go commercial. After waiting, waiting and waiting, Manisha decided to get the project going by starting a business venture with Yancy to make Mead. They drafted a rough plan on the kitchen table, and one year and a couple months later, what began as dream in a Gaithersburg basement, is now a 12 tap meadery in the Kentlands neighborhood.

We brew our meads in the basement of our Taproom in one barrel fermenters, we are a Nanobrewery!!!. We use traditional brewing techniques and use multiple varietals of honey, since each honey varietal imparts its own distinctive flavor to our meads.

At Clear Skies Meadery, we use a two step fermentation process followed by aging. Our primary fermentation begins with selecting the type and amount of honey we choose to blend with water to make a solution called “must”. We then add yeast and feed them along the way until fermentation is complete. We add oak, spices and/or fruits in our “secondary” fermentation. We let these additions steep in the mead for days to months until we get the right flavor profile.

Once we achieve the flavor profile we then age our meads and, depending on the mead, they can be aged for three to twelve months before they are placed on tap. The aging process is important to develop the rich flavor profile of our meads. This aging process requires minimal filtration and keeps most of the aromatics (and their delicious flavors!) in our mead. Other meads we put on tap earlier because we want you to experience the delicate flavors that diminish over time.