Owner and founder of Stolen Harvest Meadery Kristeva Dowling showcasing her offerings at the Grande Prairie Farmers Market (Photo supplied by Stolen Harvest Meadery)

By Shaun Penner

Stolen Harvest

Grovedale meadery earns international acclaim at World Mead Challenge

Jan 29, 2021 | 1:42 PM

A Grovedale meadery is quickly gaining traction on the international stage, after a trio of their meads placed in the top 10 of the World Mead Challenge this past November.

Stolen Harvest Meadery, owned and operated by Kristeva Dowling and her husband Eric Erme, received the recognition from the Beverage Tasting Institute, with its Saskatoon Honey Wine placing in a tie for second in the world with a score of 92 out of a possible 100 points.

Two of its other meads, the Bochet Honey Wine and the Coffee Bochet Honey Wine, also placed in the top ten with scores of 91 and 90, respectively.

This makes for quite the rapid rise for Dowling, who hadn’t even considered making the fermented honey beverage until 2017, following a very strong harvest of honey on her farm.

“We had like 200-300 pounds that year that our hives had brought in, and I was thinking to myself ‘there is only so much honey on toast you can eat’,” recalled Dowling. wondering what else she could use the abundance of honey for.

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“So, I did a further search and down some rabbit hole I came onto mead.”

Mead is a beverage made by fermenting honey and water, and often contains other ingredients such as fruit, spices and grains.

Dowling says the first batch she decided to try and make was with saskatoon berries. Not having been big into meads prior to that batch, she was taken back by the quality and flavour of her inaugural brew.

But she wanted to know what those with greater expertise than her thought of her concoction.

“So, I sent my second batch away to a competition, just hoping to get some feedback, really,” said Dowling. “Like I say, I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

“And, I won a gold medal.”

With that quick success, Dowling says she began to make other meads and entered them into competitions.

Clearly receiving strong feedback, and her wanting to have a career where she could work from her farm in Grovedale, the decision to turn her mead hobby into a business became clear.

Dowling adds mead’s popularity is gaining traction here in Alberta, and her ability to showcase the world-class honey that is produced here in Alberta is exciting.

“Mead in Alberta seems to be growing, and rightly so,” said Dowling. “It should be something that grows here, because Alberta is also one of the greatest producers of honey in Canada. So, it’s a natural economic development growth pairing.”

Stolen Harvest currently produces five different types of mead. More details on those can be found at the Stolen Harvest website.

Aside from her mead operation, Dowling is also a published author. Her book Chicken Poop for the Soul: A year in Search of Food Soverignty focuses on her learning how to hunt, forage for, and preserve her own food.

READ MORE: Local author who wrote of sourcing and growing own food says many may be questioning food security amid COVID-19