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The Mead Makers
Maree Paynter has a slew of skills, from fixing machinery to nursing animals, but she’s now deep in the world of mead making, launching Bee First Aparies with her beekeeping husband, Craig Lovell.
Maree Paynter has a slew of skills, from fixing machinery to nursing animals, but she’s now deep in the world of mead making, launching
Bee First Aparies with her beekeeping husband, Craig Lovell.
Whakamarāma mead brewer Maree Paynter is buzzing over her latest career swerve.
The qualified mechanic, animal scientist, former orchardist and ex-veterinary nurse is launching a honey-based alcohol venture alongside her partner, beekeeper Craig Lovell. Together, they’ve spent five years learning about the ancient beverage and working towards opening their own meadery in the Kaimai foothills. They erected the coloured steel shed themselves, installed pumps, filters, vats, windows and doors, then insulated and painted to create a temperature-controlled fermentation room, and a reception and tasting area.
While both learned the basics of brewing and bottling, it is Maree who has buried herself in research. She found the expert help they needed, chased all the necessary council permits and mastered the art of fermenting honey to create Bee First Apiaries mead.
“Maree is the bigwig, she’s a superstar,” Craig says of his multi-talented partner. “The fermentation and blending and tasting, that’s all Maree. I just lift and move things, provide honey, help put labels and caps on.
“She’s super practical. My truck blew up the first day of pollination and the next day, Maree had
the motor out on the ground ready to go to the engine builders. She knew what was wrong, up
to her elbows in grease.”
However, the man who provides the meadery’s key raw material is no slouch either. He has a mechanical engineering background, has held a pilot’s licence and once built a KR2 aeroplane in
a farm shed. He also speaks conversational Thai courtesy of the years spent managing railway station construction in Thailand.
“He’s really clever,” Maree says. “He’s a numbers man, he’ll stand there calculating and come out
with the figures he needs. He’s better at welding than I am and he’s one of those very likeable
people who can connect with anyone.”
It is Craig’s beekeeping skills and willingness to clock up 18-hour days that have seen their original Bee First Apiaries company fly. At summer’s peak, he’ll oversee somewhere between 1000 and 1400 hives to supply customers with pollination services and honey. Every off-season, he works fulltime as a boat builder while Maree juggles apiary feeding duties with school and sport runs for their two busy preteen sons Ross and Kurt. She is in charge of all resident animals — a few cows, horses, sheep and a goat — on their three-hectare block. After all, she’s the one with an advanced diploma in horse husbandry and management, as well as experience nursing thoroughbred racehorses. Then there’s the rural management degree she’s trying to find time to finish; just four papers to go.
The met in passing while growing up in rural Taranaki, only reconnecting when they each landed
in Tauranga after overseas travels and other careers. In the Western Bay of Plenty, they were both involved in a family kiwifruit orchard before Craig’s first love won out. “Beekeeping was just something I had to do. I’d always had an interest in bees, even when I was a little tacker still in primary school. When I came back to New Zealand and bought a hive, it was just a gateway drug. I got a job with local beekeepers and they encouraged me to go out on my own. The rest is history.
“It’s a whole world in a beehive, it’s really easy to get in there and get fascinated. It’s the quiet and calm, the smell, it’s the fresh air, the fact you’re moving as well so you get a different office every day. Sometimes, I think I’m sick of it until I open a hive and feel the bees working. It’s like patting a cat all day, it slows you down, makes you a little more comfortable in life.”
Maree, meanwhile, is utilising her biology background, rearing queen bees and keeping an eye on genetics within their apiary business. Bees and large mammals are not so different, she says. “There are so many parallels. Neither will thrive without nutrition. And if you don’t cross breed, you end
up losing traits you want to retain. We’ve started bringing in fresh genetics, new queens to cross
with our chosen colonies to breed for what you want to achieve in the field.”
Her analytical, scientist’s brain has also proved useful in the meadery, where she meticulously
records every successes or failure. Maree is constantly striving to gauge seasonal variations, or
the way different batches of honey respond when mixed with water to create the house specialty.
The fermentation process uses only naturally occurring yeasts, in much the same way that traditional winemaking methods utilise yeast found on the skin of grapes.
The learning curve has been steep.
One batch of mead exploded all over the walls. Another early batch was strong enough to be flammable and made taste-testing friends and neighbours wince.
“We’re harnessing the wild yeast that’s around us all the time. It’s its own eco-system on a microbial level, it’s temperature and light sensitive, it needs the right nutrition to ferment. We’re trying to keep
it really old school, just using yeasts that are within the honey already so it does take longer. We’re hoping our new fermentation tanks will speed things up but, at the moment, anything you taste from us took a good nine months.”
Their meadery — dubbed The Brewed Nest for the brood nest present in every thriving hive — can blame its genesis on a misplaced drum of honey. By the time the container was located and returned, two years had passed and water had seeped inside to kick-start fermentation. The resulting carbon dioxide by-product made the plastic drum balloon dangerously and the honey was unsalvageable. “So we thought we’d have a play.”
The learning curve has been steep.
One batch of mead exploded all over the walls. Another early batch was strong enough to be flammable and made taste-testing friends and neighbours wince. Subsequent efforts were so
fiercely alcoholic, they have either been tossed out or repurposed as engine cleaners.
A turning point occurred three years ago, when Maree heard retired winemaker Michael Sweetlove speak at a food festival. He mentioned his interest in mead, she approached him and he has been mentoring the couple ever since, as they continually strive to refine the product.
In March this year, almost 80 food lovers visited the property to try beekeeping and sample mead during the annual Flavours of Plenty Festival. The tastings drew an overwhelmingly positive response, as well as several pages of orders from participants. “It was really, really great and gave us the confidence to push ahead with licensing,” she says. “We knew we liked the taste but we needed
to know what more people thought.”
If all goes well, Craig says, they’ll expand the domestic market, investigate exports and grow the range to include a carbonated mead and one that’s more full-bodied. The goal is to slowly scale
up the beverage business and cut back on beekeeping, with its intensely long hours and merciless seasonal forces. Last season saw honey production plummet and hives hammered by frosts, endlessly rainy weather and the invasive varroa mite. Another 28 hives were wiped out by flood-propelled forestry slash and silt.
For now, Maree plans to open the meadery two days a week, selling mead as well as their own rewarewa, manuka, bush and pastoral honey. And she will continue to hone her craft with a
scientist’s precision, a mechanic’s pragmatism and the curiosity of an eternal student. “We’re
five years in and I only have another 120,000 to go before I get the hang of it,” she says, laughing.
“Beekeeping and mead making are hard work. Some days, you wonder why the hell you’re doing
it but we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t fun.
“I love that creation of something you can see from go to whoa. I love the fact every batch is different. I know exactly where the honey’s come from, how it’s been treated the whole way through, I’ve watched it ferment and monitored it on a daily basis and find the end result very nice. Hopefully other people do, too.”
