Meet Dru Sousan of Honeytree Meadery

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Dru Sousan.

Hi Dru, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
Our story started over a decade ago when we started beekeeping in our backyard. We became hooked on tending to bees and joining the beekeeping community. At the same time, we were brewing beer in our kitchens and eventually working for a brewery in Nashville.

With all the extra honey from our hives, we decided to start trying to make mead. We saw two problems as we became enveloped in these communities. First, beekeepers were struggling to make a living keeping bees and selling their honey, and second, they saw people not liking mead due to it being too sweet and syrupy in texture. Enter Honeytree!

Our goal is to make a more accessible product by going from dry to semi-sweet and getting rid of the syrupy texture. If we can change more minds about mead, we can directly fund more beekeepers. Save Bees with Booze is the name of our game here at Honeytree! We opened our tasting room 5 years ago in East Nashville and have been making products and harvesting honey here ever since.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what challenges have you had to overcome?
Hands down, the biggest obstacle for our business was the tornado/COVID shutdown of 2020. In March 2020, Nashville had a massive tornado walk right down the street where our shop is. Completely destroyed the businesses across the street, put 13 holes in our roof, destroyed our HVAC system, took out our back patio, and destroyed the town’s power infrastructure.

Within a week of this, we also started going into Covid shutdowns all over the country. All of this was within our first year of opening. Safe to say, it took everything we had to keep the shop from closing permanently, but we were fully dedicated to keep going and double down on our dream of saving bees with tasty alcohol.

One big challenge we realized early on was how we needed to operate our Tasting Room. Most breweries focus primarily on the distribution of their product and use the tasting room sales as a secondary income. With so few people knowing what mead is or having a bad experience with a mead that is too sweet and being turned off by it, we were up against some serious challenges.

We decided to flip the normal brewery system on its head, focusing primarily on our tasting room and having distribution as our secondary source of revenue. Focusing on in-house guests gives us the ability to educate and inspire folks on what we are doing here and give them the opportunity to try a ton of different meads to find out what they like.

We always say here at the shop that we have a flavor for everyone.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Our product is very unique in the mead world. As far as we know we are the first meadery in the country (potentially the world) to make our mead with beer yeast rather than wine yeast. This makes a totally new flavor profile that we love and hope you will, too! Most mead is super sweet and almost syrupy in texture, while ours is more dry to semi-sweet, and long gone is the syrupy texture. This gives us a much more accessible product that we think will convert everyone to mead drinkers!

All of this hard work is to fuel our main mission, Save Bees with Booze. As beekeepers, we saw how hard it was to make a living keeping bees, and over ten years, we saw more people quit than people pick up the trade. It is exceptionally hard to keep bees as climate change and pests continue to take over, and there are challenges of selling your honey once you have a successful harvest. Enter Honeytree! We use only TN honey and work directly with the beekeepers.

We go through hundreds of gallons of honey a year and make sure to pay a premium for their product. This keeps beekeepers working on their hives and producing honey rather than focusing on small packaging and selling at markets. Our goal is to be the highest source of revenue for beekeepers in whatever state we operate in through the production of mead. Making booze and saving bees is something everyone can get behind!

Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
My favorite childhood memory is spending time at a log home we used to have with some property in Missouri. Exploring and hunting never got boring.

The last generation to not be glued to a phone, lol. Super thankful for the opportunity to grow up in the forest and not be afraid of being in the wilderness. In fact, it is where I am most comfortable. Just a wild man pretending to be a city dweller!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.honeytreemeadery.com
• Instagram: @honeytreemeadery
• Facebook: Honeytree Meadery
• Twitter: @honeytreemead
• Youtube: @honeytree