There is a sense of Déjà vu going on in Oregon. After two decades, it's happening again. In the last half of the eighties, the ‘good beer’ movement took hold here in the quest for a better beer.  Staring in the seventies, the Oregon wine industry put its roots down in the Willamette Valley.  By the nineties, there were hundreds of small wineries making wine that rivaled the Old World. Here in the 21’st Century, small scale artisan-made distilled spirits are poised to remake the beverage landscape like its siblings, beer and wine.

Dolmen is a small scale craft distillery creating artisan spirits of distilled mead in McMinnville, Oregon.

We are one of a handful of adventurous distillers who have taken on creating spirits from mead [fermented honey]. The result is clear a distillate with delicate floral aromas of honey and white flowers. What is classically called an eau-de-vie or brandy when made of fruit, is simply called 'spirits of honey'.

This honey spirit is distilled to be crystal clear, clean tasting and retain the delicate essence of it's honey origins. In the nose you get a floral sweetness of flowers and honey. In the mouth you get a wave of tingly heat and flavor that serious lovers of eau de vie seek out.

Distilled mead is as old as ancient man. In Scandinavia and the British Isles, the first fermentable sugars came from honey. Early distilled spirits in the North country were not grape based but made from mead.

Distillates made from fermented honey are extremely rare. Don't pass this one up.