Category: Meet the Members

Founded in 2015, Raging Cider & Mead Co. has its roots in Dave's youth in England visiting family and realizing he loved scrumpys and english ciders in general. It's roots also stretch back to Dave & Kerry's youth as wild punk rock teenagers. All of this came together eleven years ago when Dave started making cider due to Kerry's gluten intolerance. Over time Dave rediscovered his love of cider from his youth as well as local sources for suitable apples for cider making. After a few years of experimenting, Kerry pushed him to start making cider professionally and Raging Cider & Mead Company was born. One of the commitments Dave and Kerry have made is to only source apples, pears, honey, and other fruit from San Diego County in order to support the local farming community and to try and regrow the rich apple & pear orcharding traditions of the local San Diego mountains (in particular the Julian region). They have also committed to purchasing "ugly" and overproduced fruit to help local farmers derive a secondary income source from fruit that may have gone to waste and reintroducing traditionally made ciders (or heirloom ciders) to the American consumer by wild fermenting all their ciders on native yeast and using various techniques such as fermenting and aging on the lees in wine barrels in addition to various types of barrel aging.

Raging Cider & Mead Co is a small family oriented business with their son Travis particularly involved in cellar work, harvesting, planting, and other orchard work. Travis's wife Lindsay runs local deliveries of their self-distributed ciders to bottle shops & restaurants/taphouses. Their daughter Sierra spends time assisting with harvest & planting and her husband Cody helps maintain and harvest the orchards. Their grandsons Silas & Deklan have been known to collect a bushel or two at times.

The name Serpentine comes from the fact that the two founders, Sean and Lish, are wildlife biologists. One day while surveying for desert tortoises in the Mojave desert and contemplating names for the cidery, Sean nearly stepped on a baby sidewinder. That sealed the name Serpentine Cider!

Our cider is made from fresh-pressed apple juice, currently sourced from the Northwest. We add herbs, spices, other fruit juices and/or purees, or fresh fruit, when available, to make our different ciders. We will never use artificial ingredients, concentrates, or extracts in our ciders so you can feel good about what you are drinking!

Long ago in a time far away, a boy chose the life of adventure.  It was  a decision to leave the ordinary behind for a life full of the  extraordinary.  Many a day was spent gathering his friends and heading  off on quests and fantastical journeys.

  One day after a  successful campaign, he and his party, wary from action, stopped at a  road-side inn.  The bar keep offered him a strange drink.  It was  something unknown to him, something called mead.   This strange brew was similar to beer and wine, but different.  He  noted that cost-wise it fell right between the two; beer cost 5 coppers,  wine cost 5 pieces of silver, but this thing called mead was only 2  pieces of silver. So what was this thing called mead? No idea, but if it  costs more than beer, it must be pretty good.

  The boy grew  into a young man and continued to thirst for adventure.  He joined the  military and traveled the world.  Eventually he made his way to Norway.   Naturally, when faced with the question of what to do with “down time”  the logical answer was to seek out the local tavern and interact with  the good Norwegian people. Little did he know his life would take a  twist on that fateful day.  As he entered the establishment and looked  about, lo and behold, there right before his eyes was the word Mjod  (mead), and it was for sale! What was once an unknown word in a book had  appeared before him and it was good.  Suffice to say, more than 2  silver pieces were spent on mead while in Norway.

  Upon his  return to the states, he was dismayed to learn that the golden elixir  was not to be found.  Ever resourceful and determined to recreate that  beautiful libation that haunted his dreams, he attempted to craft his  own mead but with little success.  This failure coupled with the  military way of life, always on the move, made it impossible to make  good mead and the dream slipped away.

  Many years later he felt  something stir within him, something from the past.  This awareness  grew, substantiated by a string of strange events that would prove to  be, in no uncertain terms, life altering.  One day he found himself  standing in the path of a swarm of thousands of bees.  Rather than run  for cover, he simply stood there...captivated by the mass as they passed  by his body.  Later, the well intended owl nest box was hijacked and  occupied by a bee colony.  Then, one day, he noticed a worker bee at his  feet and realized that she was close to the end of her life.  He picked  her up and without provocation he received her sting, yet strangely  enough, it did not hurt.  Instead, it crystallized his resolve to craft  and enjoy mead once again. 

  Mead mania filled his mind as he  tracked down and consumed all of the books and articles on mead that he  could find.  Ingredients were sourced and the first batch was made.   After a painstakingly long wait it was ready, and it tasted of his  dreams.  Quickly the bathroom was filled with bubbling fermentors.   Running out of space, he moved to the kitchen, and then to the garage.   Friends and family raved about his hand-crafted mead and encouraged him  to take it to the masses. 

  How would he accomplish this great  and arduous task?  Fortunately, he knew someone...a friend with almost  thirteen years of experience in home-brewing, who had already mapped business plans for a brewery of his own, with expertise in managing a start-up and extensive knowledge in project management.  It  was a partnership that could only have occurred due to divine intervention. 

  But let's not just stop at mead, the friend  said.   Let's add another craft alcohol you can't really find very easily anywhere else.  Something familiar and more approachable, yet a seemingly forgotten and almost lost fermenting art...hard cider!  And so the friend embarked on a cider journey he had never been on before.   His years of brewing experience brought a unique twist to the  conventional hard cider you might find in the commercial setting...a  drink that is overly back-sweetened and lacking in creativity.  He  played with unique combinations of flavors, apple bases, and different yeast strains to give what can be a bland background an enticing  complexity n'er to be found in the craft cider industry!

  And  so, the two friends journeyed together, along with their families, on a brave adventure of fermenting, bringing back the Old World style with  New World creativity, to bring you the best mead and cider this side of  Valhalla!

Meadiocrity started, like so many small businesses, in a garage, when we made the leap from, “Hey, this homebrew mead is pretty good” to “Hey, people would buy this!...Right?” Launching a craft brewery in Southern California is not a very original plan these days, but we decided to embrace the mediocrity and make it something truly spectacular. Mead itself has been made for thousands of years, but for most people, it is still new. Most people think we run a "meatery" (which isn't necessarily a bad stage two). We hope to help the industry grow in recognition so we are not constantly living as a mispronunciation.

The Meadiocrity quartet is made up of John, the meadmaker, brand guru, and benevolent dictator who keeps us all in line; Mark, the resident "sommelier" and customer liaison who spreads the joy of mead to the community and gives our mead that extra special finish; Andrew, the bee nurturer and mad scientist who keeps our meads top quality; and last but not least, Nate, the king of the queen bees who keeps our bees happy, healthy, and producing lots of exquisite honey. We are all San Diego natives and formed a surprisingly well-adjusted rag-tag team to get the job done.

In our experience, good mead comes from good honey, and good honey comes from our backyards -- literally. We are beekeepers who make mead with honey from our own hives, or from bees cared for by local partner beekeepers. This isn’t generic blended honey from across the US or China with who knows what mixed in -- it’s local San Diego County honey, raw and unfiltered, with distinct characteristics that change with the seasons so each batch is unique.

Although we’re new to the world of commercial production, we’ve come a long way from the early days of homebrew mead. Harnessing the talents of our quartet of renaissance men, we’re making mead that is anything but mediocre.

Meadiocrity could not have launched without the help of the first San Diego meadery, Golden Coast Mead. We fermented our first meads with Golden Coast, and greatly appreciate the support they have given. We look forward to growing, moving out, and helping other meaderies and meadmakers get started like we did. We are already planning our next stage of growth, so stay tuned for the next steps.

Lost Cause Meadery was founded in 2017 by Billy (Worker Bee) and Suzanna (Queen Bee) Beltz. Prior to opening the meadery Billy was a national and international award-winning home mead maker, earning over 35 medals in three years including four medals from the Mazer Cup International, the world’s largest mead competition. During that time his research on mead making techniques was published in Zymurgy Magazine and American Mead Maker, the official journal of the American Mead Maker Association, and he became a BJCP Certified Mead Judge.

This would be a very long answer, but here's a (relatively) shortened version. Besides being delicious, mead is THE most versatile alcoholic beverage there is. And to us that makes it the most exciting and fun to make and to drink. It can range from crazy complex, rich and super-sweet to refreshing and bone-dry. Unlike beer, wine or cider, the base sugar in mead (honey) can pair with almost anything- and, the options for honey varietals are endless. Compare a bright and citrusy honey varietal like orange blossom to a dark, earthy and complex varietal like buckwheat blossom. Or the toasted marshmallow/vanilla flavors of meadowfoam blossom honey compared to the distinct fruitiness of a raspberry blossom honey. And each region can have entirely different flavor profiles for the same varietal of honey. And I'm just talking about the base sugar! From there, the possibilities for yeast profiles, other ingredients/additives, and aging vessels are endless. Not to mention that mead is free of dogma in styles or presentation. So although we're big craft beer, wine and cider fans, for us mead is the definition of craft.

We really wanted to build the company on the idea of pursuing crazy dreams and doing what you love no matter what others say. At the same time, we wanted to have some fun with the fact that we are trying to revive an ancient craft beverage in the heart of the craft beer capital of America. Our tasting room is almost literally surrounded by breweries on all sides, so starting a meadery and building a mead community in San Diego has become our “lost cause”.

Suzanna. Definitely Suzanna. As in life, so at Lost Cause.

Sigh. Mead has been produced and drank by almost every culture in the history of civilization. We appreciate the Nordic heritage associated with mead mostly for the fact that we love any history associated with mead. Mead has legacy, it has meaning, it ties us to the past and the future. We like that it is NOT just a new fad of creating an alcoholic version of beverages you already drink (looking at you, hard sparkling water or hard kombucha).

Survive to our first anniversary. Eventually thrive. Make some of the best mead in the world. Introduce world-class mead to the craft beverage community in San Diego and beyond, and celebrate our own community of fans as much as we can. Educate anyone that will listen. Throw big parties and enjoy the ride. Never go back to the corporate grind. Help the broader mead industry, especially our amazing mead neighbors in SoCal (we support and love all our meadery owning and mead making friends in San Diego and the rest of SoCal, and highly recommend you give them all a try if you haven't yet).