Stephen Phillips and his wife were saving up to buy a house—that is, until he asked to use that money to start making canned honey wine.
Believed to be the oldest alcoholic beverage, mead is made by diluting honey in water and fermenting it with yeast. From characters in the epic poem Beowulf gathering to drink it in King Hrothgar’s mead hall to its status as Ethiopia’s national beverage, mead has held cultural significance around the globe for centuries.
Phillips hopes to bring this appreciation for the honey-based beverage to the Bay Area.
“A lot of people have heard about mead, but may not have tried mead,” Phillips said. “So it’s been a lot of education, and giving people that first experience.”
He’s worked as a brewer at East Brother Beer Co. in Richmond for 10 years and began brewing mead at home during the pandemic as a creative outlet, experimenting with adding teas and citrus to different batches and seeing what stuck. After winning gold at the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition, Phillips decided to pursue mead production commercially. In 2025, SideTrack Mead officially opened for business.
SideTrack currently offers two varieties of canned session meads, meaning lower ABV than traditional meads, and one cyser—or mead—made from fermenting honey with apple juice instead of water. The session meads are brewed with cherry blossom honey, available in both a traditional and a Jamaica flavor, with an Arnold Palmer-inspired variant currently in the works.
If SideTrack is one thing, it’s local. The apples in the Celebratory Cyser hail from Sebastopol, California. The most important ingredient—honey—is strictly sourced from Galt and Woodland. It can be more expensive this way, but for Phillips, it’s worth it.
“I like to work with my local beekeepers because then I know it’s legitimate honey, as well as it’s supporting somebody local,” he said, referring to concerns about cheaper honey from nonlocal sources being cut with corn syrup. If the orange blossom or sweet clover honeys come from his trusted beekeepers, he knows they are the real deal.
Phillips’ allegiance to producers in Northern California might come from his upbringing in Sutter, an unincorporated community two hours north of the Bay Area. Phillips began to brew beer as a hobby in Sutter, citing the absence of anything else to do as the driving factor.
Reading lush descriptions on the side of any food or drink packaging always seems to enhance their taste. Psychology aside, it’s pretty neat. Talking to Phillips about honey wine feels something like that.
He says he’s a bit of a nerd about mead, which might be an understatement. Phillips goes to mead meetups across the country and even goes on mead YouTube Discords to give people advice on their home brewing. He sits in the breezy patio of East Brother Brewing Co. excitedly discussing the specific plants that get pollinated to produce different types of honey, and even plants that don’t.
“Tomatoes, for example, are actually bumblebees. Agave would be bats. Mangoes are typically flies,” Phillips said, before describing in detail the flavor profiles associated with plants that are pollinated by honeybees.
Weirdly enough, orange blossom honey doesn’t taste like the fruit; instead it carries a hint of menthol. Sweet clover honey leans into holiday spice territory, with cinnamon being its strongest note.
Despite knowing all there is to know about tannins and the chemical process of fermenting glucose and sucrose in giant steel tanks, Phillips ultimately seeks to make mead more accessible.
“I wanted something I could drink on a sunny day, like on the beach or out by the water with friends,” he said of the lower-ABV products he’s developed as a contrast to meads that more resemble dessert wines.
The cider-esque quality of SideTrack’s session meads is especially evident in the Jamaica flavor. Similar to the agua fresca that inspired it, Jamaica hidromiel resembles a tart juice with just a bit of bite.
“This was one of the ones that was just really popular with a lot of my friends and family,” Phillips said. “And I was like, all right, well, that’s got to be the one.”
Not only family and friends favor Jamaica. Victory Point Cafe, on Shattuck in Berkeley, goes through kegs of it.
The traditional mead lets the menthol flavor from the orange blossom honey shine. Smelling of vanilla the moment the can is cracked, this mead is reminiscent of the balanced sweetness in a frothy root beer float.
In developing the cyser, Phillips stuck closer to a typical mead, with a rich, syrupy wine that coats the mouth and really does seem packed with cinnamon and nutmeg despite no spices being added.
SideTrack Mead can be found on tap and at local markets across the East Bay. For more info visit sidetrackmead.com.
