Blaqmead- “A niche that hasn’t yet been filled.”

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Quotes Courtesy of Anthony Cooksley and Karl Shaw

More often than one would think, a chance meeting between two people can culminate into ideas and lifelong dreams come to fruition. Such is the case with Blaqmead: one of fifteen meaderies in Oregon State!

In 2011, Anthony Cooksley was dating his now wife and became good friends with her cousin, Karl Shaw. To complement their game and pizza nights, Anthony experimented with different cocktails as well as sampling the local brews. During one of these nights, they found a growler full of an apple pie mixture that had been left a year prior; boys being boys, they found the growler and tasted it, “AND IT WAS AMAZING!” After what would turn out to be a fateful night, Karl and Anthony wanted to build a distillery and make whiskey. They started their research and “realized that the capital was way too high and the red tape was extensive. So, we built a different company to build the capital to build the distillery!”

After years of researching and dreaming about brewing whiskey, Karl went and acquired the brewing supplies and they set their first batch of mead in January 2023. By April, they got their first batch racked and “We thought it tasted okay. By the second batch, people were asking us, ‘You guys are going to sell this, right?’ By the third batch, when we switched to Sweet Bee Honey Company, the flavor remarkably improved.” In July, they found and secured their location, their business license, and eventually got approved for their liquor license. Drawing from their “significantly Irish” roots, Anthony and Karl set to work renovating their space from what was once an auction house into their take on an Old Irish Pub with the intent to make you feel right at home; “It doesn’t matter who you are, you can come here.”

Anthony and Karl held their soft opening on November 27, and completely sold out of product on December 22, 2023! Since their soft opening, they’ve come to appreciate the different types of people who are coming through the doors: “Mead is a boundary crosser. People of all socioeconomic statuses are buying our Mead. It is so different from anything else and it’s something we get to educate people on.” They describe the flavor as having “nods to late harvest Rieslings, but Mead tastes like Mead. I haven’t found anything that it is like.” Karl and Anthony are also proud that they’ve brought another dimension to an already complex assortment of flavors in the Walla Walla Valley, “You can get pretty much anything you want as far as wine and spirits go. We’ve got wineries, cideries, distilleries, breweries, and now a meadery. It’s a niche that hasn’t yet been filled and people are starting to find out about it.”

Thanks to their customers’ enthusiasm, Karl and Anthony are hard at work brewing mead in time for their Grand Opening and Ribbon Cutting on March 8, 2024! In the near future, Anthony and Karl are looking forward to releasing one their new flavors, Lavender Libation, and the restock of their popular Gobnait Gold- named after Abigail Gobnait, Patron Saint of Beekeepers. Being the proud homegrown men they are, Karl and Anthony have aspirations to enter the Mazer Cup a mead competition in November, “We want to compete and hope to one day bring medals back home to Milton-Freewater.”

Don't forget to save the date for their Ribbon Cutting, this coming Friday March 8, 2024 from 6-7PM!

Visit their website https://blaqmeadllc.com/. Stop by 84984 Oregon 11, Milton-Freewater, OR, 97862 or call 541-733-0953.