Twenty years ago, while studying art at Kyoto Seika University, owner Yuki Uzuhashi became interested in Japan’s nomadic honey harvesters, who each spring and summer would follow bees as they feasted on flower blooms from the southern islands north to Hokkaido. Beekeeping became part of his art: He replicated the “gypsy beekeeper lifestyle,” as he calls it, by building a yurt surrounded by beehives, for his final exhibition. When he graduated, he continued to follow the bees, ultimately to Oahu, where he bought Manoa Honey Co. in 2014. During the first year of the pandemic, Uzuhashi began tinkering with mead making, using hand-me-down equipment from Beer Lab HI. “It seemed like the natural next step,” he says, both as an apiarist and an artist. “Making mead is about adding a new perspective, about extracting the beauty of what’s out there—and as an artist, thinking about how we can elevate the state of the honey.” Known in Greek mythology as “the nectar of the gods,” honey wine is mankind’s original booze, predating the wheel by two millennia. It was imbibed by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers in Africa, who are thought to have flooded bee nests, and by Beowulf’s seafaring warriors.
Uzuhashi started with light, fruity meads—infused with lilikoi, dragon fruit, Tahitian lime—and then moved on to more syrupy meads that hark back to its original form, including one he calls Po, which is aged for a year in rum barrels from Ko Hana Distillers. Uzuhashi sources locally when possible: oranges from Maui, durian from Hilo, pineapple from Oahu. For each mead, he pairs the honey with the added ingredients, infusing ginger from Hawaii Island with macadamia honey, and sour pineapple with delicate kiawe (mesquite) honey. His Slee Ping Potion, a still mead made with Christmas berry honey, is infused with lavender and orange peel; Uzuhashi says it’s a relaxing nightcap.
To bring his mead to fruition, Uzuhashi, wife Erika and their kids lived among stainless-steel fermenters; the living room smelled of citrus, guava, lilikoi—whatever fruit was included in the batch du jour. Four years on, and with the opening of their Wahiawa location, the office is no longer partly a living room, and the ambrosial scents of mead making waft into the outdoor space, where visitors sample flights.
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