We have built our business on our ethical principles and beliefs. All our direct suppliers are family run, independent businesses and many are within the Lancashire and Greater Manchester areas. This inputs into local economies and keeps local people employed – we literally help to pay for dance lessons etc rather than a holiday home for an already well-paid CEO.

We are honest about our ingredients and production methods. We list all of our ingredients on the bottle, in the brochure and on our website. This enables anyone, like Mrs Mead, who has dietary and allergy issues to enjoy our products safely.

Our honey supplier, Paul and his family, has found some great honey producers throughout the world and the natural changes we see in our supply, shows the integrity of the products we use. This is seen in the changes of colour and flavour of every batch of mead we make. Without the integrity of our major ingredient, we would not have the premium products we have today.

Anna, our bottle supplier, is another family run business. She works with most of the large bottle manufacturers and secures great prices, which she passes on to us. This means we get a better price than if we went direct to the manufacturer. It also helps her company to grow. When we first started working with Anna in 2013, there were only three people in the company. Since then, she has grown massively, moved premises and now employs lots of people!

Sue, our packaging supplier, has worked tirelessly to help us reduce the amount of packaging needed to transport our products safely and securely. We now have bespoke packaging, designed for us which has reduced our cardboard content by around 40% and completely removed the need for additional plastic packaging.

We have supported a number of smaller, local charities since 2013. In 2016, we took part in the charity photoshoot ‘Project 22’ undertaken by local photographer John Bentley supporting Lagan’s Foundation. The picture of us we use in our brochure was taken during this project.

We had a large mead delivery go horribly wrong and it ended up being kindly taken in by the staff at the RNLI station in Eastbourne. During our conversations, it became apparent they were desperately short of cash at that time and were frantically fundraising. We donated the delivery to them to include in their fundraising efforts. Our products went down rather well and managed to raise a lot more money than the original value!

The meadery is rather close to the fires up on Winter Hill that occurred during the summer of 2018. A ‘Big Thank You’ event was held by The Groundwork Trust for all the rescue personnel involved. We were more than happy to sponsor the lights for this event.

We introduced Jarl’s Mead in February 2020 to raise funds for Checkemlads/Testicular Cancer UK in memory of our friend Gordon Hannington.  We raised £1380 for Checkemlads and the popularity of the flavour means we are keeping it raise money for a different charity every year.  See the product listing for full details of the charities helped.