Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lauren Bloom. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Lauren, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

The biggest thing that sets us apart is our commitment to sourcing all of our ingredients from Michigan farmers and growers. In a traditional brewery setting, brewers develop a recipe idea, and then go out to find a supplier. Often that supplier is far away, and the order is placed online. We turn that process on its head – first we see what’s growing well in Michigan, how the weather has affected the crops, and then we build recipes based on what’s available. There are so many big and complex reasons why this is important to us, from keeping the money we spend in the local economy, to knowing how our farmers care for their land and their soil, to reducing our environmental footprint by trucking ingredients in from a few miles away instead of thousands of miles away. It’s also important to us for the small day-to-day reasons. When we need something, we can call up Alex or Bridget or Charlie or any of the growers we work with to find out how their crops are looking. That brings a lot more joy to our work than just placing an online order.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

At Bløm Meadworks (pronounced “bloom”), we make what we like to call session meads and ciders – they’re light, dry, carbonated, and remarkably sessionable. For our meads, we start with the same ingredients as a traditional mead – honey, water and yeast – which means we can source all of our ingredients from Michigan. Unlike most meads though, we ferment it like a dry craft cider, so the result isn’t nearly as thick or sweet as traditional mead. So, if the word “mead” automatically conjures a drinking hall filled with Vikings for you, think of ours as its friendly, approachable descendants, without the pillage and plunder.

After years in the nonprofit sector, I realized that what had become my hobby and outside-of-work stress reliever was actually the thing that I cared about most – food. And more specifically, local food production. Soon after, I joined the board of Slow Food Chicago, an organization that advocates for the value and pleasure of good food for all. A few years later, Matt and I moved to Ann Arbor, looking to put down roots in our home state and open Bløm – a business that allows us to create sessionable brews and highlight some of the mouth-watering ingredients grown in Michigan.

Matt started his professional life as a financial geek. Turned out it was far more exciting to apply those geeky skills to brewing chemistry than options software. He kicked off this new career as a home brewer in Chicago and was lucky enough to have two friends who were passionate (crazy?) enough to start a brewery. While owner and head brewer for Begyle Brewing, Matt sadly learned that he was among the unfortunate crew that can’t process gluten – his love affair with beer had come to an abrupt end. Hooked on the creative fermentation process, and always intrigued by the quirky possibilities for mead and cider, Matt found Bløm to be the perfect love child of what he enjoys making and drinking.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Business progress and the path to profitability are not linear. As we closed out our first year as a business, we could see profitability on the horizon and were feeling proud of that timeline. It matched our financial goals while still holding true to the values that we’d woven into our model. Like most businesses though, the effects of COVID hit hard. We were as nimble as possible, moving quickly to curbside pick up, distanced to-go sales, and even acquiring a license to delivery alcohol to customers’ homes. We offered online classes, cocktail kits, and so on. The support of customers during those years was incredibly helpful, but our survival was largely dependent on federal loans that were made available. While this got us through, it also meant that financially we were nearly back to square one. It has been incredibly humbling to essentially build the business from scratch twice, and recognize that just because we’d successfully built it once, it didn’t mean that “bouncing back” would be quick or easy. Talking to other small business owners has been refreshing – the transparency that many of us are in the same seemingly endless boat of financial recovery.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

Since we’d only ever tried a session mead (a dry, carbonated, low alcohol mead) once, developing our product was both daunting and also completely unencumbered. We weren’t constrained by industry expectations, but there was also very little reference material for us to use, and much of the science was determined by trial and error. We started brewing extremely small batches in our garage, and had to be comfortable with dumping the ones that didn’t turn out as we’d hoped. We also reached out to folks who we thought would be experts in the field, the industry, and the raw materials. For instance, we spent a lot of time on the phone with a well-known entomologist learning about the healthy of bee populations in Michigan. And visiting beekeepers to better understand their harvests and yields. And writing emails to the few people who had published mead making books in the past. When we entered those conversations with curiosity and humility, people were incredibly willing to share their knowledge with us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.drinkblom.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drinkblom/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drinkblom/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/bl%C3%B8m-meadworks-ann-arbor