We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nicolas Hogrefe. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nicolas below.
Nicolas, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
As the premier brand of wild-fermented mead, we started off as a different sort of meadery. With no sulfites, sorbates, or chlorine our meads are off to a roaring fermentation with nothing but honey and our natural well water. Further separating us, we went into our venture with a strategic partnership with a Black-owned apiary, Mother’s Finest Family Urban Farms, to produce our meads and developed a program that ensured as we grow that our mead will bring income to underrepresented farmers in Appalachia by developing a Fair Trade Honey system that brings passive income to BIPOC families interested in beekeeping. Our Save the Bees, Save the World program funnels 5% of all bottle sales to paying the upfront materials and training costs needed to place these hives on BIPOC-owned land to ensure the long-term sustainable growth of our mead industry with locally owned hives; effectively we have a grassroots organized meadery of by and for the people. Each of our full-time employees are paid with a percentage of the business profits and we fund the creation of native pollinator sites to offset the negative ecological impact that large-scale beekeeping has on the indigenous pollinators of Appalachia. In this way we continue to push the limits on what it means to be a sustainable meadery.
Nicolas, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m a mead and wine microbiologist, Mead Scientist for short. My background is in Biochemistry (BS at UCSB) and Food Science (MS at WSU) and I’ve been plotting the Stardust Cellars winery footprint out wince I was a teenager. I always knew what I wanted to do and have meticulously planning for today for what has now been a 15 year journey. I designed this facility to create ancestral wines and meads. What this means is using natural elements like changes in temperature and humidity to control fermentations and have them do precisely what I want by simply controlling their environment without adding anything to the actual fermentation beyond what people have for thousands of years; simple ingredients but a lot of science behind it to understand how and why it all works. I have the trademark on the brand Ancestral Mead and Ancestral Meadery and a unique process to make our living culture wild fermented meads and wines which really makes our mead especially a one-of-a-kind beloved product for us. Raw honey stirred by hand and fermented down dry by living cultures creates a very health-conscious low-sugar product that is both probiotic and to the brim with nutrients and benefits from the honey and probiotics themselves. I wanted to create a paleo product that would be able to be enjoyed by the widest audience possible… I think people will find that we have done just that… if these aren’t the most drinkable 14% abv products I’m not sure what is.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
We started off as a winery and played the game of trying to build credibility in an already saturated market. Frankly, my wines are phenomenal and I’d pit them against Napa any day. However, here in North Carolina, there is this expectation that wine should be sweet, less expensive, and simple. My wines are dry, $25/bottle, and highly complex. Either folks won’t try it because they assume all NC wine is the same or they do try it and are upset that its not. So I learned the hard way that my ambitions in the wine world were not going to be well received. Luckily I learned of the incredible honey produced here locally and quickly took mead up as a side-hustle of our winery. Within 2 years we went from side to flagship with now around 90% of our sales being mead. Go figure, ancestral mead turned out to be a whole lot more exciting and folks here are ready for something new. Especially something that showcases a product beloved by the locals and frankly done best here, NC honey. We got lucky in finding an excellent partnership in Mother’s Finest to work off of to develop a lineup that is not only top tier but also diverse and inclusive in a way that the future of the industry needs to be to reach the audience we need to be competitive.
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
We happened to open our taproom in Wilkesboro October 25 2019. Knocking on death’s door since the beginning, our business has survived by the skin of its teeth. It took completely restructuring to create a wholesale wing of the business a few months in for us to find the cash to keep payroll floating and a few years in its finally feeling like we are getting out of that mode. We’ve grown the team tremendously but not without a lot of blood sweat and tears. The CEO finally gets to leave his second job April 1st after 5 years of working 16 hours a day so yes we are glad the pandemic is finally subsiding… but it did force us to adapt and grow in a way that brought us to now, with multi-state distribution deals and a burgeoning wholesale business pushed by a force-closure of our taproom in 2020.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.stardustcellars.com/
- Instagram: @stardustecellars
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stardustcellars
- Youtube: @stardustcellars1463