The preferred beverage of Viking warriors and the legendary Beowulf has found a surprising new home on the South Side of Chicago. Mead, or honey-wine, is considered one of the oldest fermented drinks on Earth. Archaeologists have found evidence of its production that dates back to 7000 BCE. Fast-forward several thousand years to the present day: Greg Fischer, the owner of Bev Art Brewer and Winemaker Supply in Beverly, teams up with a regular customer and homebrew enthusiast, Kazys Ozelis, to form Wild Blossom, Illinois’s first and only meadery.

“It’s a niche of the wine market that seems to be growing,” Ozelis reflects in the back room of Bev Art. Wild Blossom currently operates out of this tiny space, experimenting with new flavors and aging barrels of concoctions in the cellar. The honey used to make the mead comes directly from beehives kept by Fischer, who has been raising bees since he was a child in New Paltz, New York. When he met Ozelis through a local homebrew club, he was looking for a way to put his honey to use. “He could sell it as honey,” Ozelis explains. “But it’s much more interesting when you turn it into wine.”

Interesting, and a little “esoteric,” Ozelis says with a smile. While Fischer knew that the honey he was producing was of a high enough quality to make good mead, neither he nor Ozelis was sure if customers would buy it. “The only thing he had to worry about was if people would be interested—will they understand it, will they accept it,” Ozelis recalls. Part of mead’s appeal is its rich history, but that can also be a bit intimidating. “People don’t know too much about mead,” Ozelis admits. “They think of Vikings rampaging, drunk out of their skulls.”

Wild Blossom meads shouldn’t cause the average person to go berserk. Prairie Passion, the brewery’s most traditional mead, lacks the hallucinogenic components, such as fly agaric mushrooms or toad skin bufotoxins, that the Vikings are theorized to have ingested with their mead. Instead, it’s laden with sweet and heavy floral notes, and the bottle cap is filled with Chicago wildflower seeds, encouraging the customer to help maintain the renewable source of their beverage.

Wild Blossom’s product is “about as local as you can get,” according to Ozelis. Some of Fischer’s hives are located on the site of the abandoned U.S. Steel plant on 92nd Street. Where most people saw “leftover industrial real estate,” in Ozelis’s words, Fischer saw opportunity. His bees pollinate the wildflowers on the property and, as Ozelis sees it, both the city of Chicago and Fischer are “turning it into something much more enjoyable and usable.” This seems to be a common theme among Fischer’s hives: he has several more located on top of the Mariott at 540 North Michigan Avenue, contributing to the hotel’s green roof project. “There’s a lot of flowers up and down Michigan Avenue,” Ozelis explained. “The bees just fly around, pollinate them, and come back.” Still more hives are located in the Indiana Dunes, where the fragrant black cohosh flower, indigenous to the area, imparts an intense aroma to meads made from the honey of those hives. “It’s amazing that within an hour of the city you can have bees pollinating wildflowers and turning out honey that isn’t toxic or rancid,” Ozelis chuckles.

While mead has been found on almost every continent, different cultures produce vastly different versions, depending on the raw materials they have available. Wild Blossom incorporates local produce, like blueberries, mulberries, and raspberries, but in Eastern Europe, where it’s difficult to grow fruit, meads tend to be flavored with spices. Ozelis, who is Lithuanian, felt a socio-cultural connection to mead in his early brewing days. “It was something I was familiar with, something I had sampled. It’s another excuse to ferment something.” He remembers the meads from his country being very spice-oriented: “The traditional Lithuanian meads have ginger, juniper, allspice, cinnamon; they might even add some other herbs like dill or fennel. Sometimes they would add hops in there, either for aroma or for bittering purposes. It’s more like a tonic or an elixir.” With such a sweet product, bittering is a common, if optional, step. In Ethiopia, the stems of the shiny-leaf buckthorn—a shrub known there as gesho—are boiled to produce a bitter extract, which is combined with honey to make a drink called tej. The simple mead is truly a global drink.

Like the many generations of meadmakers before them, Fischer and Ozelis are constantly tinkering with new flavor combinations. Most of their meads include some kind of fruit. “The idea with fruit,” Ozelis explains, “is that it adds a layer of complexity and depth because now it’s not just honey and water. Adding fruit to it really adds much more in terms in flavor, aroma, mouth-feel, and color.” Their Wild Berry mead is made with crushed wild mulberries and raspberries, which are left in the mead, skins and all, during a secondary fermentation. Using the whole fruit gives rise to delightful tannins, and the taste is much stronger and more acidic than their Pom-Nectar mead, which uses pomegranate juice from California since the fruit doesn’t grow locally.

One of Fischer and Ozelis’ most innovative techniques involves aging their Sweet Desire mead in old bourbon barrels, to pull out the flavor, the color, and the aroma of the barrel, as well as the bourbon. This idea was a twist on a specialty beer created by the local brew club, HOPS (Homebrew’s Pride of the South Side), which Fischer co-founded in 1995. Ozelis remembers making the brew on St. Patrick’s Day for the South Side parade. “Homebrew’s Pride of the South Side would do fifty gallons of stout on the sidewalk. We’d be boiling up beer along the parade, and we’d always put it in whiskey barrels to ferment and age, because that gives it a wonderful flavor.” When Ozelis and Fischer joined forces to create Wild Blossom, they didn’t want to try this technique with wine. “That would be like throwing a shot of Jack Daniels in a cheap chianti: not very appetizing,” Ozelis jokes. “But we thought it might work with the mead, and sure enough, it did.”

In addition to their collection of diverse meads, Wild Blossom also makes a line of South Side wines, “a sort of homage to the old Italian guys on the South Side who would make wine during Prohibition,” says Ozelis. “The grapes would come in from California on the railroad cars and all the Italian guys would get the grapes and make wine like they did back when they were in Sicily or Naples.” Unfortunately, none of Wild Blossom’s beverages can be sold on premises. Due to zoning restrictions, Wild Blossom can manufacture their wines in the back of the Bev Art Supply Store, but customers need to walk to the liquor store across the street to buy them. “After prohibition, this side of Beverly neighborhood voted for the whole ward here to be dry, and then across the street was wet, which meant that you could open up a tavern or sell alcohol in restaurants,” explains Ozelis. An unfortunate by-product of this law, he points out, is that there are no good restaurants on the dry side of Western Avenue. He remains hopeful: “It might be changing because there’s pressure to develop this neighborhood. Maybe people are eventually going to realize that it’d be nice to have a decent restaurant or a music venue. We’ll see what happens.”

The future looks bright. Wild Blossom advertises mead to be the most sustainable beverage on earth, largely because it takes so little effort to harvest the raw materials. Ozelis hypothesizes that the first people to discover mead simply found a honeycomb filled with rainwater that had been allowed to ferment with airborne wild yeast. In modern times, mead-making is a little more controlled, but Ozelis cheerfully emphasizes the lack of human hands in the process. “We just let the bees fly around, go to the wildflowers to forage and pollinate, and they give us honey.” Compared to wine or beer, as well as most farm produce, Ozelis guarantees that “you don’t have to run combines, tractors, trailers, or refrigerated trucks to move the honey, so that really cuts down on energy use and pollution.” While sustainability is a popular catch phrase these days, mead is not just eco-friendly—it’s timeless. This drink of the gods contains both past and future in a single sip: an age-old tradition, perfected over centuries, promises to be around for centuries to come.