Our first meadery and the flights made it easy to sample different ones. For only $10 it was well worth it. The outdoor space is spacious overlooking the birch tree forest. There are bike trails that feed off the lawn. Come on the weekends when they serve pizza hot. The full hour and a half tour and tasting is $20 each. read more

Fallentimber Meadery - On tap - Wineries Near Me - Water Valley, Alberta

We drove out to the Fallen Timber Meadery on an August afternoon, approx 1 hr NW of Calgary. The drive is very beautiful, but make sure you have the final directions available prior to leaving Hwy 22, as network connectivity is intermittent. There are detailed directions on their website and signs along the road, but it is pretty secluded and we still took a wrong turn. I'm not sure how accessible it would be in the winter without a 4x4. When we arrived at the meadery, we were offered samples of the various available meads. They were all fresh and very delicious, and we bought several bottles to bring camping with us (although they are also available at various liquor stores in Calgary). We then took a tour, which was very laid back and informative, and was given by the owner who brews the mead. We were shown the equipment, and the entire process was very well explained with many anectodes. At this time, there is no food served at the meadery. I highly recommend a visit! read more

See all

All natural mead and honey beer. What I really like is their obvious love to the product: they produce their own honey, create some interesting varieties of mead and recently ventured into mead based beer. Visiting them on their farm means you get the whole tasting experience including a tour through the facilities. Congrats to their fifth anniversary! read more

Fallen Timber Meadery has got a really relaxed, down home feel to it - reminiscent of driving out to my Grandma's cottage when I was a kid... except my grandma never made mead! There's a patio with some couches, a fire pit and a yard for events and bocce. They even have a bocce tournament coming up this weekend. Heck yes I'm going. Anyway - patios, couches, fire pits... all of these things get so much better when you add mead to the mix. Lucky for all of us, they've got a mead for everything. You can kick it traditional, tone down the sweetness with a dry mead, or get adventurous with their saskatoon berry and cinnamon mead. They also make some lighter meads that are more like a beer than anything. Instead of grabbing a beer on your next patio day, sub in their hopped mead - it's clean and refreshing, and at around 7% ABV it really gets the job done! If you feel like going even more "beery" than that, they have an ongoing selection of braggots, brewed with barley and hops just like a beer. Sure you can add honey to beer, but with a braggot, you've got more than 50% honey so it's still a mead, just with a beer flavour. The tours are really fun to go on. Unlike most brewery tours, you also get to see the agricultural side of things. Most breweries don't grow their own barley on location, but this meadery has plenty of bees to make the honey. You get to learn about the brewing process, but also about the bee process. They're fascinating little buggers! read more

In the days of yonder, yore and yesteryear, quite frequently we read about patrons imbibing on a beverage known as mead. I always wondered what wonders said drink contained yet never had occasion to ask as it typically crossed my path in the form of a book or movie. And yet, here it is in the Kingsland Farmers Market. A stall with bottles stacked up, each flavour in a row on the counter awaiting the chance to wet your lips with its light sweet flavour. Less acidic than grape wine, mead is actually a honey wine. Created from honey collected from its own hives, I would guess that the mead from Fallen Timber is as unique a flavour as the honey it creates. Different flavours of honey depend on the flower the bee is harvesting from. The traditional mead is what came home in my bag last week. I thought it appropriate to crack the bottle in honour of the review. I've been chilling it in the fridge for about a day. It's light in colour and I think I prefer the chilled version to the room temperature sample I had last Friday. Slightly dry but still with hints of sweetness, it's flavour is not as overpowering as that of grape wine can be. Bottles retail for $20 a piece. I may need to throw myself a medieval themed BBQ before the summer's out just for an excuse to get my friends to drink more mead with me! read more

This meadery has several features that make it worth a visit if you are in the Water Valley area. First, the brewmaster gives a nice tour of the facility. In some sense a meadery is more like a winery than a brewery, insofar as the flavor of the honey is affected by where they place the bees relative to pollinated crops, the time of year, etc. it's fascinating to learn about this and to taste different honeys on a tour. Second, Fallen Timbers is the only meadery around that does hopped and sparkling mead-based beverage, a.k.a. Braggots, that are more like beer than wine. Bottles of this stuff go down a bit more easily than wine bottles of 14% mead. Third, they experiment with different flavors regularly, e.g. I picked up one of the last bottles of bourbon cask aged mead in my visit. The Saskatoonberry mead was popular with the other visitors. They have about a dozen products to sample in their tasting room! Fourth and finally, they sell all sorts of products derived from our melliferous friends' nectar, like beeswax candles, honeycomb, and unpasteurized bottles of honey. With pretty surroundings and a furnished deck, all in all, a nice way to spend an hour in the great Alberta countryside. read more

See all