Big Lost Meadery & Brewery

On the back of the tables at Big Lost Meadery & Brewery in Gillette there is a picture of a cabin. “There’s a whole bunch of lore and mystery behind this cabin,” Sam Clikeman, who started the place, told Cowboy State Daily in 2024. “We’ve never actually been there, but we heard it exists. It’s just this cabin in the middle of nowhere, where you can go and get Big Lost.” Clikeman and his partner, Bob Hewitt-Gaffney, built the tables and chairs by hand, and no two are alike. Small leather straps nailed to the tabletops hold drinking horns.

The taproom on Warren Avenue

The building at 105 Warren Avenue holds the whole operation under one roof: the mead production and distribution facility, the brewhouse, and the taproom. Visitors may tour all three. The taproom has no televisions and plays no music, because Clikeman meant it as a quiet room for talk. A live fire burns there in the colder months. On hot summer nights a garage door beside the tables is often raised. Games are kept on hand for families, and the brewery holds themed trivia nights and other gatherings. A figure of Wild Man, the persona behind one of the meads, points the way to the men’s room. Crazy Woman, drawn as a Viking shield maiden, points to the ladies’.

Mead is poured into horns, a salute to the Vikings. According to Live WYld Magazine, for an entire year Big Lost offered nothing else to drink from. Glassware is available now. A horn can be held, set in a table strap, or rested in a wooden holder. Customers took the theme further than the owners did and brought in Viking-style swords, axes, and wooden shields.

Food comes from Ranch & Roost, a partner restaurant across the courtyard, which serves smash burgers, chicken sandwiches, hand-cut fries, chicken wings, and tacos. Orders placed anywhere in the Big Lost building are carried to the table. Many customers take their mead to the large outdoor space beside the restaurant. Renée Jean of Cowboy State Daily ate a jalapeño popper chicken sandwich there, with sour cream and chive tater tots.

Honey, hibiscus, and German malt

Each Big Lost mead has a character behind it. The bottled line includes Wild Man, Crazy Woman, Flathead Warrior, Sweet Dame, and Island Gypsy, sold in stores in Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Colorado, and Taiwan. Crazy Woman carries a layer of hibiscus, Island Gypsy a fruity banana, and Sweet Dame lemon and ginger. The taproom pours styles that are not distributed. Jean’s 2024 flight included a sparkling lemon-lime mead “a little like champagne” and a burnt sugar mead with a smoky flavor. Mead cocktails are on the menu as well. The Viking Mule mixes Sweet Dame with ginger beer, lime, and mint. The Summer Maiden combines Crazy Woman with raspberry, lime, mint, and soda. The Blushing Dame is Sweet Dame, sour, and raspberry, and it comes out pink.

In 2024 Clikeman said the honey came mainly from Campbell County. In 2017 he had told County 17 it came from bees in Montana. Accounts of the time it takes also differ. Clikeman told Cowboy State Daily that his meads generally take a full year. Seven years earlier he told County 17 that regular batches ran four to six months, and some specialty brews as long as ten years. “Honey has a lot of characteristics that you don’t get with other sugars,” he said in 2024. “When you ferment it, it’s a fairly complex fermentation, from a nutrient and yeast health standpoint.”

The house beers are malt-focused, mostly German in style, and brewed, in the company’s words, “for the common man.” A flight on Live WYld’s visit held a Black Alt, a Peach Blonde, an Irish Red, and a Pale Ale. Hewitt-Gaffney told the magazine the brewhouse had just moved up to a five-barrel system. Other Wyoming beers are poured alongside.

Creek water in a Utah cabin

Clikeman was a firefighter by trade. An area inside the building is given over to firefighting memorabilia, most of it from his family and friends. His brewing began at a Forest Service cabin in Utah. The company dates this to the mid-2000s and Live WYld to 2007. The cabin had no running water, sporadic electricity, and no phone. “Me and my buddies got tired of drinking Utah beers,” Clikeman said. “So, we decided to start making our own.” He and his friend Ned drew water from the creek and brewed over an open fire. Live WYld reports that Clikeman called his first batch “Okay.”

Back in Gillette, his hometown, a friend asked him to make mead. Clikeman refused. “It’s too expensive and it takes too long,” he recalled telling him, and added that he would have to make a whole barrel at once to make it worth the time. The friend knew a man in Montana who would sell honey cheap in exchange for some of the finished mead. Live WYld names the friend who arranged the honey as Shane Anderson. Clikeman bought 125 pounds. The first batch came out well enough that he almost quit beer, and his friends switched to mead with him. County 17 told the beginning differently in 2017. Its account says Clikeman started with no brewing experience and worked out mead at home by trial and error.

The name came from Big Lost, the street Clikeman lived on while he was planning the business.

From the General Store to one roof

In 2014 Clikeman opened Big Lost Meadery in the old General Store on Main Street. County 17 gave the address as 106 S. Gillette Ave. “That’s where things happen,” he said of Main Street. When he bought the building, old drywall covered the walls and old carpet covered the hardwood floors, and County 17 called it “hideous.” He pulled down some of the drywall to expose the brick and opened the ceiling. He described the result as a cross between an old wooden cabin and a mead hall. He figured few meaderies existed and Wyoming was an unknown market. Live WYld calls Big Lost the state’s first.

During construction, Clikeman’s sister Nicole began dating Bob Hewitt-Gaffney, a teacher with carpentry skills. The company tells it this way: Sam had not gotten along with her past boyfriends, so she sent Bob down to work with him and win him over. Bob became Sam’s right-hand man and learned mead making and brewing. After he proposed to Nicole, Sam made him an owner.

In 2016 the Campbell County Chamber of Commerce named Big Lost Meadery its Entrepreneur of the Year. That October, mead production left the downtown bar for a facility in a former brewery, and a brewery opened downtown to fill the space. By 2017 the mead was fermenting in a vat in space shared with Pizza Carrello, and the only brewing at the bar was beer. At Gillette Main Street’s Historic Building Bender in May 2018, actor Levi Strandgard played John Daly, the building’s original owner. Clikeman then showed visitors how much of the original structure he had reused in the bar interior. At the end of 2018 Big Lost refurbished a large warehouse for production. The Gillette News Record reported in 2019 that Pizza Carrello had expanded into the space Big Lost left.

An offer to travel to Taiwan produced a distribution partner there, but Covid-19 struck just as full-scale distribution was about to begin. Big Lost stopped distributing beer and turned back to mead. It then built the Wyoming building that houses everything together. For food it partnered with Aaron and Kelly of Ranch & Roost, who were looking to start a restaurant in Wyoming. The main bar and back bar that Clikeman and Hewitt-Gaffney built for the original space came along. In 2024 the two companies ranked Dallas–Fort Worth, Tampa Bay, Nashville, Des Moines, and Sioux Falls as candidates for a second location, and chose Sioux Falls. Big Lost South Dakota opened there in 2025.

The Wild Man’s shirt

Each mead came with a written legend. Live WYld recounts the one behind the brand. The Big Lost Cabin is said to be lost in the back country of western Wyoming, its fire always burning. A crusty old barkeep there waits for Wild Man, Crazy Woman, and the others.

Then a friend of Clikeman’s, Shane Kirsch, went hunting in Namibia wearing a Big Lost T-shirt. “While he was hunting, he ended up getting mauled by a leopard,” Clikeman said. A guide shot the leopard. Kirsch survived, and so did the leopard and the shirt. “He got pretty mangled up, but since he was wearing a Big Lost shirt I just had to rewrite the Wild Man story,” Clikeman said. “Which in turn affected the Crazy Woman (mead) story, too.” In 2017, at the Main Street bar, the framed shirt hung with a smaller frame beneath it holding the story on yellowed paper.

The shirt now hangs at Warren Avenue as the first induction into the meadery’s Hall of Legends. “I don’t know if we’ll ever have another induction,” Clikeman said. “The bar has been set pretty high. But it is a fact, if you wear Big Lost gear, leopards can’t kill you. Or, at least, it’s yet to be proven otherwise.”