Cloud City Mead

The Honey Hole on Highway 24

The taproom sits in the Silver Creek development on the south end of Leadville, off Highway 24 and next door to Tenderfoot Market. The meadery calls the place “The Honey Hole.” It holds both the tasting room and the production facility, at 609 Highway 24, Unit D. Inside there is a bar and a seating area. Outside there is a patio with fire pits and yard games, and dogs are welcome. In summer, the tourism office for Leadville and Twin Lakes says, locals order mead slushies. Non-alcoholic slushies and other drinks are on hand for those who are not drinking. The house line is “Life is sweet at 10,000 feet.”

The Leadville Herald described Cloud City in February 2025 as “a one-man operation.” That one man is Adrian Beebe, founder and meadmaker. A Herald photograph from that visit shows him in the taproom holding a glass of “Cirrus,” a blueberry lavender mead. Visitors can taste the full list, including meads poured only at the taproom, and take home bottles, cans, or growlers. Outside the taproom, the meadery’s site lists limited availability at Mt. Massive Liquors in Leadville. The site also says Cloud City mead will “soon” reach stores in the Arkansas Valley and in Summit and Eagle counties.

Peanut butter, green chile, and lavender

Mead is honey fermented with water and yeast, and it is naturally gluten-free. Cloud City adds fresh fruit in quantity and sweetens only with honey and fruit. “REAL HONEY REAL FRUIT REAL GOOD!” the website reads. Beebe’s stated aim is balance. Most of his meads are carbonated and lower in alcohol, and he also makes a smaller number of full-strength sweet ones. The sources give the alcohol figures differently:

• The meadery’s site: dry, sparkling “session strength” meads run 4.5 to 8 percent. The traditional wine-strength meads are sweet and still, sometimes spiced.
• The tourism listing: 5 to 8 percent for the carbonated meads.
• The Herald in December 2022: Beebe’s drinks stayed around 7 to 11 percent. Mead can reach 20 percent.

Beebe explained his reason to the Herald in 2022: “I want people to be able to drink more than one of them, especially with the altitude. I don’t want to be the reason people are throwing up on the street.”

The menu changes, and the Herald has written it down twice:

• 2022: a peanut butter and jelly mead, offered with grape or strawberry jelly; a Hatch green chile mead; and a traditional mead of Hawaiian honey and Lehua blossoms. Beebe called the traditional one “elegant and dry” and “a really good starting point for people that have never had mead before.”
• 2025: drier meads of tangerine, alahe’e blossom, and malbec, and sweeter orange creamsicle and PB&J.

Beebe told the paper he starts with a particular honey and then looks for fruit to pair with it. He has kept away from the Viking and medieval imagery that many meaderies use. He wants his mead to be drunk like any other modern adult beverage. “If there has been any doubt about mead because of a past experience, you gotta find out for yourself,” he said in 2025. “Don’t assume that it’s too sweet, don’t assume that it’s not going to be for you and just come on by and give it a shot.”

From Periodic Brewing to a back room at Before & After

Beebe came to Leadville in 2006 to attend Colorado Mountain College. The Herald says he studied outdoor recreation leadership and wildfire fighting there, and he has lived in town ever since. The meadery’s site says he grew up on Colorado’s Front Range. The Herald gave his hometown in 2022 as Colorado Springs.

The sources differ on when he started brewing:

• The meadery’s site: he began homebrewing in 2008 and made his first mead in 2009.
• The Herald, 2022: he started home-brewing in Leadville in 2009.
• The Herald, 2025: he took it up shortly after graduating.

Beebe has described what drew him as the “marriage of science and art.” In the Herald’s words he said: “I’m fascinated by how some flavors can be transformed by just a single-celled organism. I’ve always been into cooking new flavors in the kitchen.”

While volunteering at brewing competitions, Beebe partnered with Chris Labbe, who was opening a brewery in Leadville. Beebe became head brewer of Periodic Brewing in 2015, the year it opened. The 2025 Herald article says he left in 2017 to make mead and began experimenting seriously in 2018. The meadery’s own account puts the full-force start of his honey fermentation in 2019. By the 2022 report, Periodic had closed during the pandemic. In the years between, Beebe won several medals in homebrew competitions, and in 2021 he took steps to open a meadery.

Cloud City opened as a business in 2022 in a back room of Before & After, a Leadville bar. Beebe fermented there and wholesaled his mead to the bar, which poured it on three taps. The Herald reported that the meadery officially opened in November and held a grand opening party on December 17, 2022. “I’m a major beer fan at heart,” Beebe told the paper then. “And if I can make something that’s totally different that I love as much as beer, I think that can go really far.”

According to the 2025 Herald article, he soon outgrew the three taps. He found the building on Highway 24 and opened the doors of Cloud City Modern Mead there in September 2024. A 2025 Thirst Colorado survey counted about 20 meaderies in a state with more than 400 breweries. Beebe told the magazine that mead is no passing fad, “because it can be so many different things and is continuously changing and evolving.”