Hierophant Meadery

Hierophant Meadery stands at the corner of State Highway 525 and Double Bluff Road in Freeland, by Double Bluff Beach on South Whidbey Island. The tasting room and the production building beside it are modeled after barns in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic, a nod to mead maker Jeremy Kyncl’s Czech heritage. “We really wanted to have kind of a storybook vibe here to meld into the island,” Michelle Scandalis, who runs the meadery with Kyncl, told the South Whidbey Record when it opened.

Flights on a honeycomb tray

Flights come to the table on a honeycomb-shaped wooden tray. Every mead is infused with botanicals, the historic style called metheglin. Scandalis has said Hierophant is one of the few commercial meaderies working that way. In 2024 the Herald described the Matricaria Chamomile Mead as “a gentle balance of floral and fruity.” It said the Krokos Saffron Mead, aged on French and American oak, tasted “like a sip of the forest.” Other bottles include Hawthorn Tulsi, a blend of hawthorn berry and holy basil, along with Gilead Poplar Vanilla and a Bentley Cherry Bochet. The makers have used lavender, rose petals, poplar leaf buds, tree resin, nettles, dandelion root, mushrooms and the tips of Douglas fir. Some meads drink like white wine and some are bubbly. Some include fruit cider and others are cut with tea. Customers often say they “didn’t know mead could taste like this,” Scandalis told Whidbey Local in 2024. One of the most popular is Butterbee, a butterscotch mead inspired by the Butterbeer of the Harry Potter books. It sold 24 cases on its first day on the market.

The meadery also pours switchels for those not drinking alcohol: a soda with apple cider, a nettle beer, and a honeymaker’s punch. The shelves carry bottles and apothecary goods such as elderberry syrup, golden milk powder, and a few teas. At the 2021 opening they also held beeswax, soaps and jars of honey. Seating is indoors and out. Light snacks are sold, outside food is welcome, and leashed dogs are allowed everywhere.

Outside, visitors sit among native plantings and a meadow that the owners keep as a pollinator refuge for native insects, birds and bats. They planted 120 trees and shrubs, among them black hawthorn, blue elder, Pacific crab apple and honeysuckle. A 2021 grant from the Pike Place Market Foundation started an herb garden, and lemon balm from it has already gone into the mead. Nettle grows “freely and abundantly” in the forest just beyond the buildings. Whidbey Local reported herb walks around the farm and Herbal Maker’s Workshops on the grounds.

A short walk from the tasting room, the brewhouse holds a row of vats, each with room for up to 400 pounds of honey. Behind them stand shelves of plants in containers, like an apothecary’s rows of remedies. Barrels of about 655 pounds of honey arrive every few months. Much of it comes from beekeepers in the greater Spokane area. “It’s folks that we were tabling next to at the farmer’s market,” Kyncl said. The honey is warmed, diluted, and fermented for four to five weeks, then infused with botanicals and packaged. Kyncl puts the whole process at roughly two months. Leftover wax, pollen and herbs go to the garden compost.

Bonfires for the seasonal wheel

The meadery marks the solstices, equinoxes and Gaelic seasonal festivals with fire pits and a seasonal altar. Guests are invited to offer intentions to the fire. Free herbal activities include planting seeds and making herb bundles.

The Autumnal Equinox Festival on Sunday, September 20, 2026, ran from 2:00 to 8:00 p.m. Samantha of Fulla Za Mobile Pizza served wood-fired pizza made with local ingredients, and the bonfires were lit. The meadery released its 2026 batch of Spiced Apple, a sparkling apple mead with cinnamon, ginger, clove, star anise, nettle and elecampane root. Guests brought autumn objects from nature to the altar. Tessa Karno followed the 4:30 song and ceremony with a Witches Dance tutorial. A scheduled musician did not show, and singer-songwriter Celia Farran filled in at the last minute. The festival’s food drive for Good Cheer, a Whidbey food pantry, raised $1,070 and a van load of food. Afterward the meadery kept a donation bin in the tasting room.

The Lughnasadh festival on August 2, 2026, marked the first harvest. Rescued and adoptable animals came from Higher Ground Animal Sanctuary, the owners’ family nonprofit, including baby pigs and baby goats. Visitors could get crêpes, henna, and Lammas dolls made from natural materials. The Belly Dancers of Whidbey Island and the Mutiny Bay Brass Band performed. Kyncl ran the games field as the Celtic god Lugh, with kid-friendly archery and potato hurling. With the Gaian Guild, the meadery built a large effigy of Mother Earth, and visitors adorned it with flowers, breads and wheat. “The Oracle,” a blueberry sage mead made with Mutiny Bay Blues, was released that day.

Through 2026, Kyncl also ran for Mr. South Whidbey, a pageant benefiting the Friends of Friends Medical Support Fund. The fund helps South Whidbey residents with uncovered medical expenses. The meadery’s own promotion listed him as an Eagle Scout, a woodworker and boat builder, and the winner of 55 gold or double gold medals in wine, mead and cider competitions. The 1990s cover band Poser played a benefit at the meadery on September 30, 2026, and raised $4,000. For six months, a troupe met twice a week for costume sewing circles and dance practices, with Karno as creative director. They danced for Kyncl’s talent portion at the pageant in Freeland Hall on October 3. The six contestants raised $43,000 together, and the title went to a contestant named Steve.

The meadery says the dancers will perform again at its first Samhain celebration, Friday, October 30, 2026, from 5 to 9 p.m. The evening will have mulled mead, and guests are asked to bring brooms. The same night is billed as the grand opening of the Glass House, a glass greenhouse beside the meadery that adds service and event space. The meadery’s September posts said the Poser concert would debut the new Victorian Glass Greenhouse. The events calendar also lists a Full Moon Sip and Sauna with Good Medicine Whidbey on October 25, 2026. Later dates on the calendar are a Yule festival on December 20, 2026, Imbolc on February 6, 2027, Ostara on March 21, 2027, and Beltane on May 1, 2027.

From Mead to Double Bluff

Kyncl and Scandalis met at Bastyr University in Kenmore, where both earned degrees in herbal science. Mead was the first thing Kyncl ever tried brewing in college. “We were always making all kinds of interesting stuff in college,” Scandalis said, “and going commercial with it is really, I feel like, the best job in the world.” The meadery launched in 2012 in Mead, about 10 miles north of Spokane. Its first tasting room was in Green Bluff, also in Eastern Washington. The couple noticed the coincidence of the names: Mead, then Green Bluff, then Double Bluff.

The accounts of the move west differ. The Herald wrote in 2024 that the couple moved to Freeland in 2018 after years of searching for a place to grow. Whidbey Local wrote that they bought the Freeland property in 2019. Both say Whidbey’s farm tourism drew them. “We thought we found Narnia,” Scandalis said of the island. “We thought we found the Shire.”

They spent much of the pandemic building. The Whidbey room, which the Record called Hierophant Whidbey, opened in January 2021. All production moved from Green Bluff to the new 2,000-square-foot facility. Because of the governor’s mandate, tastings were held only outdoors at picnic tables, and the room was open weekends, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The couple talked then of woodland trails and a Hobbit-themed bed and breakfast. In 2022, Scandalis said, they realized “just how much islanders love mead.” By spring 2024 they were offering 24 varieties and employed 15 people. Whidbey Local reported that they bottled 6,000 cases and 375 kegs in 2024. They had also hosted the state Senate Agriculture Committee to discuss their sourcing. The original Mead location still operated a tasting room then. The meadery also pours at farmers markets around Seattle and Spokane and sells from the farm tables at Pike Place Market.

A bee for a hierophant

Scandalis explained that the word “hierophant” comes from ancient Greece and means one who shows or reveals what is sacred or holy. For the couple, that figure is the honey bee, and their logo pairs a bee with a kabbalistic tree of life. “The honey bees are showing us something very important with their decline,” she said. The bee’s decline is part of why they chose mead over other fermented drinks. “You taste ecologies in the honey, entire ecosystems that produce these beautiful flavors,” Kyncl said.

The meadery’s event-planning page tells a story about honeymoons as history. It says that in medieval times new couples drank mead, prized for its supposed magical properties, during their first month of marriage, and called it the “honey month.”

The owners estimate that a gallon of their mead uses about six gallons of water. “The bees just go and they find surface water,” Kyncl said. A meadery, he added, takes only the excess honey the bees do not need. “The entire point is to keep them alive,” Kyncl said. “This is not making bacon.”