Hunters Moon Meadery

Most visitors come in by the East Harmony exit off I-25. East Harmony becomes County Road 74 and runs through the town of Severance. Between County Roads 23 and 21, across from the 74 XPress gas station, a turn leads into a subdivision called Settlers Landing. The meadery stands at 404 Immigrant Trail, in a building behind Greg and Kim Bowdish’s house on two acres. There are no set hours. Tastings are private and by appointment, and the owners ask visitors to call first, though they say they can usually manage short notice. A party can be one person or as many as fifteen.

The building holds both the production facility and the tasting room. A private tour and tasting runs through as many as 13 meads, by the state tourism office’s listing. In 2015 the Greeley Tribune photographed Kim setting out bottles, and Greg pouring small tasting glasses and showing a batch as it fermented. According to NOCO Style in 2024, the couple have no employees and pay no rent. Kim handles the administrative side, and Greg oversees fermentation while also running his own civil engineering business full-time. In September and October 2026 they were pouring away from home as well, at the NOCO Brewfest in Severance on September 12 and at the Golden Wine Festival on October 3. From Golden the meadery posted that they were set up “a bit slanted but excited to MEAD YOU!”

Chokecherries from the front yard

The list has grown and changed. There were 13 flavors in 2015 and twenty in 2019. When Kim spoke to Thirst Colorado in 2025 there were 24, running “from very dry to very sweet and everything in the middle.” Visitors sometimes arrive with mistaken ideas. “Some people think it’s a honey beer,” she said. “Other people think it’s syrupy sweet, which it’s not.” In July 2026 the meadery’s own post counted more than 20 meads, from 6.5 to 17 percent alcohol.

The semi-sweet Mountain Berry is made with wild huckleberry and chokecherry, and the chokecherries come from the Bowdishes’ front yard. “It’s really as local as you can get,” Kim told Westword in 2019. Sweet Mountain Berry is a still, sweeter version made with huckleberries from northwest Montana, where Kim is from. Lady Eva is made with Palisade peaches, Ginger Moon with fresh ginger, and Lunar Lemon with organic lemons. Kona Mikala is infused with coffee from Hawaii and falls in the sweetest group. Touch of Gold is infused with saffron. Kim’s Clove is made with holiday spices, and Westword called it a good base for a hot toddy.

At the dry end, the Tribune listed Trappers Cask, a chardonnay oak-aged mead. Westword described a Trappers Cask Red, aged six months in a merlot French oak barrel. The Earl Grey tea mead, which Thirst Colorado calls the Earl Greg, won Best of Show at a wine festival in Windsor judged by master sommeliers. “For wine judges to pick a mead over wine is pretty amazing,” Greg said.

Not every experiment works. “Sometimes batches are successful, and sometimes they’re not,” Greg said. “But either way it’s fun to experiment.” One that worked began with a honey that tasted naturally of marshmallow. They added cocoa nibs, vanilla, and graham crackers to it to make a s’mores mead. The newest gold-medal winner, announced in July 2026, is TEMPEST, “dark and luscious.” On October 1, 2026, the meadery’s self-described Mead Mistress posted that she had a glass of it for dinner.

Honey, water, and yeast

Kim describes mead as three things: honey, water, and yeast. Greg first dilutes the honey with warm water so it dissolves. He moves it to a tank and adds cold water until it reaches the specific gravity for 12 percent alcohol. Yeast and nutrients go in by stages: roughly half at the start, a quarter a couple of days later, and the last quarter halfway through fermentation. “Just about everything we make has the same base,” Kim said.

Fermentation takes nine months to a year and a half. “Like wine, it doesn’t taste very good if you interrupt it before it’s ready,” Kim said in 2015. She tastes the batches as they go: “It’s kind of like tasting soup as it cooks.” When fermentation is done, Greg moves the mead off the yeast. He ages it nearly a year as a very dry wine and then sweetens it back with more honey, fruit, tea, or spices. “We try to use fresh fruit as much as possible,” he said. “Dried fruit just doesn’t create the same punch in flavor.”

Batches are small. Colorado Wine lists them at 15 to 165 gallons, and the state tourism listing at 15 to 260. In 2015 the Tribune put potential capacity at 1,650 gallons, with another 1,500 planned in new tanks. That year the couple was also trying test kegs of a 6.5 percent mead on tap at Brix Taphouse and Brewery in Greeley. NOCO Style reported that they made 3,000 bottles in 2023 and hoped to reach 7,500 a year for liquor stores and craft beer pubs.

A beer allergy and a surplus of honey

Greg had been home-brewing since 2000 and brewed beer with a Greeley brewing club. The accounts of why he stopped differ in degree. The Tribune says Kim is allergic to hops, Westword says to beer, and NOCO Style says to everything in beer. Meanwhile, Westword wrote, his hives in Severance were producing more honey than he had a use for. Moving to mead meant learning wine yeast, which comes from grape skins, and much longer fermentations. “(Different yeasts) are all flavor effecters,” he said. “They change the mouth feel and the longevity along with other factors.”

The Bowdishes began making mead commercially in December 2010, and the first batch finished in 2011. Four months into the business they won two medals at the Mazer Cup International. Sweet Mountain Berry Melomel took a silver, and an experimental coffee mead called Howling Moon took a bronze. By 2015 they held nine international awards and four state awards from the Front Range Wine Festival, and by 2019 they held 36 international medals.

At the Orpheus MeadFest on July 23, 2022, Hunters Moon took six medals and finished second in the Heavy Medal standings for brewers. The golds went to Apple Pyser and Moon Dance Cherry. The silvers went to Flower of the Elder and Sweet Chokecherry. The bronzes went to Native Plum and to a barrel-aged mead called Cheechako. The meadery’s own count in July 2026 was 67 international medals and more than 20 national ones.

Greg also tells where the word honeymoon came from: a newlywed couple was given a month’s worth of mead to ensure their progeny.

Sixty hives, then seven

The hives multiplied to sixty. At one point the Colorado Wine listing gave four separate beeyards, a fifth planned, and 50 hives. Greg found that each hive was its own source. “You can have two beehives right next to each other that produce very different honey,” he said. The yield was just as changeable. The 2015 Tribune piece reported that two years earlier 50 hives had made about 3,700 pounds of honey. The following year 60 hives made only 300 pounds, partly because some hives had died and had to be replaced.

The original plan was to make every mead from their own honey. That would have taken about 100 hives and 6,000 pounds a year. “Beekeeping is a pretty tough business,” Greg said in 2019, when he estimated that half the honey was still his own. NOCO Style reported in 2024 that the bees had kept 60 hives for 12 years. Then pesticides, insecticides, and the varroa mite killed most of them, and the couple was down to seven hives. They now buy much of their honey from the Colorado Honey Company, a family business with a distribution facility in Loveland.

Greg is still listed with the Northern Colorado Beekeepers Association as “Bee Keeper and Mead Maker,” under the name Two Bees LLC. In late March 2026 the meadery posted that it had taken its first swarm call of the season the week before: “I don’t think it has ever been this early in the year!”