You don’t have to try very hard to find a microbrewery within an hour of Plant City. The craft beer industry has exploded in recent years as these small breweries have become some of America’s favorite event venues, meeting locations, nighttime hotspots and daytime tour destinations.
Most people do, however, have to put in some work to find a meadery. The world’s oldest alcoholic beverage hasn’t had a renaissance quite like its carbonated counterpart. But now you don’t need to go to the nearest Renaissance festival to try it.
Plant City is now home to Three Hands Mead Company, a labor of love by longtime homebrewers Cody and Jamie Lenz that’s bringing something new — and something very old — to the burgeoning development of Evers Street in the Historic Downtown District. The meadery has been open for several weeks now with a limited menu and will soon roll out its own unique flavors for its May 29 grand opening party.
Cody Lenz started making mead seven years ago after he and Jamie Lenz were introduced to it at the Stein & Vine in Brandon. He already had brewing experience from several years working with his father, but mead offered a new challenge as well as something both he and Jamie Lenz could enjoy together.
“She loved it,” Cody Lenz said. “I was excited and I learned that night that mead is not cheap. Out of necessity, really, I got into making it. It turned out well and I kept going with it. It’s really something I can do to make for my wife to have a drink. It turned into something I would share with my friends. That turned into submitting meads to competitions and winning medals, and realizing I’m actually making good mead. The opportunity to grow opened up in Plant City and we ran with it.”
After a Topics on Tap meeting two years ago, in which he brought some bottles of his mead and shared them with positive results, Cody Lenz said he realized Plant City may have room for a meadery if not a brewery. It would fit right in with the neighboring Roots Tap Room and Wine Bar and Tipsy Bookworm — all three businesses offer a unique bar experience with vastly different menus. There’s no heated competition here, but there is a kinship between them.
And that plays right into the meadery’s name. Whenever the Lenzes need to help each other out with a project, whether it’s been Cody making mead or Jamie building the meadery downtown, they’d ask each other for a “third hand.” Now that the meadery’s up and running, they’d like to be that extra helping hand for their neighbors and Plant City at large.
“A goal of ours is to be the ‘third hand’ for whoever needs it,” Cody Lenz said. “If somebody on the block downtown needs help, if there’s an organization that needs help and a place to host an event, or they need donations for a backpack drive, we want to be that ‘third hand’ for the community when they need it.”
The tasting room was designed and built largely by Jamie Lenz, and the work was largely done on the fly. Besides having a contractor come to frame out the bar, everything you see in the tasting room was the result of spur-of-the-moment inspiration and trips to the Lowes in Plant City.
“It was one of those things where none of us planned… it was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a honeycomb bar? Let’s do it. Wouldn’t it be cool to have bee smokers for lights? Let’s do it,’” Cody Lenz said. “We’re at Lowes and she goes, ‘Oh, those look like old bee hives, let’s get those for lights.’ None of this was planned — we just came up with it as we went. It turned out pretty good. I’m really happy with the way the place looks. And it’s funny because I’m not a yellow person but I’m really happy with that back wall over there. I don’t know why.”
Even with a limited menu of beer and mead on four taps, plus whatever’s in the fridge, Three Hands has been warmly received by the Plant City community since its soft opening. The bar was packed last month for the Improvement League’s Blues, BBQ and Berries event and was also the highlight of this week’s Topics on Tap block party event. Plant City’s introduction to mead has been swift and successful thus far — more so than the Lenzes envisioned when they first opened the place — and it should only get better from here as Three Hands’ signature offerings make their way to the taps on May 29. There will also be beers, hard seltzers, ciders and eventually non-alcoholic options available for people who aren’t trying to drink mead but still want to hang out at the meadery.
Cody Lenz said Three Hands will eventually bottle and sell its mead to go out of the tasting room, then look into local distribution within a year and move to larger-scale operations after that. The meadery’s goal is to branch out and help mead get the star turn craft beer has while staying true to its Plant City roots.
“There’s no better place,” Cody Lenz said.
The meadery, located at 111 S. Evers St., is open from 5 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, from 5 to 11 p.m. Fridays, from 1 to 11 p.m. Saturdays and 1 to 9 p.m. Sundays.
WHAT IS MEAD?
There’s no known alcoholic beverage older than mead, which has been consumed all over the word for thousands of years.
In theory, it’s pretty simple: honey and water fermented by yeast. It’s generally sweeter than most drinks thanks to its base of honey, but not all mead has to be cloyingly sweet. That’s something the Lenzes hope to teach people who may be skeptical about trying it.
“It’s very similar to making wine,” Cody Lenz said. “Instead of starting with grapes, you start with honey. From there we decide where we want to go with flavors. It’s honey, water and yeast as the base. From there we can do fruits, spices, coffee, maple syrup, hot peppers — it’s really only limited by our creativity. It’s all just kid of figuring out the ratios of what you want to do, throwing it in the tank and giving it some yeast.”
Anyone concerned about drinking a heavy, fruity, strong beverage in Florida’s summer heat need not worry. Carbonated meads have become increasingly popular in the last five to six years, Cody Lenz said, and they put a lighter, more refreshing take on the drink.
“It’s like in the beer world when winter is stout season,” he said. “In the mead world, winter is big, heavy fruit mead season. In the summer we’ve got lower ABV, carbonated stuff that doesn’t wear you out in the heat.”
Mead plays well with fruits and spices for flavoring, but it does allow much room for creativity.
“One of our most popular meads is ‘Not for the Faint of Tart,’ which is tart cherries, cranberries and pomegranates,” Cody Lenz said. “It balances that tartness from all those fruits with the sweetness of the honey.”
Cody Lenz said one of the meadery’s goals is not only to introduce the drink to people who don’t know about it, but also to change the minds of anyone who swore off it after drinking the cheapest stuff.
“Not all mead is equal,” he said. “If you’ve had mead at the ren fair… this isn’t your everyday Renaissance festival mead. It’s a challenge and it’s something we enjoy at the same time, getting people to realize this is much better than that and that they do like mead. They can become mead people… the joke I tell people is, ‘You’ve had Heineken but you still drink beer.’”