Daniel Eichler, a recent graduate of the MSL program, has a unique passion: brewing mead. With a background in Chemistry and a clear love of experimentation, Dan creates innovative flavors of the traditional beverage. Thanks to the MSL program, he has plans to incorporate his hobby into a business! Read on to hear his full story.
Background
I started brewing mead a little more than a year ago. I had just finished my bachelor’s degree in chemistry and I was looking for a hobby to keep me busy while I waited for the MSL program to start. With the uptick in micro brewing in the past decade, I felt that brewing would make for an interesting distraction. Through lots of research in brewing science, I stumbled upon brewing mead. The thought of brewing mead captivated me – it was easy and cheap enough to start brewing small batches, and there was also a lot of room for more challenging batches when I perfected the art.
The Chemistry Behind Brewing
A lot of brew science stems from chemistry and biology; my recent degree in chemistry made my learning curve a lot less steep. Any zymological process (i.e. fermentation) only requires yeast and a sugar source: beer uses the sugars boiled out from grains, wine uses the sugars squeezed from grapes, and mead uses the sugars from honey. Traditional mead only contains three ingredients: honey, water, and yeast. Understanding which strain of yeast the brewer is working with and what style of mead the brewer wants to make will dictate the primary fermentation steps.
Yeast is a living organism and as such will only thrive if its environment is hospitable. Ironically, as sugar concentration increases, there is more food for the yeast to eat, but as the yeast eats the sugar, it is converted into ethanol, and as the ethanol levels increase, the environment becomes more inhospitable. This is where the fun of brewing starts to bloom. Knowing what concentration of sugar the yeast will fully utilize to reach desired the alcohol content while keeping the mead either dry or sweet takes the precision of a scientist. But it also needs the feel of an artisan.
Varieties of Mead
The fun and artisanal aspect of being a “meader” comes from the varieties of mead that can be made. A Metheglin is a mead with added spices. My most current metheglin is a Thai hibiscus flower tea called Bleed Purple, which was unveiled for the 2017 MSL graduating class.
Some brewers are adventurous enough to use spices, like chipotle peppers in their meads, and as odd as it may sound, the heat brings great balance to the sweetness of typical meads. Melomel is another variety of mead – it has added fruit. Basically, if it’s a tasty edible fruit, it can be fermented in mead. As of late, I have been going a little overboard with blueberries, but I have also put together orange and cherry melomels. Another variety of mead that I have been experimenting with is a Cyser, which is a mead where the water is replaced with apple cider. A Braggot is a mead that has sugars from grains – like what you would find in beer – along with honey as the main source of sugar. Lastly, a Pyment is a mead made with grapes or grape juice.
From Hobby to Business
The MSL program has instilled in me an entrepreneurial drive and solid business strategy. Even though this brewing is in its infancy and is still only a hobby, I have been instinctively positioning myself to create value from this project. Hopefully, I will be able to capture that value when the time is right. Currently, the largest barrier to entry is the cost of the materials; 60 lbs of honey is surprisingly expensive, and my currently production capacity does not allow for proper utilization of wholesale shipments. Also, there is not much of a demand for mead in the market right now. In fact, every time my mead brewing comes up in conversation, the first reaction is “what is mead?”
I have not yet officially formed an actual business for my brewing company, but when I get around to doing this, I will likely form Eichler Brewing as an LLC – a Limited Liability Corporation. The holdup is this pesky PhD in chemistry that I will be starting in August. In the meantime, the business is still just a hobby, and I will devote my attention to working on perfecting the brewing arts and developing a plethora of recipes. I guess I can say that the business is at the 3 F’s stage, more commonly known as “Friends, Family and Fools.” I have had many discussions with potential investors about funding, equipment, and locations.
How the MSL Has Helped
It was an interesting and happy coincidence that the budding idea of starting a brewery/meadery was running parallel to my learning the intricacies of entrepreneurship in the MSL program. For fun and practicality, I would often use the idea of forming a functioning brewery to navigate the hypothetical business fact patterns we explored in MSL classes. The classes gave me the tools – such as evaluating how to organize my business, whether to incorporate or form an LLC – needed to bring these ideas to fruition; the abundance of speaking events related to entrepreneurship at the law school provided me with real insight into the common pitfalls of starting a business.
In addition to courses in business and entrepreneurship, I focused my MSL curriculum on studying intellectual property. Before starting the program I would have never imagined that there was any intellectual property in a brewing business. I was wrong. I now know the importance of establishing trademarks and trade dress; I have been taught the value of the copyrights that my personally-designed labels carry; I have learned the importance of deciding whether to pursue patents or to keep the IP as a trade secret; and I have gone through the rigors of learning the law so that Eichler Brewing™ maintains its brands and properly creates a trade secret for its recipes. I have also learned that establishing IP is important, but understanding the risks of infringing other business’ IP may be just as important.
About the Brand
Branding is the largest contributor of Eichler Brewing’s intellectual property and because of that I have invested a lot of energy into thinking about the stories that the brand tells. When I first started brewing mead, I was interested in blending Norse mythology into all of the drinks. The very first brew I made was cherry mead and it was titled ‘Heiðrún’s Nectar.’ Heiðrún was the goat that lived in Valhalla and ate the leaves of Yggdrasil, the tree of life. After eating the leaves from the tree of life, Heiðrún would make mead in very much the same way as a cow makes milk.
I now use the phrase ‘brewed by a goat’ on all of labels for my mead bottles, as you can see on this picture of the label for my recent production of Bleed Purple mead:
I produced 25 bottles of mead to serve at our celebratory graduation reception and was also happy to be able to make an individual bottle of mead for each member of our 50-person graduating class. The hibiscus flowers gave the mead a pretty purple color, and a floral taste and smell. In many ways, the mead was a perfect coming together of everything great about the MSL: chemistry, business, intellectual property, pride in our school (thus the purple, Northwestern’s color), and most of all, a wonderful and very collaborative community.
Dan Eichler, MSL ’17
Follow Eichler Brewing on Instagram to see more photos of the mead brewing process. You can also learn more about Dan on the MSL website!
