One Heck of a Month
It has been one heck of a month for Tineo Mead Company, so I’ll get straight into the highlights.
Tineo is now a fully licensed production meadery. After months of applications, inspections, paperwork, and preparation, we completed the final licensing requirements needed to legally begin production.
I also entered Tineo’s flagship recipe in Mead Stampede, an amateur mead competition based in Oklahoma. I made the batch at home without any commercial equipment, but with the same focus on quality that will go into everything we will produce at Tineo. The recipe took first place in its category out of 23 entries and received great feedback from two certified judges.
Not that I don’t trust my wonderful friends and family, but having complete strangers, let alone experienced judges, validate something I created was incredibly meaningful. It gave me even more confidence that we are building around the right recipe.
We also completed Tineo’s first full branding effort. Tineo now has a logo, a can design, and a visual identity that finally makes the company feel real. I worked with the wonderful team of Nadia Percan and Emiliano Carbone at Aligned Collab in Buenos Aires. Their design moved Tineo away from its original, more rigid look and created something that brings the fluidity and natural beauty of honey to life.
It has been a lot of fun updating the website around the new identity. The final label files and barcode are ready, and I’m now working with a local printer to get the first labels produced and onto some cans.
We’ve also begun reaching out to festivals and other local events, and I’m starting to hear back from some excited organizers. There’s nothing official to announce just yet, but it has been a lot of fun beginning to put the calendar together and imagining people finally getting to try Tineo.
It has now been about three months since I signed the lease on an empty industrial space. Since then, it has slowly transformed into a real working meadery, complete with fermentation tanks, production equipment, water filtration, and nearly everything needed to make our first commercial batch.
The last major piece of equipment is scheduled to arrive within the next couple of days. Once it is connected, I’ll do a little more of my favorite activity, cleaning, and then at long last I’ll be pouring honey into the tanks.
A lot more is coming soon.
Chris
