The Magic Kingdom of Meads: Zymarium Meadery Is a Hidden-Gem in Orlando Making Mead for the Future

Orlando might be known for castles, wizards, and a specific famous mouse, but tucked away from the theme park hustle is an entirely different kind of magic—liquid magic, to be exact. At Zymarium Meadery, Joe and Ginger Leigh are reinventing the world’s oldest fermented beverage for a brand-new generation.

Typically made from fermenting honey with water and fruit, mead stretches back generations, across continents, and time periods. But Zymarium tells a story of mead not through the past but the present and the future. Here, mead isn’t a relic, but a living, breathing experiment, bursting with endless possibilities. Much like its famous neighboring theme park, Zymarium is an emporium of imagination. All told through mead. Think lychee mead, so refreshing it practically transports you to a tropical orchard, or a blackberry cheesecake mead so silky it feels like dessert in a glass.

The name itself, Zymarium, nods to zymology and zymurgy—the study (and art) of fermentation. And that’s precisely the ethos here: combining meticulous science with fearless creativity to craft “meads of the future.” Honey isn’t just a sweetener; it’s a canvas, as expressive as grapes in wine or hops in beer, capturing the essence of place, season, and imagination.

Zymarium is almost like a place where adults can feel like kids again. Where the impossible and the improbable become possibilities in a bottle.

Step inside their sleek Orlando taproom, and you aren’t just going to another taproom—you’re stepping into an era of exploration, experimentation, and just pure magic.

From Addiction to Accomplishment

Photography courtesy of Zymarium Meadery

“I was quite literally addicted to honey in college,” says Ginger, who would take honey bears with her to classes and buzz through one daily. “I don’t know what my chemistry deficiency was then,” she laughs.

Although today Ginger says her cravings have subsided to normal levels, the obsession had its benefits. “I realized that different countries had totally different tastes of honey,” says the interactive artist who traveled the world producing creative, interactive installations under her artist name Synthestruct. “That was a whole new world for me.”

As it did for Joe, in a slightly different way.

The Untappd ticker and beer collector used to have a spreadsheet with hundreds of super-rare beers. He and his friends would get together once a year to share everything they’d collected.

In one of those trades, someone gifted Joe a mead as an extra. After trying all the beers, the group decided to open the fermented honey beverage, a Schramm’s Black Agnes.

“We all took sips and just looked at each other,” recalled Joe. “This was better than all the beers we just spent a lot of time and money getting.”

Joe went whole hive collecting mead, spending not an insignificant sum tracking down bottles from meaderies all over the country (the highest being over one hundred dollars for a 2014 Schramm’s Statement Reserve).

One year, for her birthday, Ginger suggested they try making mead instead.

“It didn’t turn out anything like the mead I fell in love with,” jokes Joe. “It’s very easy to make alcohol, but it’s very hard to make mead.”

Ginger chips in positively, “Well, it successfully fermented!”

Regardless, the software engineer became obsessed, reading white papers and researching wine chemistry.

“He’s very programmatic,” explains Ginger. “He’d change one variable, take a million notes, see how that affected the mead, change another variable, see how that affected the mead, and take [more] meticulous notes.”

And he made lots and lots of batches of homemade mead—close to one hundred, experimenting with different fruits, yeast strains, and flavors.

“I love science, and I love making things,” says Joe. “It keeps me going because there are infinite flavor possibilities to explore.”

Slowly, each batch started to get better than the last.

When a friend recommended that Joe enter a local competition, he won a gold medal for Nostalgia for Infinity, a blueberry, blackberry, raspberry mead. In 2018, that mead would win three different golds and best of show at different homebrewing competitions.

Despite the success, Joe always thought opening a meadery was just a fantasy. He had a giant document with hundreds of pages of notes about his dream fermented honey factory, but he never actually thought it would happen.

He had a full-time job, and Ginger spent most of her time traveling the world creating large-scale interactive audio-visual installations for brands like ARTECHOUSE in Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C.

Then the pandemic hit.

Not All Pear Shaped in the Pandemic

Photography courtesy of Zymarium Meadery

The pandemic put six months’ worth of projects on pause indefinitely for Ginger, who, by her admission, isn’t good at sitting around with nothing to do.

“I had all this built-up creative energy,” recalls Ginger, who turned to Joe and said, “I’m never going to have this much time on my hands again.”

If ever there was a time to work on a business plan for opening a meadery, “now’s the only time to do it,” she says.

It took the couple nine months to find a location, but Zymarium Meadery opened in August 2023 with twenty meads on tap.

“The joke is,” says Joe, “that we didn’t sleep for a few years.”

Joe approaches mead with meticulous modernity.

One of their most popular series, titled Endless Meads, focuses solely on honey and a specific fruit. Usually, you take honey, dilute it with water, add your fruit, and ferment.

With Zymarium’s Endless Meads, they dilute honey with 2,000 pounds of fresh fruit. No water needed here. Just the juice from crushed fruit.

“It is absolutely an insane amount of work,” says Joe, who has to constantly punch and press the chosen fruit down to extract the needed liquid.

What he gets, though, is an incredible amount of skin and tannins that contribute to color and flavor.

Zymarium has cycled through all types of produce, including berries, bananas, and even pears. The latter two, Joe will then condition on dried bananas or dried pears, respectively, to “keep pushing that fruit profile as far as possible.”

Zymarium has become known for these Endless Meads. But they’re just one example of the spectrum of meads you can find here.

The Hive Whisperer

Photography courtesy of Zymarium Meadery

For a spreadsheet savant and scrupulous notetaker hellbent on process, Joe has an uncanny way of letting meads speak to him.

“I treat making mead more like cooking than baking,” he says, noting he won’t release something unless he loves it. “I’ve never dumped anything, but I will keep working with it.”

Instead of following a set recipe step by step, Joe will constantly assess, adding a drop more of this, whether that’s acid, tannins, or more fruit.

He lets the mead tell its story, whether that’s an expression of a specific honey varietal or a flavor melding of different fruits.

For example, Scarlet Magick, a hibiscus mead inspired by one of Joe’s favorite drinks at a local taco spot, Hunger Street Tacos. After their hibiscus tea blew him away, Joe had the idea to mimic the flavors through mead. The trick Joe learned after seeing them make the tea in the kitchen was to use real hibiscus.

For the collab, Hunger Street Tacos dropped off fifty pounds of hibiscus. Planning to make a session mead, Joe actually added the hibiscus during fermentation instead of finishing the mead on the flower. What Joe expected to be a bright, fruity mead turned more red-wine tannic during fermentation. To balance, Joe backsweetened the mead with panela sugar, also known as piloncillo, a traditional, unrefined sugar popular in Latin America. Even then, the mead still needed something. Joe looked at spices traditionally used with hibiscus—ginger, cinnamon, and clove. He did a trial with clove first.

“It was one of those moments where you’re just like, I have never tasted this combination or anything like this before,” says the stunned meadmaker. “It was phenomenal; I’m now obsessed.”

Joe calls the mead “magical.”

Released for Halloween, Scarlet Magick “quickly became people’s favorite,” gushes Ginger.

This is Joe’s sweet spot: finding new flavors, experimenting with old ones, and combining complementary notes to make something you’ve never tasted before, bringing new regions of the world to life.

For instance, Florida Lychee, a session mead at 6.5% ABV, debuted on the opening-day menu but was originally just a mead Joe made for himself.

“Whenever I eat lychees, I can never eat enough to be satisfied,” says Joe, who made a mead that would drink like a really amazing glass of fresh lychee juice with orange blossom honey.

The mead turned out sweet, juicy, refreshing, and tropical.

One small experimental batch blew up.

Videos of the mead on TikTok had influencers crowding into Zymarium for the lychee mead.

Folks lined up for hours at festivals just to try it.

“People would walk in, and if we didn’t have the lychee mead, they just said see you later,” recounts Joe, who quickly realized they needed to make this mead a flagship.

Currently, the lychee mead easily outsells every other one at Zymarium by two to one.

“It has become our gateway mead,” says Joe, who emphasizes that Zymarium intentionally has a mead for everyone.

Mead for the Masses

Photography courtesy of Beer Belly Boys Club

What many people don’t realize about honey is that it’s as expressive as grapes in wine or hops in beer.

Honey from the supermarket has been stripped down, ultra-filtered, and pasteurized. Everything has been removed so that the honey will never crystallize, staying liquid and shelf-stable.

Without the original characteristics of the pollen, “it’s just been blended to be the flavor of grey,” explains Joe.

When you get unfiltered, unheated honey in big fifty-gallon drums that each weigh 650 pounds from local pollinators, like they do at Zymarium, you’re getting the purest expression of a varietal.

“Having fresh honey is phenomenal,” says Joe. “The aroma when you open up the drum…smells like spring.”

And the flavor changes depending on the country, region, area, etc. Much like grapes have terroir, affected by the weather, soil conditions, and temperature, honey also takes on the tastes of the land and changes seasonally.

“Even if we sought to get the exact same honey every single year,” says Ginger, “it’s impossible because it changes yearly.”

You can see this in Zymarium’s first batch of Existential Magnetism, a mead featuring Florida’s Black Mangrove honey. And a second batch, which highlighted Lehua Blossom Honey from Hawaii.

The former fermented with bright pineapple notes, to which Joe added one hundred pounds of raw coconut. Although the honey initially expressed butterscotch caramel, “fermentation changes it in a really novel way,” says Joe. “It would have been a crime not to put it on coconut.”

The name alludes to two elements calling to each other.

Joe called that mead an “unexpected surprise.” But as with his other experimentations, he leaned into it.

Especially since the coconut soaks up like thirty percent of the mead, Existential Magnetism isn’t a mead made in practicality, but one that pays homage to the honey in all its glory.

“It’s so worth it,” says the meadmaker.

The experiment paid off with Existential Magnetism winning a gold for best Metheglin (mead with spices or herbs) in the United States and Florida at the Untappd Community Awards and a bronze in the Sweet Metheglin category from the National Honey Board’s Mead Crafters Competition.

You can also make mead that varies from bone dry to sensationally sweet. It’s easy to assume that, since mead is fermented honey, it will always be sweet. This just isn’t true.

To showcase this spectrum, Zymarium offers flights at its tasting room.

“We try to ask people what they’re in the mood for right now,” explains Ginger, as opposed to what they usually drink.

Much like other preferences, what you’re in the mood for can change daily.

“It’s a lot like music,” says Ginger, “I’m not going to listen to the same song all day; it really depends on what I’m doing at the moment.”

Joe suggests getting one of Zymarium’s flights, which they can curate for you, or you can create one yourself.

If you choose one of their preset flights, Zymarium sets up sips for you from driest to sweetest, most delicate to bold.

The Bold and the Bee-utiful

Photography courtesy of Drew Garraway (on the top, middle right, and bottom right)

As a modern meadery, Zymarium isn’t afraid to blur the lines between traditional and totally out there.

Self-proclaimed foodies and cocktail lovers, Joe and Ginger find inspiration for Zymarium’s meads everywhere.

After trying milk punch, a current cocktail trend that includes booze, citrus, and some type of warm milk clarified and strained, Joe came up with a recipe for a blackberry cheesecake mead.

Currently, Endless Blackberry Cheesecake is one of Ginger’s favorites.

“It literally tastes like an actual blackberry cheesecake,” Ginger says excitedly.

Joe takes his Endless Blackberry recipe and adds fifty pounds of cream cheese powder, carefully massaging and mixing so it doesn’t oxidize.

“We’re basically rehydrating cream cheese in the mead, mixing it in, punching it down,” explains Joe. “We let it separate out, and we take the mead out from under this giant cream cheese [cloud].”

The result is a mead that’s unbelievably silky and velvety, where you can actually taste the cream cheese.

“It’s unlike any other mead I’ve ever experienced,” says Joe, who also adds a bunch of vanilla beans in as well to amplify the flavor profile. “It’s become our new style that people are just crazy about.”

Zymarium has this modern approach to mead, one that might borrow from the past but zooms to the future.

When you walk into Zymarium’s taproom in Orlando, FL, it’s almost as if you have time-traveled.

Drinking in Deja Vu at Zymarium

Photography courtesy of Drew Garraway (top right, bottom left, and bottom right)

The mostly deep black taproom with accents of gold feels calming in a way that most people can’t describe. It’s a place you’ve never been to, yet it still seems like somewhere familiar. You just can’t quite put your finger on it.

Ginger often hears people say, “I don’t know why, but I feel so calm and at home when I walk in here.”

Using her artistic background, Ginger designed the taproom to be in many ways the exact opposite of her normally sensory-overloaded productions.

Instead, it’s a space “that actually slows down time,” explains Ginger.

Which is precisely how she wants it. Because mead is a new learning experience for most people, Ginger wants Zymarium’s taproom to exude comfort and not necessarily cosiness but closeness, like meeting someone for the first time and knowing you’re going to be great friends.

“At the core, I want [the taproom] to be a place where people want to come back,” says Ginger, who first built pretty much every detail of the design in a model to scale.

From the playlist to every single plant, all the fine elements come together to “create a space where people can focus on the meads in front of them and the conversations with people.” Even down to the details that most people probably won’t even notice.

Like the recurring theme of six. A honeycomb is a hexagon with six sides, so Ginger’s math mind incorporates these fractal components into a synthesizing whole.

The taproom has six booths with six lights above them. At the bar, you’ll find twelve chairs with twelve lights. And you’ll find the hexagon shape on different elements, like the side panels of the bar.

“Even if nobody else realizes it,” says Ginger, “these elements have meaning and a sense of being.”

The Meaning of Zymarium

Photography courtesy of Drew Garraway

From the same root as zymology or zymurgy, the study of fermentation, Zymarium plays into the meadery’s mission to make modern meads for the future.

Meads that go from bone dry to super sweet. Meads that include blackberries and cream cheese powder, or just honey and fruit, or faraway honeys from places like Hawaii.

The common denominator here?

“The joy of sharing mead with other people,” says Ginger. “It’s really exciting to introduce people to something new, a whole new world they’ve never tried before.”

One of Joe’s favorite things is seeing someone’s face light up when they try mead for the first time. That never gets old.

“Seeing the look on people’s faces and the community we’ve built and fostered and that has grown up around us has been really magical,” reflects Joe.

People have traveled from all over the world just to try Zymarium’s meads. Joe points specifically to fans from Romania and China. “They were in Orlando for us,” says Joe. “They didn’t come from the park; they didn’t come for work. No, they made sure we knew that they flew here just for us; that was just absolutely humbling.”
Locally, Zymarium has become a community space, hosting events for organizations like the Orlando Gayming League, with a recent event raising $1,600 for the Coalition for the Homeless.

“These are their lives,” says Ginger, “moments that are important to them to share with other people; we can build that community.”

At Zymarium, mead isn’t just a means to an end; it’s a means to the future. And that’s just pure magic.