Supplier Spotlight: Gosnells Of London
Last week saw the launch of our latest exhibition, “As Chosen By” by Kate Friend, in partnership with Lyndsey Ingram. Guests poured in to the Tithe Barn to wander the space and chat amongst friends, Peckham Lemonade in hand. Lyndsey introduced us to Gosnells, the London based drinks company championing mead who kindly hosted the launch party with us, and it has been a delight to learn more about this ancient drink. Over to Tom Gosnell, founder of Gosnells of London…
Mead often conjures up images of Vikings, Beowulf and Game of Thrones, but the drink has a lot more to offer than its traditional novelty “castle gift shop” image suggests. Here at Gosnells we’re making mead modern, by shaking up aged perceptions of this honey based alcohol.
Mead has a long history – indeed it’s believed to be the oldest form of alcohol, with evidence for making mead going back further than the year 10,000 BC. Honey based drinks crop up all over the world, from Ethiopia where it’s still enjoyed today as Tej, through Mesopotamia across Asia to India and China. In some ways it’s the one of the simplest alcohols, requiring just honey and water and, in the past, wild yeasts to ferment it.
However, this simplicity belies the rich complexity that honey can produce in a drink. We like to describe honey as liquid flowers – the honey is a distillation of all the nectar that the bees have been collecting and the flavours of those flowers.
Bees forage for around 3 miles from the hive, and all those different flavours make it into the honey. It’s this story of the terroir of the honey that we really want to tell at Gosnells – DNA testing the honey that goes into our signature Wildflower Mead showed that it’s made from over 45 different plants and flowers!
Of course, bees are more than just a source of honey, they’re are an essential part of the natural world – it’s thought that over 66% of the food we eat has been pollinated by bees.
This is something we’re keen to highlight at Gosnells and we’ve just launched a Guerrilla Gardening campaign to encourage everyone to plant more for pollinators. In our pocket of Peckham, SE London, we’re teaming up with the local community to take over neglected spaces and brighten them up with planting. As well as providing much needed habitats for bees and other wildlife it softens the urban environment.
If all this talk of drinks has made you thirsty, you’re probably asking yourself what the best way to drink mead is ? Our Wildflower Mead is the perfect drink for a hot summer’s day, best served well chilled. It's a textbook thirst quencher, reminiscent of cider but with a drier honeyed flavour.
Our other favourite way to drink Gosnells is as part of a cocktail – our mead provides the perfect lengthener for a tall drink, our choice is the Peckham Lemonade, a delicious combination of gin, lemon juice and mead.
If you want to find out more about us or our mission to help save the bees – check us out on IG @gosnellsmead or www.gosnells.co.uk.
Peckham Lemonade Recipe
Our Peckham lemonade is our Signature cocktail debuting our Wildflower honey Mead. The combination of a botanical forward London Dry Gin and our delicious Wildflower mead meld together sweet and savory. Bringing a new spin on a classic French 75.
INGREDIENTS
100ml Gosnells Wildflower Honey Mead
35ml London Dry Gin
15ml Honey Syrup
25ml Lemon Juice
METHOD
Build in a Boston shaker;
Add Gin, Lemon & Honey syrup.
Fill the Boston shaker with ice and shake.
Strain over iced glass & add Gosnells Wildflower honey, garnished with lemon peel spritzed & straw.
