Jenkintown has a new cocktail bar that specializes in mead. Just don’t call it a meadery

When Melissa Hager and Mike O’Donnell went to name their new bar in Jenkintown, they decided against celebrating mead, the honeyed spirit they’re making.

“From a marketing perspective, it was just silly to make that the core focus,” O’Donnell said of the idea of calling the bar a meadery. “The first thing people [say is], ‘Oh, you’re a butcher? You’re a meatery? What kind of meats do you have?’”

That’s how Yorkway Place, Jenkintown’s most-charming pedestrian alley, came to be home to the Keep Easy, a cozy bar serving up dry, house-made mead plus Pennsylvania wine and cocktails. The former reading room’s interior maxes out at 20 people, but there’s seating for 30 on its front patio, set back from Route 611 traffic in a pre-war shopping arcade. It opened in July.

O’Donnell and Hager have lived in Jenkintown for more than eight years. The couple had a tea lounge called the Herb Shop at 747 Yorkway Place since March 2020 but decided to pivot to something more lucrative in the last year. They landed on making mead.

Mead is ancient and simple — made from honey and water — but outside the Renaissance Faire circuit, it’s almost stubbornly obscure. In an age that’s embraced fermentation of all kinds, more people are familiar with kombucha than mead.

And that’s partly why Hager and O’Donnell chose it. They considered making beer or spirits, but the brewery market felt oversaturated and the overhead on a distillery seemed out of reach. Mead, by contrast, requires relatively little equipment. Plus, “not a lot of people know about this,” O’Donnell said.

“It’s basically the same fermentation process as wine, but instead of fruit, we’re using honey,” he explained.

He and Hager buy 20-gallon batches of honey from a Lancaster farm, haul that home, and dilute it with water, and add yeast. It can take six months to a year for the yeast to fully consume the sugars in the mixture; from there, the meadmaker can age the spirit further to let the flavors mellow and meld. O’Donnell declined to say how long they age their mead but said they ferment out all the sugar they can.

That means, despite some first-time customers’ expectations, the Keep Easy’s mead is not sweet. “It’s actually very dry,” O’Donnell said. “Depending on the yeast I use, it’s somewhere between a wine and a Champagne.” For customers who’d like a sweeter beverage, he offers to mix in a little agave.

The couple began making mead together in 2022 and got a Pennsylvania winery license (allowing them to serve any Pennsylvania-made booze) earlier this spring. The menu features their own mead served neat, hot, over ice, or by the flight (other flavors include turmeric, hibiscus, and yerba mate — inspired by their tea-shop past). They also mix up a number of carefully calibrated mead cocktails, including a surprisingly dry meadtini, a frothy mead sour, and a muddled mead old-fashioned.

The Keep Easy also has an extensive traditional cocktail list, from a gin fizz to the dark & stormy, all made from scratch. They’re sourcing from several Pennsylvania distilleries — Bluecoat, New Liberty, Resurgent, Thistle Finch, Dad’s Hat, Manatawny Still Works, Bluebird, Jacquin’s, and more — giving them a deep arsenal to shake or stir up whatever drink you might want. The bee’s knees and a pineapple mint julep are the best-sellers so far.

Food offerings are limited by the small space’s kitchen, but there’s tinned fish and snack boards, cheese and crackers, chips and salsa, and cake.

Hours are noon to 11 p.m. Thursday and Sunday, noon to midnight on Friday and Saturday.

The Keep Easy joins a growing number of more modern spots in Jenkintown, including Human Robot, Newbolds, Pizza Wheel, and Via 417 as well as standbys like Buckets and the Drake Tavern, where Hager and O’Donnell met 10 years ago. (He’s from Exton, she’s from the Northeast.)

“Jenkintown’s just awesome,” O’Donnell said. “It could be a Doylestown, it could be a New Hope once more businesses come in ... We wanted to be a part of that, too.”