Welcome to Cerana Meads,
an Indian take on history's oldest alcoholic beverage!
Mead: The orginal craft alcohol!
Cerana Meads use premium ethically sourced ingredients and contain no artificial flavours or colours. Our handcrafted meads are flavourful, refreshing, exciting and are the perfects drinks to celebrate life with.
Our Seasonal Meads
Pinot Noir Pyment
SWEETNESS LEVEL ABV 12% TYPE Pyment (Mead made with honey & grapes) FOOD PAIRING Fatty fish, roast chicken and Indian curries.Pinot Noir Pyment, the perfect representation of our commitment to the craft of mead making. Best quality natural sealed-comb honey is combined with the inky red Pinot noir grapes to bring together two wonders of nature in a bottle. Modest sweetness with balanced acidity, a fresh complex fruity bouquet and a blush rosé colour that comes from the grape skins, will give you one of a kind experience.
Pinot Noir Pyment
SWEETNESS LEVEL
ABV
12%
TYPE
Pyment (Mead made with honey and grapes)
FOOD PAIRING
Fatty fish. roast chicken, curry based Indian cuisine.
Yule Spice
SWEETNESS LEVEL ABV 11.5% TYPE Metheglin FOOD PAIRING Creamy sauce based dishesIndia's first commercially available standard mead, Yule spice is a metheglin (mead made with honey and spices.) The warm aroma of cinnamon, the gentle burn of ginger, French Oak on the nose balanced with sweet, earthy jamun-ness of honey leaves you with a lingering sense of comfort. Yule Spice is the perfect and ultimate festive drink. This is a limited period release for the winter season.
Yule Spice
This metheglin, that's mead made with spices, is a limited period release for the winter season. So wait no further and grab your bottles of India's first commercially available standard mead while stocks last.
SWEETNESS LEVEL
ABV
11.5%
TYPE
Metheglin (Mead made with honey and spices)
FOOD PAIRING
Fried snacks, mildly spiced kebabs and Indian gravy.
Our Flagship Meads
Jamun
Melomel
SWEETNESS LEVEL
ABV
7%
TYPE
Melomel (Mead made with honey and fruits)
FOOD PAIRING
Spicy and curry based cuisine
Summer in every whiff and monsoon in every swig! This mead is made by infusing Jamun fruit in jamun honey. The aroma of jamun and citrus notes add to the experience of this eartlhy concoction. Light & crisp, it opens up a multi-layered fruity tang with mild tartness which is followed by the unmistakable jamun taste which renders its dry finish.
Pomegranate Melomel
SWEETNESS LEVEL ABV 7% TYPE Melomel (Mead made with honey and fruits) FOOD PAIRING Seafood and savoury dishes with a sour basePomegranate, the mystical fruit of the underworld, adds a ruby tinge to the bronze gold pour of this mead made with lychee honey. With a fruity, caramel-vanilla aroma this mead runs smooth on the palate with toffee & pomegranate upfront followed by vanilla swirls. Off-dry finish with lingering fruity notes like a refreshing tropical punch on a balmy evening.
Chenin Blanc Pyment
SWEETNESS LEVEL ABV 8% TYPE Pyment (Mead made with honey and grapes) FOOD PAIRING Creamy sauce based dishesThe most popular grapes coming from India's wine capital Nashik are chenin blanc. Cerana offers the very first pyment in the country made with these superstar grapes. The herbaceous flavour and citric acidity of chenin blanc works wonderfully in combination with multifloral honey from Himachal with spicy notes of cinnamon, lemons and bay leaf.
Jamun Melomel
SWEETNESS LEVEL
ABV
7%
TYPE
Melomel (Mead made with honey and fruit)
FOOD PAIRING
Spicy and curry based cuisine.
Pomegranate Melomel
SWEETNESS LEVEL
ABV
7%
TYPE
Melomel (Mead made with honey and fruits)
FOOD PAIRING
Seafood and savoury dishes with a sour taste.
Chenin Blanc Pyment
SWEETNESS LEVEL
ABV
8%
TYPE
Pyment (Mead made with honey and grapes)
FOOD PAIRING
Creamy sauce based dishes
Mead is fun!
Introducing
Cerana Honey
We Make What We Love
The quality of our meads is of primary importance to us. We believe in a philosophy of ‘farm to bottle’, and in line with this we treat all our raw materials with utmost care, be it the honey, fruits or spices. We carefully preserve them and extract the natural flavours into a bottle of Cerana Mead, handcrafted with love.
The Cerana Story
When our co-founder Yoginee learnt about meads she was intrigued not only by its rich history and diversity but also because mead brought together her myriad interests. It was a marriage of her love for nature, her fascination with the social behaviour of bees and her appreciation of alcohol.
Unable to find the drink locally she experimented with making some herself and after her initial experiments were appreciated by friends and family she toyed with the idea of setting up a meadery.
She knew just who she needed to help her achieve this and reached out to her friend and fellow Ph.D. scholar, Ashwini who was finishing her post doctorate in Canada at that time.
Ashwini was always enthusiastic about creating an innovative, value added product from agricultural resources and had a love for wines and spirits, jumped at the idea of this unique and exciting venture. She traded in maple syrup for honey and thus began the journey of Cerana Meads.
Our Co-Founders
Dr. Yoginee
Budhkar
Co-Founder
Yoginee has been drawn to the nature ever since she was a child. Bees and their complex behaviour attracted her specially., In her undergrad days, this bee-lover had envisioned making alcohol.
The drive to start the meadery saw her go to California to study advanced mead making and business of mead making from UC, Davis. She also studied in detail about honeybees and bee keeping in Pune, Nashik in Maharashtra and Kottayam in Kerala. A science fiction fan she wanted to name the tanks at the meadery after the droids from Star Wars.
Dr. Ashwini
Deore
Co-Founder
Ashwini has expertise in upstream and downstream processing of biologically produced substances. In addition to this, she is a WSET 1 (London) qualified professional in wines and spirits. She has attended a workshop on the Sensory experience by VLB (Berlin).
With her love for cooking and knowledge of food science she has a knack of perfecting recipes for the various meads. On the rare occasions she is not working Ashwini enjoys long drives, painting and music.
Our Marketing Team
Devdatt
Phadnis
Sales Head
A hospitality virtuoso by profession and a true-blue foodie by emotion, Devdatt is our high-end delivery guy AKA the Sales head.
He completed his hospitality training during college days and worked across departments in the hotel industry for 6 years.
Drawn to marketing and his love for food and spirits brought him to sales for a couple of reputed E-commerce F&B start-ups and finally to Cerana Meads where his extensive experience in hotels, restaurants and sales makes him a perfect fit.
Devansh
Lala
Marketing Head
Devansh started his own edutech firm at the age of 22 while pursuing his Engineering degree in Mumbai. He led a 50 people Marketing team for his firm. He later sold his well-established brand to pursue the things he deeply cared about. This led to a short stint in consultation with NGOs related to animals and healthcare.
Devansh and Yoginee met via a carpool app and instantly struck a good friendship. A year down the line and post just 1 conversation, Yoginee and Ashwini decided to take Devansh on board to head marketing for Cerana!
Our Production Team
Rahul
Banagaiyya
Assistant Mead Maker
Rahul finished his graduation in wine making from Gargi Institute in Nashik. He followed his keenness by working for great brands like Sula and Fratelli. But, when he found out about meads, the challenge of doing something different got him to come join team Cerana.
He administers the tank hall operations, from starting a new batch of meads to bottling them efficiently.
Rahul, who is a gardner at heart, is also a passionate carrom player and excels at his game.
Suraj
Thorat
Laboratory Assistant
Suraj finished his graduation in biotechnology and started his career in a laboratory in Nashik. But his love for learning about alcoholic beverages brought him to team Cerana. He is a jack of all trades and master for more than a few.!
A perfect fit for a bootstrapping brand like Cerana, his technical skills, and hands on quality have brought about a number of positive additions at the meadery. He cannot keep still and we are happy he channels his energies into making things operations better at Cerana.
Parag
Thakur
Quality Control
Parag handles quality control and cellar operations at Cerana. He finished his masters in fermentation tech and immediately joined team Cerana. For a fresher, he has proven to be a quick learner.
He is good with, what we call “the mead math”. He comfortably handles all the sugar to alcohol conversions and keeps an eye on the quality parameters of the meads in the lab.
He is also a good dancer and a shy boy.
Sustainability @ Cerana
We take pride that a majority of our manufacturing set up is sourced locally within the state of Maharashtra, thus minimising our carbon footprint.
We source most of our produce from within the state as well. The jamuns, pomegranates and grapes are all sourced locally.
The honeys are also sourced from within the country. Lychee honey comes from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Jamun honey from Maharashtra and adjacent states. And multifloral honey comes from Himachal and Karnataka.
We take pride in only buying our honey which is collected from what is called the “super chamber” of the bee box, at a premium cost, The super chamber is where only surplus honey is stored. Cerana’s meads are certainly not made from honey that is stolen from the bees.
The entire cooling system at the meadery is automated and optimised to minimise the consumption of electricity and uses environmentally friendly coolants. The tanks in which the mead is fermented are insulated to slow down the temperature loss which is energy saving.
Water wastage through the RO water plant is minimised and effluents that are generated go through extensive treatment. The fruit waste or processed pulp generated in the mead making process gets converted into compost. The treated water and compost are used for gardening. at the meadery thus minimisiing water loss and maximising resource utilisation.
In our effort to support a sustainable practice and promote organic and environment friendly products and services we plan to collaborate with like minded lifestyle brands and help them reach a bigger market hand in hand with us.
We invite local artisans to exhibit their art and craft at the meadery. Exhibitions will range from beauty products, to fashion, to nutraceuticals, to foods, to paintings… all the while making the process fun with a few pints of our meads.
