Vinland Meads: Award-Winning Mead, Falconry, and a Family Kitchen in Murchison

ETX Uncovered · Murchison · Published October 31, 2026

The hawk is hooded and calm, perched on a thick leather glove in what used to be a tractor shop. Its name is Lasair, Scottish Gaelic for “flame,” and it is sitting in on my interview with Clyde and Sarah Hays and their chef, Sean. Clyde is explaining, in no particular hurry, how you trap a wild red-tailed hawk and teach it, in about two weeks, that hunting with you beats hunting alone.

Ask him what he is and he answers in order. Sarah's husband first. Then his boys' dad. Then falconer. Then mead maker. Then beekeeper.

He lists mead fourth, although it's actually the oldest thing on the list. Clyde was brewing from his grandfather's grandfather's Scottish recipes for more than twenty years before the hawks, the farm, or the business. Today he and his wife Sarah own Vinland Meads, and this year their mead brought home more gold medals from the Texas Mead Cup than any other meadery in the state.

Spend an afternoon there and you start to imagine how dynasties are built. Everything else in the building grew up around that recipe.

From Homebrewer to Texas Meadery: How Vinland Meads Started

The story starts before COVID, in Van, when Sarah decided the boys, all seven of them, needed to learn how to farm. Then the pandemic sent everyone home, and the timing was perfect. She bought bees. Clyde had spent two decades winning awards as a homebrewer with honey he had to buy. Now he had his own.

When Starlink opened its beta, Clyde was one of the first testers. Reliable internet meant they could live anywhere, so they sold the house and found land about five miles north of Murchison, near Sarah's family. It had three springs and was mostly woods. The first thing they built was the hawk house.

They waited a full year to make sure the springs didn't dry up. Then they started a business, but not the meadery. They started Heathen Beard Company, making beard oil and balm with wax from their own hives, partly to learn how the licensing and paperwork worked on something smaller.

The meadery was supposed to follow on a slow schedule. Then the organizers of a brand-new Viking festival in Gladewater called. They'd tasted his mead somewhere and wanted 1,500 bottles. Clyde told them no. His mead takes six months, minimum. They asked if he could have it ready by December. He could, barely. The paperwork went in two weeks later.

That was about two and a half years ago. Since then, Vinland mead has landed on liquor store shelves from Gilmer to Dallas and ships to 32 states.

Opening a Murchison Tasting Room

The plan was always a tasting room on the farm. In January, Sarah left her job at the Cancer Institute to run it full time. Then, as they got ready to pour the foundation, the county asked for a sewer system that would have cost around $60,000. It wasn't in the budget. Nothing about this place has a bank behind it.

So they pivoted. They found an old tractor shop on Highway 31, signed a lease, and walked in on April 1 with everything they had. They gutted it, built it out, and opened May 1. There was one bathroom when they started. Now there are four. When the federal permit for the new production space finally came through, they had one day to move nearly 500 gallons of mead in progress from the farm. They did it.

Murchison has fewer than 600 people. Clyde knew exactly what he was walking into, and he told the city council as much the first time he met with them.

“There is no foot traffic here. We're not looking for foot traffic.”

What they're after is the drive. Something unusual enough that people from Dallas and Austin show up every weekend, and good enough that they leave a little stunned. Every one of their Google reviews is five stars. Some visitors admit they almost didn't come because nobody has all five stars. On the way out, they tell him they understand now.

Homemade Games, Original Music, Books, and a Bookshop Under One Roof

Look around and the list keeps growing.

The arcade screen on the bar runs games Clyde built himself, complete with a leaderboard and one called Clyde Mead Barrel. The music playing overhead is his, too. He has written five albums' worth of songs, partly because he'd rather not pay licensing fees to someone in New York who doesn't pay the artists. He wrote every one of them. He did not sing a single one, a fact the whole staff was happy to point out, laughing, with what sounded a lot like gratitude.

The shelves hold books by Clyde and Sarah Hays: Year One Falconry, a memoir of their first year as apprentice falconers, and an eight-book children's series built from true stories on the farm, like the day a horse got into the beehives. Clyde just released a three-act play called The Far Shore, imagining Vikings reaching Japan. He sent it to the Japanese town where it's set, and to Viking and falconry scholars, for review. A graphic novel prequel is nearly finished.

The custom teas come from Justin Smith, Clyde's best friend and the in-house herbalist. The beard oil comes from their bees. Behind a set of double doors, Sarah is painting the shelves of her own bookstore, The Rose & Raven Bookshop.

Clyde explains it simply.

“When something gets in my brain, it bounces around until I get it out.”

Chef Sean Curry's Mead-Paired Flatbreads

Before the tasting room, Clyde and Sarah, who sits on the three-member board of the Texas Mead Association, visited every meadery and winery they could. Most served a charcuterie board and frozen pizza, if they served food at all. With every Vinland mead sitting at 16 percent, they knew people needed to eat. They wanted a real kitchen.

Sean Curry came from Austin, where he spent about twelve years in kitchens: general manager at East Side Pies, head chef at Cap City Comedy Club until COVID shut it down, then training cooks across a network of thirty food trucks, then a couple of breweries. In January 2025 he moved to East Texas to help care for family, figuring there wouldn't be work for someone like him out here. He was right. He ended up flipping burgers across the street.

That's where he met Clyde, who told him all about the tasting room he was going to open. Sean nodded along. He'd heard people talk like that before. Then one day the text came: where you at, we're open. Sean walked in the next day and couldn't believe it.

“Ever since then, it's just better not to doubt Clyde.”

The brief was flatbreads on local sourdough, but not snack food. Sean came back with the Forage, with mead white sauce, pecan-smoked andouille, blackberries, and hot honey, and the Plumage, with thin-sliced plums, prosciutto, and gorgonzola. The whole crew tastes every new idea before it goes on the menu, and both made the cut. So did Sean's mead-pickled onions, which customers keep trying to buy by the jar.

The crew likes him enough to roast him. There's an official application to date Chef Sean sitting on the table, and a song about him, “A Tribute to Taste,” which he'd prefer nobody play while he's in the room.

How Vinland Mead Is Made

Plenty of mead makers can turn a batch around in a couple of months. Clyde's takes six at the least, and that's by design.

Most makers stir honey, water, and yeast together. That leaves the yeast swimming in sugar, which stresses it, so energizers and nutrients go in to keep it working. Clyde doesn't stir. For a 110-gallon batch, he pours in 390 pounds of honey, six and a half 60-pound buckets, and lets it settle to the bottom. Water goes in on top, then yeast, then the lid. The yeast works its way down through the honey one layer at a time. Fermenting alone takes about a month and a half.

After that, every two weeks, he racks it: draws the mead off and leaves the sediment behind. Nothing goes to waste. The sediment gets pressed into fertilizer bricks for flower beds. By month four the mead runs clear. It's filtered, bottled, and labeled, and then it waits another month before anyone can buy it. His Reserve takes 18 months and gets bottled once a year, every January, about 200 bottles with Clyde and his hawk on the label.

Every Vinland mead finishes at 16 percent. He'd like you to sip it like brandy, and eat something while you do, which is the whole reason the kitchen exists.

He brews only with Texas wildflower honey from beekeepers whose hives he can walk himself, so his traditional mead tastes a little different every year. Wet years and dry years show up in the glass. He doesn't add color, either, so the blueberry mead isn't very blue. He's fine with that.

Zombie Bees and a $3,200 Bottle of Mead

Clyde doesn't pull bees out of trees. Years ago, he was in the middle of recording his tech podcast when Sarah ran into the garage and told him to get his bee suit. A tree had come down in the family cemetery, and it was full of bees.

The colony ran nearly as tall as the room. A piece of that tree sits in the tasting room now. They pulled the bees and the honey and brought them home, and only then realized there was no queen. A queenless colony shouldn't make it through the winter. This one did. Bees from a cemetery that refused to die: zombie bees.

He held on to their honey for years, until the meadery went commercial. Then he brewed it in a single six-gallon jug, ran it through his whole process, and let it rest in an oak barrel until the tasting room opened. A glassblower in Wylie hand-blew 26 bottles for it. That's all there will ever be.

Clyde describes the taste as the oakiest, peatiest Scotch you've ever had, with a sweetness underneath that isn't quite honey. Bottle 26 stays behind the bar for tastings, at $166 for a one-ounce pour.

The price of the rest was set by a friend. He wanted bottle one before it was even out of the barrel, and when Clyde told him it wasn't for sale, he left $200 in Clyde's poker box anyway, with one rule: the price doubles every time a bottle sells.

Bottle one went for $200. Bottle two, $400. Then $800, then $1,600.

Bottle five is on the shelf right now, for sale, at $3,200.

A Free Community Meal in Murchison

Back to that list.

The kitchen, the floor, and the dish pit are full of family. Two of the Hays boys work there. His daughter-in-law and her best friend work the floor. Sarah's young cousin washes dishes when they need him, and when they don't, everybody pitches in. Clyde's grandson has his own little table by the shelves and greets customers. And Sarah knows how every piece of the place works, and makes sure everyone else can step in when they need to.

At a mead festival not long ago, Clyde overheard his youngest tell a brother that their dad was famous. Clyde told him people only knew him because of the mead. His son said no. They know you.

At least once a month, the taps go off and the menu screen goes dark for a free community meal, made from brisket trimmings and kitchen scraps they refuse to waste. No donations and nothing for sale. Clyde started it after delivering fresh eggs to the food pantry across the street and noticing who was in line: mostly seniors, stretching fixed incomes. The grandfather who taught him to brew could have used a hot meal sometimes, too.

There's a reason none of this is optional for them.

“If we fail, that's going to tell our seven boys that you can't start a business in Texas.”

When a slow week gets heavy, Sarah has a standard response: suck it up, buttercup.

The recipe came down from his grandfather's grandfather in Scotland. His grandfather taught him to make it. Now it's poured from a bottle that reads Honor Your Ancestors, in a building where his sons cook, his daughter-in-law works the floor, and his grandson greets you when you walk in.

He may list it fourth. It's still the thing underneath everything else, and he's already handing it down.

Why I Interviewed Them

I walked into Vinland Meads expecting a tasting room. I walked out having seen a hooded hawk, a homemade arcade, a children's book about a Highland calf, a play about Vikings in Japan, and a dating application for the chef.

Nobody there treats any of it as unusual. This is a family that sees an idea, a gap, or even a leftover brisket trimming, and makes something out of it. Then they hand it to the people around them.

ETX Uncovered exists to highlight the people and places you'd drive right past if you didn't slow down. Murchison is easy to drive past. Vinland Meads is a good reason not to.

Know a business owner building something meaningful in East Texas? I'd love to hear about them.

Vinland Meads is a meadery and artisan kitchen at 6504 State Highway 31 East in Murchison. Find them in the ETX Discovered listing or reach them at vinlandmeads.com and (903) 484-6018.