Meet Justin Schoendorf of Atlanta

Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Schoendorf.

Hi Justin, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Monks Meadery was born from a mix of financial necessity and a passion for craft alcohol by high school friends Martin Key and Justin Schoendorf. The story began shortly after the duo graduated college and moved to Atlanta. As “relatively poor” recent grads with an “insatiable appetite for craft beer,” they were frustrated by Georgia’s strict alcohol laws, which at the time capped beer at 6% ABV. To bypass these limits and save money, they turned to homebrewing. While experimenting with various recipes, they stumbled upon an ancient, obscure beverage: mead (fermented honey wine). Having never actually tasted a commercial version before, they approached the process like brewers, creating a dry, carbonated, and high-ABV (over 12%) drink that differed significantly from the sweet, still meads common in history. After years of refining their recipe and navigating complex legal hurdles they founded the company in 2011. They chose “Monks Meadery” to honor the English monks who traditionally kept bees and brewed mead for religious ceremonies before King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. What started as a basement experiment evolved into Georgia’s first meadery, eventually opening its own flagship taproom in Poncey-Highland in June 2021.Today, the brand is well-known for its whimsical, modern flavors like “Dragon’s Nectar, Faerie Dew, and Red Wedding among but the best seller still remains the flagship Monks Mead. We’re proud to be the the official mead for events like Dragon Con and the Georgia Renaissance Festival.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Definitely not smooth. The timeline should help understand how challenging the whole process has been. We came up with the idea for this business in 2004 and initially tried to raise money. Investors didn’t want a long term play, Everyone wanted to know what the exit plan was. in 2008 we signed an agreement with Terrapin that had just set up a brewery in Athens, We couldn’t justify the expense (or fund) building our own place. It took 3 years to get our license such that we could operate a winery inside of an existing brewery. In 2011, we made our first commercial batch at Terrapin in Athens. The next 8 years were tough, we ended up moving production from Terrapin to Red Hare in Marrietta, then to Wild Heaven in Avondale Estates. In 2018, we moved the production back to Athens at Southern Brewing Co. Not having the money to build our own place has slowed progress down and been a challenge that still plague us today. In 2021 we opened a tap room in between Virginia Highlands and Inman Park in a little town called Poncey Highlands. It was an experiment and a test to see if people would want to drink mead in a bar environment without other options (no wine or beer or liquor) and it’s working. In 2024 Southern Brewing went out of business just as we were getting some equipment installed in a place in Stone Mountain. We still don’t own our own production facility but we have a blending location where we’re doing all of our formulations and bottling. Soon we’ll have a second tap room on the front end of this Stone Mountain location. So my main struggles have been money, licensing hurdles because we’re making “wine” but really require beer brewing equipment to do what we do. We’ve had huge educational hurdles, before I can sell someone a bottle of mead, I have to explain what mead is. Although this isn’t as much as a hurdle as it was 20 years ago, we still get people every day comign in our door wondering what mead is.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’ve worked in the alcohol industry for 25 years. I started at a distributor and moved into a supplier role in 2005. I’ve spend a lot of time working with bartenders to help them craft the perfect beverage with the products that I’ve sold over the years. At Monks, I’m obsessed with making the perfect beverage and are balancing acids, with honey, or fruit, with salts, or botanicals and other things to achieve that balance in that final drink. Monks has been mainly a hobby job and something I did on the side from my professional job until 2021 when we opened the tap room. I’m fortunate in that a lot of my creative and passions are able to come to live with the business I’ve created. I’ve been taking pottery classes since the early 2000’s and you’ll see some of my work at the tap room holding flower or in some signage I created. I love to cook, I think making mead is very much a culinary product. We’re In our Stone Mountain location, we’ll have a kitchen and I’m hoping we can push that culinary experience even further. I love to tinker in my yard and grow plants in a garden. This doesn’t show up much in the meadery but it’s something that brings me a ton of joy.

Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
Build your dream. If you’re going to spend the majority of your waking hours on one thing, you better enjoy what you’re doing. I’ve tried to move too quickly at times and bought equipment that was too big for our operation when sometimes the more labor intensive solution is the better one. I’ve gotten good advise from peers in the same industry. Spend some time to learn from those that have done it already. I talk to folks that are looking to start meaderys all the time. I learn from each of those conversations so it’s a two way street and you’d be surprise at how helpful someone that you might think of as a competitor might be.

Pricing:

• Honey is very expensive and it drives up our cost. At the end of the day, we just try to mark things up a fare rate and the market seems happy enough to pay what we’re charging. My distributor and retailers are constantly telling me to lower the prices if I want to increase volume. I can’t lower the price to increase the volume, if the volume increases and we’re able to capture more economies of scale, then we can look at lowering the price.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://monksmeadery.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monksmead/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MonksMead