John Kluge Jr. is the man with the mead touch
Waking up in a wooden hut packed to the rafters with her innumerable siblings, the worker bee proceeds to squeeze her way through a narrow slit cut into the bottom of her home, practically crawling over others to escape into the sunshine.
Then, she's off down a grassy hill, atop which sit dozens of other near-identical huts, over a cabin, which is significantly larger than her own home, and then she arrives. Rows of dahlias come to an end before the towering height of Maximillian sunflowers preceding plots of four different kinds of lilies.
The bee perches on a petal, one of the hundreds he will gather nectar from and pollinate that day before returning to the hive where nectar is stored in honeycomb cells.
She repeats this routine again and again with relentless fervor over the course of her 40-day lifespan. Her life’s work will culminate in about a 12th of a teaspoon of honey.
Yet, the fruits of her labor live on, fermented and converted into the most ancient form of alcohol: mead.
The libation requires about a pound of honey per bottle with the addition of water and yeast. So the cycle persists, day in and day out, on a 130-acre farm nestled in the hills of Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville.
It’s called Thistlerock Mead Company. A rural haven, reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire, where radical social enterprise is taking on a whole new form in the hands of Doug Suchan, a former Navy SEAL and third-generation beekeeper, and John Kluge Jr., son of the late media mogul John Kluge Sr. and ex-wife and socialite Patricia Kluge.
Though his father died in his Albemarle County residence in 2010, the lessons he bestowed on his son are the bedrock of Kluge’s startup.
John Kluge Jr., owner of Thistlerock Mead Company, walks through the property's flower garden, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville.
“He used to tell me all the time as a kid, ‘No matter what we do as people, the further time continues out, everything we do matters less and less and less,’” Kluge told The Daily Progress. “The people that made the biggest contributions in history, there’s just a handful of them. So, if you have an option to design something that’s going to make a difference in the world, or to do something that’s just going to exist, why wouldn’t you try and improve things?”
His company endeavors to do just that. Already on the path to achieving its goal of becoming the first net-zero meadery in the country, with 33% of the farm powered by renewable energy, sustainability is the beating heart at the center of the Thistlerock ecosystem.
Kluge described the operation as “completely regenerative” and emphasized a hands-off approach when it comes to coexisting with the surrounding flora and fauna, using only organic substances on plants. His master beekeeper, Allison Wickham, also uses a similar style when handling Thistlerock’s 70 hives of both Russian and Italian honeybees as well as some from the Virginia survivor stock.
While honey produced from their own bees, called Piedmont Wildflower honey, is used to make their Piedmont Wildflower mead, the business partners also source other honeys and ingredients from organizations with missions closely aligned to their own.
John Kluge Jr., owner of Thistlerock Mead Company, watches a honeybee travel from flower to flower on his property, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville.
The origin of honey, the main ingredient of mead, has an influential role in the taste of the final product. Kluge often stresses this point, referring to “honey as the terroir of mead,” borrowing a term from the wine industry referring to the natural environment where grapes are grown and harvested.
For example, one might detect smokier notes from a waft of mead produced with fermented honey hailing from African honeybees. Kluge said this is due to the more aggressive nature of those insects, meaning their keepers must use more smoke in order to subdue them while extracting the combs.
“Sometimes we like to say if you’d like a mead, more than likely you’d like the place that that mead comes from,” he said.
Thistlerock has found other methods of infusing a variety of flavors into its meads. Its Piedmont Wildflower brew spends about 12 months sitting in an old whiskey barrel. Kluge mentioned a concoction Suchan, the mastermind behind the brewing, is currently working on of raspberries, blackberries, strawberries and elderberries that he plans to age in barrels previously used by nearby Blenheim Vineyards, owned by musician Dave Matthews.
Thistlerock Mead Company owner John Kluge Jr. inspects honey production on his property in Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville, Thursday, June 27, 2024.
“All of that residual wine and tannins are still mixed in oak,” he said. “So when we put our berry mead into it, it’ll get those oaky qualities and the tannins from the wine will kind of smooth out the overall profile. What I hope we end up with will be something that’s like a hybrid between a Bordeaux wine and a port.”
This attention to detail is not only evident in the nectars and fruits Thistlerock selects for its meads, but also in the reused equipment used at every stage of the mead-making process.
The bottles are composed of “100% post-consumer recycled glass” labeled using recycled paper with plant-based polymer stoppers. While this might appear to be going above and beyond to the average consumer, it’s still “not good enough” for Kluge, who is concerned that the weight of the glass bottles will rack up the carbon emissions during shipping.
“There’s a little startup in France right now that is producing flax fiber-made bottles, but it’s still too expensive,” Kluge said. “So they’re experimenting with pine resin. … It’s 30 times lighter than glass. If that gets to market, we will switch, and we’re already talking about how we can help them set up manufacturing here.”
The Thistlerock Mead Company tasting tavern is seen on Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville.
A self-described “brewing fanatic,” Suchan single-handedly rigged a majority of the setup at Thistlerock’s on-site fermentation facility. Prior to Thistlerock, the small building was a barn lying in disrepair until Suchan wired the electrical lines and plumbing and mounted 400-gallon tanks inside. Renovations to the structure also included adding insulation made from natural cellulose fibers, installing solar tubes and supporting the walls with wood certified as environmentally beneficial by the Forest Stewardship Council.
Thistlerock’s founders’ mission goes beyond simply making mead. The business invites people into its space to educate them on sustainable practices, the global loss of biodiversity as a result of climate change and what can be done to turn the tide.
“Consumer-facing products have the ability to inform and educate and inspire people to think and act differently if it’s done with real intention,” said Kluge.
He also plans to carry out this endeavor through educational programs held at an outdoor amphitheater near the Thistlerock tasting tavern. He’s bringing his friend, Michael Sheldrick, to speak in early August. Co-founder of Global Citizen, a movement committed to tackling the issues of extreme poverty and global warming, Sheldrick is joining Kluge for a “fireside chat about building a global change-making organization and using citizen power and music to change the world.”
A list of the different types of mead available at Thistlerock Mead Company is on display in the tasting tavern, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Albemarle County south of Charlottesville.
“This place is a refuge and it is meant to create intimate, nature-based experiences for people,” said Kluge. “You have to manage the needs of building a successful business from a financial perspective with your goals and values and mission. If we have too many people here too often, the natural environment will no longer be what it is and the people that come here will no longer get the benefit from it.”
The name “Thistlerock” stems from Kluge and his wife Christine Mahoney’s Scottish and Irish heritage: the thistle being Scotland’s national flower and the shamrock being Ireland’s.
The couple recognizes their Celtic ties in more than just the name of their business, honoring Celtic holidays such as the summer solstice with maypole dances and bonfires. They also contracted with a Welsh stonemason now living in Crozet to construct a Scottish standing stone circle in the heart of the property’s flower farm.
The tasting tavern, which was designed to remind visitors of a “home or a bar run by a honey explorer of some fictional origin of some fictional unknown time,” primarily serves the traditional foods of the British isles: Scotch eggs, pork pie, pickled vegetables and a “seasonal Eton mess” for dessert. Currently, the tavern’s operating hours are from noon to 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, though Kluge said they might open on Sundays as well in the near future.
Mead and honey sit for tasting at Thistlerock Mead Company in Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville on Thursday, June 27, 2024.
Getting the meadery up and running is just the first step in Kluge’s plans for the enterprise. He’s looking ahead to build up the mead community and get more businesses involved in environmental advocacy organizations, such as the Green Business Alliance run by the Community Climate Collaborative.
“We’re hoping to get a program going with PVCC [Piedmont Virginia Community College], similar to their wine program, because if you want the industry to grow, which is important for us, we can’t just be a successful meadery,” he said. “For us, success is married to the success of our peers.”
