5-7-19 Greg Heller-LaBelle – AMMA VP, The Colony Meadery – MeadCon East

5-7-19 We are talking with Greg Heller-LaBelle, Vice President of the American Mead Makers Association, and co-owner of The Colony Meadery in Bethlehem, PA.Greg is coming on to tell us all about the debut of MeadCon East, the AMMA conference, that will be held in Pennsylvania, September 5-7, 2019. After 3 years of holding the MeadCon in Broomfield, CO alongside the Mazer Cup International, the AMMA has decided to host a second conference on the other side of the country. This event, being in the first year, is as yet small, but is expected to grow each year.Greg himself is a longtime homebrewer (from wayy back in college). He eventually moved back to his birthplace in Bethlehem, PA. He is a craft beer writer, and when he got back to his hometown, he revived the Lehigh Valley Brewing, a fancy name for a group of guys who got together monthly to share dusty beers they'd collected and stored. (Because beer, of course!). At one of those meetings, this guy, Mike Manning brought along a homemade mead. And boy was it good! Greg, having been deep in the beer culture, saw the writing on the wall that the mead world was going to take off, and spent the next couple months hounding this stranger to go into business with him, and The Colony Meadery was born!We're going to talk Meadcon, mead, and building and running a meadery with Greg tonight, join us!