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Dan Schreffler at his Dunmore shop, Space Time Mead and Cider.

Dan Schreffler poses in front of the tanks of mead he brews at Space Time Mead and Cider in Dunmore.

Dan Schreffler at his Dunmore shop, Space Time Mead and Cider.

Dan Schreffler poses in front of the tanks of mead he brews at Space Time Mead and Cider in Dunmore.

For Dan Schreffler, mead and Dunmore turned out to be the perfect pairing.

With an intense interest in nerd culture where mead is prevalent, and a love of making his own alcohol, the founder of Space Time Mead and Cider felt connected to mead, a type of wine that uses honey, rather than grapes, as its primary ingredient. He opened his business at 419 S. Blakely St., Dunmore, in 2018.

“I enjoyed the taste, I enjoyed the process of making it and it was the novelty of it as well,” said Schreffler.

Like wine, mead can be sweet or dry. The drink can be altered to create unique flavors, such as Space Time’s “Thanks for all the Fish” which tastes like the Swedish fish candy. Space Time also offers more traditional flavors, like their year-round flavor “Andromeda,” a drier, fruity blend with notes of lemon, mango and spearmint.

The mead-making process for Schreffler starts with a five-gallon pail of locally sourced honey. He places the honey in a water-filled, stainless-steel tank and mixed. From there, he adjusts the water to honey ratio to create the desired taste and alcohol content.

Next, a pump circulates the mixture throughout the tank ensuring the honey is mixed and diluted. Yeast nutrients are added, and it is mixed again before more yeast is added, beginning the fermentation process.

The mead ferments until it reaches the desired sugar level. It is then pumped from one tank to another, a process known as racking off, and given time to rest to ensure the yeast has finished fermenting. The mead is tasted and racked once more, and clarifiers and stabilizers are added to the mead, giving it shelf life. The final step is filtering and bottling the mead.

“At one point in time, mead making would take years because we didn’t understand the chemistry of it. What took one or two years, we now get most of the fermentation done in four to six weeks,” said Schreffler.

Schreffler started making his own mead in 2008 as a hobby while working for MetLife. Then he was diagnosed and treated for cancer in 2010.

“There are multiple side effects of cancer, but the big ones are a lack of patience, cognitive impairment and, the biggest one, perspective. You go through that, and you think ‘what does Dan 2.0 want to be?’ and it was not working the rest of my life and retiring in corporate America,” said Schreffler.

That was when Schreffler decided to take his mead to competitions with the American Wine Society to see what other people thought. In 2017, his Apple Wildflower Honey mead won Best Amateur Mead.

“We were looking for objective feedback, so we entered several competitions to get that,” he said. “It helped me improve my process and then I got to a point where I wondered if I could open a meadery in NEPA.”

The final step in Schreffler’s plan was to gauge local interest, so in 2017 he signed up as a vendor at Montage Mountain’s Brewfest.

“We had a line for mead,” he recalled. “It’s one thing when it’s with your geeky friends or judges say it’s good but another thing to be commercially viable. That convinced me that we have an opportunity to be successful doing this.“

Based on that success, Schreffler opened Space Time in 2018, its name deriving from both Schreffler’s love of sci-fi, as well as the idea that “there is a space and time for different meads and ciders.”

All meads and ciders are made at the Space Time location in Dunmore. Space Time is also a Pennsylvania Preferred product, meaning over 80% of their ingredients are sourced from within the state. Schreffler also ensures his product is environmentally friendly, leaving the smallest carbon footprint he can.

“We see the orchards, we know the beekeepers, we know exactly what we’re getting. Our product depends on clean air, clean water and clean soil, so the last thing we want to do is hurt our ability to source those materials locally,” said Schreffler.

With Space Time being the only meadery in NEPA — and one of only 17 in the state — Schreffler sees a range of clientele, from lovers of mead who come from out of state to nerds like Schreffler.

“People like new things and our timing was right for this. The minute we put ‘mead’ on the building, we had a built-in customer base that was coming in the door,” said Schreffler.

Since opening, Space Time attends multiple craft fairs and oddity shows to showcase their product. These events can be found on Space Time’s Facebook page and on their website. Space Time is also sponsoring NEPA Horror Fest 2022 at the Circle Drive-In on Saturday.

One of Schreffler’s own customers and amateur mead maker himself, Zac Lehr of Jessup, took a larger interest in Space Time by apprenticing under Schreffler and helping with events Space Time attends.

“I’ve made my own mead for about three or four years, and when I learned about Space Time being local, I just walked in and asked Dan if he ever needed help around the shop and we hit it off from there,” said Lehr.

Lehr has been apprenticing with Schreffler for close to a year.

“It’s been a great, new experience. It’s very relaxing and it’s nice to know that if I can’t make it, Dan is understanding when it comes to that. I’m taking it at my own pace and it’s rewarding when the opportunity arises,” said Lehr.

Mead can be purchased at Space Time in Dunmore as well as at The Hopping Eagle in Hawley and Susquehanna Brewing Company in Pittston. Their ciders are available at Last Minute Brewing in Scott Twp.

This story has been changed to correct an error. Like wine, mead can be sweet or dry.