The Colony Meadery, a new upstart by locals Greg Heller-LaBelle and Michael Manning, is poised to open at Allentown’s Bridgeworks Enterprise Center, a manufacturing incubator, later this year.
The Colony Meadery recently received federal approval and is currently in the beginning stages of receiving approval from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board.
Manning is a prolific home mead maker who won Best of Show at the Valhalla Mead competition in 2011 with his mojito-style mead named Mo-Mead-O. The recipe later ended up as the basis for Mojo, a 13.9% mead brewed at Moonlight Meadery by Michael Fairbrother.
Colony is currently running a RocketHub crowd-funding campaign to raise money. Some of the perks of helping out include various Colony-branded items, VIP tickets to their launch party, your name on the wall of the meadery, and at higher levels, naming rights to a mead and collaborating on your own recipe.