Honey Before Hops: Mills 50’s Meadery-and-Brewery Pocket

Every drinking district in Florida has a brewery. Mills 50 has a brewery and a meadery — and the meadery might be the more interesting room. Within a few blocks of each other on and around Mills Avenue sit Zymarium Meadery, Orlando’s first meadery, and Ten 10 Brewing Company, the un-fussy neighborhood brewery on Virginia Drive. Together they hold two spots in our ranking of the best craft breweries in Orlando, and together they make the strongest argument in the city for drinking something made within walking distance of your bar stool.

Zymarium: honey, patience, and a top ranking

Zymarium Meadery, at 1121 N Mills Avenue, ranks No. 2 among Orlando’s craft breweries with a Net Score of 92.5 — remarkable for a room that does not pour a single beer. Mead is fermented honey, humanity’s oldest alcoholic drink, and Zymarium treats it with a modern maker’s range: more than twenty meads on offer, running from dry to dessert-sweet and from traditional honey-only styles to contemporary fruit and spice variations. Everything is gluten-free by nature and made with local, unheated honey, which keeps the character of the honey itself in the glass. If your entire mead education is a Renaissance fair, a flight here is a re-education: the dry end drinks like a white wine with a wild streak, the sweet end like a digestif with a story. Staff will happily build a flight that walks you across the range, and you should let them — mead rewards curiosity more than loyalty to a first impression.

Ten 10: the neighborhood brewery, done right

Ten 10 Brewing Company, at 1010 Virginia Drive, ranks No. 9 on the same list (Net Score 89.5) and plays the complementary role: the DIY-spirited brewpub where the district actually drinks its beer. The house-made lineup covers the craft staples without preciousness, and the kitchen backs it with the bar snacks and sandwiches that disappear faster than the table planned. This is the room for the second round of the evening, the game on in the background, the friend who wants a proper pint rather than a tasting flight. Where Zymarium is a destination you explain to out-of-towners, Ten 10 is the local you become a regular at.

How to drink the pocket

A word for the mead-curious on what to expect in the glass. A traditional mead shows the honey itself — orange blossom reads differently from wildflower — while fruit meads (melomels) and spiced versions layer from there, and the dry-to-sweet spread is wider than wine’s. Zymarium’s range is built to be tasted across, so order the flight, start dry, and work toward dessert. You will leave with a favorite, and it will not be the one you predicted.

Round out the pocket at GB’s Bottle Shop & Tasting Bar on Virginia Drive, the district’s bottle shop and tasting room, where the shelves run deep on craft beer and the by-the-glass pours let you sample before committing to a six-pack for home. It is the natural third stop of the evening: the meadery for the education, the brewery for the pints, the bottle shop for the homework.

The two rooms sit close enough to pair in a single evening, and the order matters. Start at Zymarium while your palate is fresh — mead’s subtleties are the first casualty of a long night — then drift to Ten 10 for pints and food. Both sit within the wider Mills 50 crawl: dinner on the corridor first (our food crawl has the route), then honey, then hops. It is a distinctly Orlando sequence, in a district that has never once tried to be somewhere else. Find both on the Top Spots Map and drink local in the most literal sense available.

Filed under craft beer · Mead · Mills 50 · Ten 10 Brewing · Zymarium

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