By Lisa Carolin
Using mostly local ingredients including raw honey, fresh pressed apple cider, and blueberries, Charles Durbin creates mead, wine and apple cider at the Rebel Jack meadery in Dexter Township.
It took a lot of paperwork and construction modifications, and in 2012 the Rebel Jack meadery was officially licensed.
“Mead is arguably the oldest alcoholic beverage known to man,” said Durbin. “It is estimated that mead predates all other forms of alcohol by thousands of years.”
Durbin says that the difference between mead and wine is that mead is a wine made from honey, whereas in a grape wine, the fermentable sugars come from grapes. In cider, the sugars come from apples.
He recently signed with a distributor. His winery is closed to the public due to state and local restrictions, but his meads/wines are available at Terry B’s in Dexter and at Baxter’s on Zeeb Road.
“I currently have two meads available: an apple honey wine made from cider from the Dexter Cider Mill and local honey that I call Cristo,” said Durbin. “The other one is a melomel (mead that have fruit added to it) made from Dexter Blueberry Farm blueberries and local honey with a slight amount of currants.”
Durbin describes the latter as a balanced crisp and light rose wine he calls Trinity. He describes both as dry wines.
By day, Durbin is an engineer for an automotive supplier. He is also a husband and father and a veteran of the U.S. Navy. When he was temporarily laid off in 2009, he and his wife talked about some alternative money-making possibilities. Durbin had home brewed in the past and after a lot of research decided that becoming a licensed winery could be potentially profitable.
Durbin chose the name Rebel Jack because he says, “It’s the rebels that inspire the human spirit and that motivate change.”
For more information on Rebel Jack, click here.
