By Douglas Crowl
Loveland Connection

You don’t have to poll many people to stumble across a dream business idea.

Maybe it’s an art gallery, yoga studio, guitar store or coffee shop.

“Just do it,” Adam Kittel said while standing beside a row of shiny new fermenters, large stainless steel pots where honey, water and yeast will ferment to make honey wine, commonly known as mead.

Mead is Kittel’s passion and he planted his dream business in downtown Loveland, the Bacchus Meadery, with his brother, Jason Kittel, and girlfriend, Tamara Clark.

Honey of a hobby spinning jobs

From The Herald, PORT ELIZABETH   Wednesday January 2, 2008

Dr Garth Cambray, director of the Makana Meadery in Grahamstown, inspects some of the bees that produce the honey from which a whole list of products are made. Picture: Judy de Vega

Shaanaaz de Jager

THE Herald Citizen of the Year business category winner Garth Cambray has turned a lifelong hobby into an enterprising business and an opportunity to create employment.

Cambray, 30, a honey-wine producer and biotechnologist, is the director of the Makana Meadery in Grahamstown.

8 January 2007

A honey wine produced at Makana Meadery in Grahamstown banked gold at an international festival in Colorado and is set to turn the Eastern Cape into the largest honey-producing area in South Africa.

Honey Sun African Mead - sweet mead infused with rooibos, honeybush, cinnamon and apple - is one of several value-added products combining African traditions with skills training and a top-shelf product.

It collected gold in the speciality category of the 2006 International Mead Festival in Boulder, Colorado.