Nani Moon Meadery - Kapa?a

Visited this past Saturday. Walked in and attempted to approach the counter to see the mead menu, but was cut off by the owner and told to find a table. Very similar experience to the other reviews in regard to relentless upselling, interesting staff personalities, and poor atmosphere. Tried all 10 of the current offerings, and only 1 was deemed “alright” between my boyfriend and I. Having visited many meaderies from various states with different styles, this isn’t a preference issue they simply produce a poor tasting product. Recommend spending your time and money elsewhere on the island.

Visited this past Saturday. Walked in and attempted to approach the counter to see the mead menu, but was cut off by the owner and told to find a table. Very similar experience to the other reviews in regard to relentless upselling, interesting staff personalities, and poor atmosphere. Tried all 10 of the current offerings, and only 1 was deemed “alright” between my boyfriend and I. Having visited many meaderies from various states with different styles, this isn’t a preference issue they simply produce a poor tasting product. Recommend spending your time and money elsewhere on the island.

Quaint, friendly Meadery sources local ingredients from Kauai and nearby islands to create a honey wine.

Being seasoned mead tasters and mead makers ourselves, Nani Moon has always been a spot that we have tried to visit on Kauai for the past several years. However, we haven’t been able to get inside this whole time due to their shifting, odd hours, or due to them simply being closed for no reason during their supposed business hours. Finally, we were able to visit them during our most recent trip.Despite what other reviewers said, the hostess was friendly enough and we felt welcome. She did deliver a fair amount of sales pitches, but she was thorough in answering our questions about the mead.As for the mead itself, we got a royal tasting set to try everything on the menu. One issue we had was that the tasting notes were hit-or-miss when it came to accurately describing the mead. For example, we thought that the Winter Sun wasn’t full-bodied and was a bit lacking in the flavors described (side note: for the reviewers complaining that there were no traditional, non-fruited meads on the menu, this one gets pretty close). Other meads, we felt the flavor was a bit too strong, like the Buzz Squared and Deviant Behavior meads, as their flavors lingered on our palettes for a while after the tasting, and not necessarily in a pleasant way. The other meads tasted as expected, with the Cacao Moon being the favorite. It was well-balanced and tasty.All in all, it was an ok experience that is a bit heavy on the wallet. I was fine with the price of the tasting, but I felt that the prices of the bottles and merch was quite high, despite the higher operating costs of Kauai. I wouldn’t dissuade others from coming here, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it either.Side comments as a mead maker: the hostess mentioned that they stopped using crown caps due to the pandemic supply issues and had to switch to standard wine corks. This switch also caused them shipping issues due to corks popping out of bottles from carbonation. I was confused by this statement since all of their meads are still. This suggests that they might be bottling the meads before they are completely finished fermenting. Since their menu notes that they do not use chemical stabilizers (very handy tools to prevent these issues), they should probably look into using either champagne corks/cages, or letting their meads degas before bottling.

I regularly have mead from various award-winning Midwestern meaderies like Second City, Pips, and Schramms. Nani Moon 's product is excellent and they specialize in dry meads which I don 't usually have much access to. After tasting the regular offerings and seasonal offerings, I ended up buying a bottle of the seasonal offering of candied orange cranberry cyser . Basically, the cyser is a mix of apple juice and honey instead of water and honey which are usually used to make mead. After we chilled it, the dry cyser paired wonderfully with our dinner that revolved around macadamia nut crusted mahi mahi.Chef 's kiss!!