JACKSON TWP.: Dr. Godwin Meniru is one busy guy.
For starters, he’s a gynecologist with his own practice, the Junaelo Women’s Clinic.
He’s also the owner of the Meniru Meadery, where he makes both mead and wine.
Soon, he’ll launch a small brewery, as well.
Oh, and he’s married.
Where does he find the time to make mead, wine and now beer along with being a husband and practicing doctor?
“I don’t know how I do it,” he said with a laugh during a recent visit to his small operation in a corner plaza storefront at 5866-5868 Fulton Drive NW. “It takes interest and drive. It’s a form of relaxation for me.”
Meniru, a native of Nigeria who came to the United States in 1999, is an accomplished mead and winemaker whose amateur awards include winning “Winemaker of the Year” in 2012 at the WineMaker International Amateur Wine Competition sponsored by WineMaker Magazine.
He turned professional in October when he opened the meadery and winery. Mead is a beverage fermented with honey and other spices.
Meniru Meadery has a quaint tasting room complete with a four-seat bar, a few tables, flat-screen television and small decorative guitars hanging on one wall.
Customers can sample anything from a cherry honey wine to chardonnay to apple cyser on premise, or even take home a bottle or growler. He has 15 different brands available, and another 12 are aging.
“It’s been growing gradually just like any business,” Meniru said about his clientele.
All the mead, wine and beer-making equipment is in the back, hidden from the view of customers. As opposed to an estate winery where grapes are grown and processed on premise, Meniru purchases the ingredients for his creations.
Making mead and wine professionally wasn’t Meniru’s first choice. His initial goal was to open a brewery and he attended a course at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago to learn the business side about becoming a brewer.
The plan now is to open his nanobrewery this summer to complement the winery and meadery. Several Ohio wineries, including Debonne Vineyards in Madison and Valley Vineyards in Morrow, have opened breweries as an attempt to attract more visitors.
“It’s a national trend,” said Donniella Winchell, executive director of the Ohio Wine Producers Association in Geneva. “One of the reasons the wineries are looking at craft beer is because the demographics and the history and the stories are very similar.”
It also doesn’t hurt that craft beer is hot. The craft brewing industry has seen double-digit volume and dollar sales increases over the last few years, including 15 percent volume and 17 percent dollar sales growth last year, according to the Brewers Association, a Boulder, Colo.-based trade group.
At Meniru Meadery, which will be renamed Meniru Meadery and Brewery, Meniru will use a small Speidel Braumeister brewing system — producing less than a barrel a batch — to provide draft beer at the tasting room.
The goal is to draw in people who aren’t fans of wine and mead. A brewing license also will allow him to make grain-based meads, he said.
As for the beer styles he plans to make, Meniru said a “combination of what I know customers like and what I know they will grow to like.”
That means a Budweiser clone, pale ale, India pale ale, Russian imperial stout and porter, he said. Then, he also wants to throw in some fruit beers and exotic fare such as ales with grapes, spices and perhaps oysters.
If the brewing takes off, Meniru said he would purchase a larger brewing system.
When the brewery opens, the business will be open more often. Now, the business is open from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and 3 to 10 p.m. Saturday.
For more details, go online to: www.menirumeadery.com.
Rick Armon can be reached at 330-996-3569 or rarmon@thebeaconjournal.com. Read his beer blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/the-beer-blog/. Follow him on Twitter at @armonrick.