Wehrloom Honey & Meadery: A Beekeeping Family’s Taproom in Robbinsville, NC

Wehrloom Honey & Meadery started with two beehives given as a Christmas gift, and it grew into one of far-western North Carolina’s most distinctive tasting-room stops: a family honey business that turned its harvest into mead. The flagship taproom sits at 257 Willie Colvin Road in Robbinsville, deep in Graham County near the Nantahala National Forest, with a second location in nearby Bryson City. It’s not a vineyard pour — it’s honey wine, made from bees the family has kept for more than a decade, and that makes a visit here genuinely different from any other stop on a High Country wine trip.

From a Christmas Gift to a Family Business

Aron and Jessica Wehr moved to Robbinsville in 2010 with their daughters Anna and Abby, expecting it to be a brief stop. According to the family’s own account on their website, it became home instead, and not long after the move, Aron gave Jessica a pair of honeybee hives as a Christmas present. Those two hives became twenty, then a hundred, then hundreds scattered across the Appalachian hillsides. What started as a backyard hobby outgrew the family’s kitchen shelves, and the Wehrs began selling jars of raw, lightly filtered honey at local farmers markets and festivals. In 2013 they officially founded Wehrloom Honey. As their harvests grew, they branched into beeswax candles and a line of skincare products Jessica originally made for her own family, and eventually into mead — fermenting their honey into a lineup of honey wines and building a taproom to introduce visitors to it. Today Wehrloom Honey & Meadery runs two brick-and-mortar locations, in Robbinsville and Bryson City, with hives spread across Graham County. (Source: Wehrloom’s own “About Us” page.)

What to Taste

Wehrloom’s menu is built entirely around mead — fermented honey wine — rather than grape wine, and the lineup covers a surprising range of styles. “Home Sweet Home” (9.0% ABV) is a traditional mead made with sourwood honey, a regional specialty the family calls their favorite for its light, almost buttery flavor. “Black’bear’ry” (6.9% ABV) is a melomel — a fruit mead — made with blackberries, lavender, hibiscus and vanilla. “Everybody Loves a Ginger” (5.5% ABV) is a metheglin steeped with fresh ginger, green tea, lemon and lime. “‘Apple’achian Cyser” (8.0% ABV) swaps most of the water for fresh, unfiltered apple juice and adds cinnamon, orange peel and cloves. There’s also “BeeWizer,” a lightly hopped mead the family names for the queen bee; “Pretty in Peach,” a peach-ginger melomel; a coffee-and-chocolate mead called “Not Yer Mama’s Chocolate Milk”; a “Hard Honey Seltzer”; a strawberry lemonade mead; a kitchen-sink metheglin called “Yardsale”; and a cherry-lime “Cherry Sour.” All of it is built on what Wehrloom calls their “Appalachian Mountain Honey,” harvested from hives kept largely on national forest land so the bees forage on wild mountain nectar. Because it’s a small, hand-poured operation, the exact taproom pours can shift, so it’s worth checking their current menu before you go. (Source: Wehrloom’s Robbinsville mead menu.)

The Setting and the Experience

This is a working honey operation first, and the taproom experience reflects that. The Wehrs describe keeping their bees as close to their natural state as possible, and that care for the hives is the thread that runs through everything they make — honey jars, candles, skincare, and mead alike. The family has grown from a two-person hobby into a small team that harvests, pours and packages every product by hand. Visitors coming for a tasting are getting a honey-focused stop rather than a vineyard walk: there’s no rows of grapevines to wander, but there is a story about bees, land, and a rural Appalachian county that’s easy to get invested in over a flight of mead. Wehrloom also sells its honey, skincare line and mead by the bottle to take home, so a stop here doubles as a place to pick up gifts.

What Else Is Nearby

Robbinsville sits in Graham County, at the western edge of the North Carolina mountains, and it’s the gateway to some of the region’s best-known scenery: Lake Santeetlah, Fontana Dam (the largest dam east of the Mississippi), the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest old-growth stand, the mile-high Cherohala Skyway, and the twisting stretch of US-129 riders call “The Dragon” (Source: Graham County Travel). Wehrloom’s second location in Bryson City puts it a short drive from the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad, which runs scenic and themed excursion trains out of its downtown depot (Source: Great Smoky Mountains Railroad). If your group is making a full day of it, pairing a Wehrloom tasting with a scenic drive on the Cherohala Skyway or a stop in Bryson City’s small downtown is an easy way to fill out the afternoon.

Planning Your Visit

Be honest with yourself about the drive: Robbinsville is roughly 175–180 miles from Boone, which is a genuine cross-state trip rather than an afternoon errand — figure on 3.5 to 4-plus hours each way on mountain roads, more if you’re routing through Asheville traffic or slowing down for the Blue Ridge Parkway (Source: TravelMath driving distance calculator). That distance is exactly why this is a trip best planned as a full-day private outing rather than a quick tasting-room stop, and it’s also why having a single vehicle and one dedicated driver for the whole group matters even more than usual — nobody wants to be behind the wheel for four hours each way after tasting mead. Wehrloom has two locations (Robbinsville and Bryson City), so confirm which one you’re headed to and check current hours directly with Wehrloom before you go, since small tasting rooms often adjust their schedule seasonally.

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