April 11, 2024

Big Lost Meadery, a Wyoming-based producer of mead, is expanding to Sioux Falls with a bar, brewery and restaurant.

The nearly 9,500-square-foot, two-story project will start construction next week on lakefront property at Lake Lorraine.

Stone Group Architects

“This is a big one,” said Steve Van Buskirk, president of land development at Van Buskirk Cos., which is co-developing Lake Lorraine with the Friessen family.

“We’re so excited to have another piece of the lake finished up. It’s fun. It’s something different and unique, and that’s what you cross your fingers and hope for is to have something new and interesting come to the market.”

Big Lost Meadery was founded almost a decade ago in Gillette, Wyoming, by Sam Clikeman, who grew up in the area. He discovered mead, which he calls “the oldest fermented beverage on the planet,” while working for the U.S. Forest Service in Utah. The state’s restrictive alcohol laws led him to get into brewing his own beer, which progressed to mead after someone asked him to try it.

“It went really well, and I got into that and quit making beer and wine and just focused on mead,” Clikeman said. “I was looking to start a business, and everybody and their dog had breweries, but nobody was making mead.”

While varieties of mead vary greatly, they all involve fermented honey. Clikeman describes his as “halfway between a wine and liquor,” he said. “Some are honey, honey and fruit, honey and spice … from a legal definition it is wine because it’s fermented but not from grain.”

The business has grown to nationwide distribution, including many locations in Sioux Falls, and in Southeast Asia.

“Really our focus has been on production and distribution, and now it’s time to start focusing on more of the retail side and developing on-premise assets,” Clikeman said.

That led him to Sioux Falls, not far from where he has family in Parker, after considering markets from Nashville to Dallas and Des Moines.

“Sioux Falls just made a lot more sense,” he said. “It’s 6.5 hours from home, which is nice, and the market is absolutely vibrant. What’s going on with Sioux Falls growth patterns, with the people, the way people view craft alcohol and the restaurant and hospitality industry is very vibrant. There’s a lot of things that made us want to be a part of it.”

Clikeman worked with Van Buskirk commercial broker Autumn Kaufhold to look at sites from southeast Sioux Falls to downtown before settling on Lake Lorraine.

“This came along perfectly,” she said. “They wanted a place that could be a destination and fit their meadery. I think it’s the one place in town you can drink a beer on a lake. We have river views, but this is our lake-view restaurant that I think will make it unique.”

Big Lost Meadery will sit on the north side of the lake, near Hyatt Place and The Blu on Lorraine apartments.

Big Lost Meadery has expanded multiple times in Wyoming, adding a brewery in 2018 and most recently in early 2020 when Clikeman partnered with Aaron Cannon to add an adjacent restaurant, Ranch & Roost. It also will be part of the Sioux Falls concept.

The tagline is “seriously elevated grub,” he said. “It’s primarily burgers and chicken sandwiches, which is nothing new, but there’s a big way they do it. They hand-grind burgers from raw steaks every morning and spend a lot of time on prep work. It takes two days to make the fries. They source everything individually and can track it back to the individual ranch in Nebraska, and they get all their birds from one place in Colorado and all their potatoes from one farm in Idaho.”

The Sioux Falls location also will have an expanded menu of appetizers and small plates — including chislic.

“They’re from North Carolina and never had chislic, but we got them turned onto it,” Clikeman said.

The design of the two-story space will include indoor-outdoor seating on multiple levels, plus the brewery. The mead will come in from Wyoming.

“We have this semi-Viking, mountain man theme, very rugged Wyoming cowboy, and we will bring some of that to Sioux Falls, but at the same time our plan is not to be colonists but immigrants,” Clikeman said.

“We’re going to be putting a lot more distinct South Dakota things as part of that. We’ll hand make our furniture and do all our own woodwork, but this is very much going to be a South Dakota operation with Wyoming influence.”

The Wyoming location is known for hosting popular events such as curling down the middle of Main Street and a Viking-era theme dinner with food from the time period and live Nordic-style music.

“We do a lot of painting and pottery classes and open poetry,” Clikeman added. “It’s a very eclectic-type place, and we’re very open to if people have stuff they want to try out.”

The lakefront location will be built by Van Buskirk’s construction team and be adjacent to a new plaza being developed by the Friessen family this year.

“The Friessen family has been working diligently getting that wrapped up,” Van Buskirk said. “It’s going to be a sloping plaza from the street level down to walking level with a zig-zag path so it’s handicapped accessible. It’ll open it up so the public can swing in and park and take a walk around the lake, so it should open up accessibility to the broader community.”

The hope is to open Big Lost Meadery in the first quarter of 2025. Lake Lorraine will hold a groundbreaking for the project at 4:30 p.m. April 15. It comes just days after the death of 93-year-old Warren Friessen, who helped cast the vision for the property more than a decade ago.

The new development means there’s about three-quarters of the lake spoken for.

“This really helps polish it off,” Van Buskirk said. “We’ve got another party looking at the west side of the lake, so we’re getting close.”

There also are some existing spaces in the development for rent, including in the building near Five Below that includes small shops such as Moe’s Home Collection and Apricot Lane Boutique, in addition to some space along retail centers on Marion Road.

Kaufhold, who has them listed, said there is interest from at least one national tenant, and she’s marketing it to others.

“The benefit you don’t get at a lot of places is the business collaboration,” she said. “Every business owner gets together and meets and brainstorms ideas like a farmers market or a Halloween walk around the lake.”

The dynamic was appealing to Clikeman too, he said.

“Being part of a legacy development was a big deal, and after meeting the Friessens and seeing the vision, we saw an area that can be conducive to that. It’s about being part of something bigger than just our operation,” he said.

“It’s a big opportunity.”

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