Got Mead?

Mead, like cider, is a growing industry. Check out Got Mead.com. This website has a plethora of information regarding mead, including meaderies, recipes, and other information. It is quite the website.

Some meaderies to check out and try:

• Beowulf Mead
  
• Blacksnake Meadery
  
• Chaucer's Mead - sold with a little pouch of mulling spices.
• Fair Winds Mead
  
• Honeyrun Winery - they do a lot of meads and fruit wines that are blended together
• Iqhilika Mead - they have a chili mead
• Meadow Vista Honey Wines
  
• Mountain Meadows Mead - they come to several regional festivals
• New Day Meadery - they post up YouTube videos that are kind of interesting, ranging from bees to their latest product and steps in between.
• Rabbit’s Foot Meadery - besides mead, they also do cyser and braggots
• Redstone Meadery - comes in a blue bottle, and I really like their juniper mead
• Sky River Mead

You may have to go to a specialty beer or wine store to find mead, but also check the Port section in wine at in your local grocery store.

As far as finding honey to make mead, start with your local farmer’s market. Also, you might be able to find local honey via associations. For instance, Washington State Beekeepers Association is broken down into regional clubs. There is also a National Honey Board that has a Honey Locator website that lets you search by type of honey or by state.

One other thing I should mention about drinking mead or any alcoholic beverage with honey in it is that it gives horrible hangovers, so be careful with this stuff.

Choosing Honey for Making Mead

Honey is made by bees collecting flower nectar from flowers, mixing it with a few enzymes, and then sealing it in wax. This process actually makes honey very stable, as it will not ferment or mold unless water is added. Honey will sometimes crystallize, but it is still very usable.

If a hive is placed in an area where there is predominately one type of plant flowering at that time with a few weed exceptions, beekeepers are allowed to call the honey a single variety honey by the name of the plant. Therefore, if a hive is placed in an apple orchard, and the beekeeper believes the honey to be made out of at least 80% apple flower nectar, then the honey can be called apple honey. However, if that guarantee cannot be met, they honey will usually be labeled as wildflower honey, or not labeled at all.

At last weekend’s mead class, they had about 30 different jars honey, in which we got to taste by dipping toothpicks into the jars. I have to say, pumpkin honey was probably my favorite, as it had a little bit of spice to it. I didn’t care for chestnut, as it seemed a bit bitter to me.

So what honeys make the best mead? The first rule is to taste the honey. If it doesn’t taste good, it won’t make a good mead. After that, fruit honeys are pretty good with the exception of melons, which can give off sulfur. We were told to stay away from maple honey, and pine honey apparently creates off flavors such as menthol. We were also told that buckwheat in general does not make a good mead. I tasted the dark colored buckwheat honey, and it was very malty, but they had a second Eastern Oregon honey that was much lighter in color and tasted very different that they said made a good mead. So this proves that there are exceptions to the rule and reinforces that the honey should be tasted first. However, they did suggest that the darker buckwheat honey could be good if blended with other honey to tone it down while perking another honey up.

In the case of the two buckwheat honeys tasting different, according to Honey.com, “the darker the honey, the more apt it is to taste stronger and more robust. The lighter colored honeys are usually more delicate and sweeter in flavor.”

They told us that orange blossom honey and fireweed honey make some very good mead, and recommend it for beginners. I have seen a lot of orange blossom honey from the homebrew stores, but never fire weed. Also, I usually see clover honey in the grocery stores, which makes a decent mead.

After my class, I went down to my local Saturday farmer’s market to see what I could turn up there. Again, I found orange blossom honey which is imported to this region, and clover honey. I also turned up blackberry honey, which I realized to be a lighter milder honey than the other varieties. Still, it tasted good and would probably make a decent mead while supporting my local region.

Review of Mead Class

On Mead Day, first Saturday of August, I attended a mead class at F.B. Steinbarts in Portland, OR. Mead, simply put, is a fermented honey drink, sometimes called honey wine. It is as simple as fermenting honey and water, but there are other words for mead if other ingredients are added, such as:

Braggot – a mead made with malted grain, usually malted barley.
Cyser – a melomel made with apples
Melomel – mead made with fruit
Metheglin – mead made with spices
Pyment – melomel made with grape juice
And many more lesser known kinds…

After learning how to make fruit wine, I have thought about dabbling a bit with mead. Mead is a honey wine, made by diluting honey usually with water. However, due to Oregon homebrew laws, they could not actually demonstrate how to make mead because it is so simple to make. It shouldn’t be cooked like beer, or it will lose its aromas, and it doesn’t need to be sulfites or pH balanced like wines. Honestly, after the honey is diluted, they can add yeast, which is when it becomes illegal to transport homebrew in Oregon.

So the event ended up being talking about making mead, sampling some meads, and tasting honey. They must have had about 30 different jars of honey, including honey made from the nectar or alfalfa, buckwheat, blueberry, clover, holly, honey, poison oak, pumpkin, thistle, and wildflower. Interestingly, items like poison oak, which causes people to get rashes due to the oil in the leaves, does not have the same poisonous oil in the nectar, making it safe to consume.

Mead

I bought The Compleat Meadmaker: Home Production of Honey Wine from Your First Batch to Award-Winning Fruit and Herb Variations for Christmas. I should really do up some mead here soon. They take a while to age, but they are done up still and not carbonated.

My first taste of mead was when I was at a collogue’ house for my day job. Her husband brewed it up, and I thought it was delightful. My husband said he had mead before and didn’t like it, but this homebrewed stuff was pretty good. In December, I went to the Holiday Ale Festival at Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, OR. Mountain Meadow’s Mead from Westwood, California was there. I tried their sweet, cranberry, semi-sweet, and spiced meads, and ended up taking home a bottle of the cranberry mead. Wonderful stuff!

There is another meadery out of California called Rabbit’s Foot Meadery. I recently found in a grocery store their Biere De Miele. It is an ale fermented with honey and is styled after a Kosch. It reads, “We use only the finest malted barley, freshest hops and German Kolsch yeast to create a wonderful and light bodied ale. Lightly hopped to allow the orange blossom aromas from the honey to come through, it is an easy to drink ale, which we are sure you will enjoy.” I mentioned that I don’t care for hops, so this wasn’t bad, falling in the somewhat drinkable but probably wouldn’t buy again. My husband liked it, though.

I went and bought a bottle of Rabbit’s Foot Sweet Mead next. Mead is not cheap, and I was having a little bit of a hard time figuring out from the labels what would be a semi-sweet or a semi-dry and avoiding the dry meads. I did make the mistake of chilling it like a white wine or a sweet cider, but the label says to drink it at room temperature. My husband didn’t like it, as it was too sweet for him.

My Taste

What do I like to drink? Well, it seems when my husband and I go and try cider and wine, we gravitate towards the sweeter stuff. In fact, we toured a brandy distillery, and after sampling their products, we only walked away with a liquor and not the bone dry spirits.

Admittedly, I don’t know much when it comes to grape wines, but I do alright with most, but again, I like it a touch sweet. We served Willamette Valley Vineyard’s Oregon Blossom blush at our wedding, which the winery describes as the local answer to California’s Zinfandel. My husband and I also enjoy an occasional Muscat wine. With a good meal, though, about any grape wine will do.

When it comes to beer, it is an interesting story. My first beer that I ever attempted to drink was a Pyramid Ale. I don’t remember what kind, just that I didn’t like it. In my mind, I knew Pyramid was a good quality beer, but I didn’t like it. Over the years, I tried and tried again, but I always made funny faces. When I started dating my now husband, who is really into beer and loves porters and stouts, he started trying to find something I might like. Frambois worked because of the sugar and fruit juice, but most bars don’t serve it. For his birthday one year, we went to the Rogue in Portland, where they allowed us to custom pick a sampler set. I found two that I liked – one was with honey and mandarin oranges, and the other had flavorings of coriander. Both of them were wheat beers. It was like something was knocked loose, as I’m able to drink wheat beers now, especially if they have fruit in them, and an occasional honey lager such as the one from a Canadian restaurant called Earls. I don’t like hops because they are bitter, and my husband’s favorites taste burnt to me. Actually, a lot of beer tastes burnt to me. I’ll taste every beer he gets, but for me, beer is either drinkable, somewhat drinkable and I’ll need someone to finish it for me, or not drinkable.

Admittedly, I’m a bit scattered at the moment with what I want to make – cider, fruit wine, or mead. Thing is, most people think of all three of these as being sweet, but they don’t have to be. I’ve had an excellent dry cider, a dry blackberry wine you drink like a Merlot, and I know there are dry meads out there. So yes, I like my drinks sweet, but it is honestly easier to make dry alcoholic beverage, which will help strike a balance between what I like best and what others might like to buy. In the meanwhile, I’ll just keep experimenting to develop my skills and attempt to narrow my focus.

The Beginning

What am I going to blog about? I am planning on documenting what I hope is a beginning of starting my own business of selling fruit wine and cider.

The idea was a slow growing one. I was raised on a farm, but live and work in the city. The recession was coming on, and I'm always looking for ways to do things myself to save a buck. You know, go back to the basics. I moved in with my boyfriend in a house in the suburbs, and finally got to grow a garden. After my boyfriend was upgraded to fiancé, we went to a local distillery, and I was really impressed, thinking, this would be awesome to do myself, but I didn't really do anything about it. However, there was a man in our tour group who said he had brewed cider, and I thought that would be a better starting point since my parents have about six apple trees on their property. Free material source!

I got a hold of some books on cider and started reading them on my honeymoon since I now had time with the wedding being over. I was strictly thinking of doing it as a hobby at this point. There was one day, however, where I was jealous of my husband's summers off from teaching, and the increased recession fears that my new boss didn't know what to do with me and was going to let me go. This idea of having a winery suddenly popped into my head, and I've kind of obsessed with the idea since, knowing that I wouldn't get summers off.

My winery would not sell grape wine because that can be found anywhere. Instead, I draw my inspiration from Shallon Winery in Astoria, OR. It is run by an old gentleman who makes the most wonderful fruit wines, including a cranberry whey wine and a chocolate orange wine. Last time I was there, before I had my idea, I asked what would happen upon his death, as it would be a terrible thing to lose his recipes. Now I hope that I could purchase at least the cranberry whey wine recipe from him.

It has been about four months since I began my hobby research, and now I am beginning to blog about it. I hope you will watch as I try to turn this little hobby into a business.