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.

Book Review: Tasting Club

While researching about supertasters, I called up the catalog online for my local library to see what books they had on taste. I came across a very interesting one called Tasting Club: Gathering Together to Share and Savor Your Favorite Tastes by Dina Cheney.

This book starts out covering the basics, including a brief blurb on how the tongue tastes food. This chapter is really devoted to actually having tastings, forming a tasting club, and an extensive section on how to conduct a tasting. It includes how to send an invite, and what to provide your guests to assist with the tasting, such as pens and a tasting grid found later in the book.

From there, the book has a chapter on wine, chocolate, cheese, honey, tea, extra virgin olive oil, cured meats, balsamic vinegar, apples, and beer. For example, with wine, Cheney talks about terroir, how wine is made, different types of wine, location, grape varieties including a table talking about characteristics, finding wine, shopping and storing wine, choosing food accompaniments including a menu and a few recipes, organizing the tasting, learning your palate, a tasting grid for wine, and a wine glossary of terms. This organization and detail is repeated for the other foods, with minor tweaks to better match the subject.

I was fairly impressed with this book and I may try a tasting from it, such as in the balsamic vinegar chapter. However, for something like apples where there are a lot of different varieties out there, this book oversimplified things and only stuck to the grocery store apple varieties.

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.