Craft Mead - The Nectar of the Gods Comes to the 21st Century

By Dustin Canestorp

The craft beer world has been making headlines for quite some time now as more and more Americans make the switch from mass produced, bland beer options to small batch brews with flavor, character and real taste. However, beer's not the only thing on the menu these days. Craft mead is actually becoming more and more popular in today's world and you might just find that local mead producers in your area have some rather tempting options to offer you. What is mead? Should you bother with it? Let's take a look at what it is, where it came from and where it's going in the modern era.

Mead - The Original Alcoholic Beverage

Beer has an incredibly rich history that reaches back into the misty recesses of time. Wine has a similar history. However, if you look closely, you'll find that there was only one original alcoholic beverage - mead. Long before the Egyptians were brewing beer or the Greeks trading amphorae of undiluted wine, mead was being made and enjoyed by local populations throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world.

You'll find references to mead everywhere from Viking myth to Geoffrey Chaucer, Pliny the Elder to Taliesin, and the archaeological record bears evidence of mead making all the way back to 7000 BC, though it most certainly dates back farther than that. Mead is the ancestor of any drink made with fermentation, and likely predates the beginnings of civilization, going back to early hunter-gatherer cultures.

What Is Mead, Anyway?

Now that we know a bit about mead's history, it's time to touch on what it actually is. Some call it honey-wine, though that's not truly correct. In its purest form, mead only has two ingredients - water and honey. The honey carries both the yeast needed for fermentation and the sugars for the yeast to transform into alcohol. Of course, there are countless varieties out there today, many of which can trace their roots back centuries.

Types of Mead - Variety Is the Spice of Life

For those who are considering giving mead a try, you'll find that you have quite a few different options out there. While pure water/honey varieties are probably the most common, there are quite a few others that can provide you with some great flavors and enjoyment. What's on the menu? Let's take a look at the variations of mead.

Melomel: A melomel is basically mead that contains fruit. Almost any type of fruit can be used here, though you'll find that strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are some of the most frequently used. Originally, mead was used as a type of food preservation (much like pickling) for summer fruits to help them last through the year.

Metheglin: A metheglin is similar to a melomel in that it contains additives. However, while a melomel will have mostly fruit, a metheglin uses herbs and spices to flavor the beverage. Hops, chamomile, cloves, nutmeg, lavender, oregano and others have been used to flavor mead in the past.

Cultural Variants: In addition to "types" like melomels and metheglins, there are plenty of regional/cultural mead variants. As you might expect from a beverage with close to 10,000 years of history, the options are pretty staggering. Here are just a few:

Morat, oxymel, pyment, sack mead, short mead, medica, cyser, bochet, balche, great mead, medovina, midus, myod, sima, white mead.

Yeasts Used in Brewing

Traditionally, wild yeast was responsible for fermenting the sugars within the honey. However, as anyone who has ever attempted to use wild yeast in home brewing can tell you, the results can be enormously inconsistent. In an attempt to provide consistent results from batch to batch, quite a few modern brewing supply companies have isolated specific strains of yeast just for brewing mead.

Some brewers do use yeast commonly associated with brewing beer or wine. However, specialty yeasts are available. Why bother with these? If you're planning to brew a batch of mead, specific mead specialty yeasts can offer some benefits, particularly in the area of preserving the delicate flavors found in mead. Beer/wine yeasts simply don't do a very good job here. If you're interested, White Labs and Wyeast both have mead yeast options commercially available.

Mead in Today's World

While you might not be able to hit your local grocery store and snag a 6-pack of mead from the beer and wine section, it's more widely available than you might think. According to some sources, there are as many as 150 local meaderies operating in the United States today, and another one opens its doors every few weeks.

Quite a few meaderies are actually wineries seeking a way to diversify their offerings. Others are specialty operations, such as Brothers Drake Meadery in Ohio. There are even mead-specific resources available online that cater to mead brewers and drinkers all over the world.

One of the newest trends in mead making is "complete sustainability." Brothers Drake Meadery provides an excellent example of this in action. They use only locally sourced ingredients, from fruit to honey, gathered from around Ohio. The company has a mantra of sourcing local, brewing local and selling local.

You'll find plenty of other meaderies out there too, from Ring of Fire Meadery in Arkansas to Heidrun Meadery in California, Meadery of the Rockies in Colorado and Celestial Meads in Alaska.

Why Give It a Try?

Why should you bother trying mead? Obviously, it's not going to be a drink for everyone. Confirmed beer lovers who aren't particularly fond of wine might not find any reason to sample a mead variety. However, for those who have a love of new beverages and exploration, then indulging in this beverage might be a great way to find a new favorite drink. There are plenty of options out there, particularly during the holidays when mulled mead and spiced mead become more prevalent. Why not give mead a shot and see what your ancestors were enjoying so much!

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Making Mead: 5 Practical Tips for Beginners

By Will Kalif

Mead is one of the easiest wines to make and you can almost never go wrong but there are some good rules of thumb you should follow. Here are some practical tips from a mead maker.

Tip One: Patience is the biggest trait you need to have when making mead. We live in an instant gratification world where if you don't get it now you lose interest. It takes patience to make mead because it follows its own time line. If you are thinking about tinkering with your mead you should step back and think about it for a couple more days. You can almost never go wrong by waiting. And mead will age very slowly. Typically, for average mead you will need to wait six months before it is tasty enough to really enjoy. The rule of thumb is the longer you wait the better it will taste. Up to about two years and sometimes more.

Tip Two: When should you rack into a new container or carboy?. Your mead will form a cake of sediment in the bottom and this is perfectly normal. It could be an inch or more thick. This cake of sediment (called Leeds) is the biggest reason why you rack to a new carboy. My advice is that the very first racking should come after the airlock has settled to less than 1 bubble every thirty seconds -and then wait a few more days or even a week. Then rack it off into a new container. Again the rule of patience applies and it is perfectly ok to wait even longer. After that you can rack as you see fit - once a month is pretty good.

Tip Three: Figuring out when your mead is ready to drink. This too is a very common question that people ask and there is no definitive answer that can be had without testing. Every batch of mead is different and maturity will depend on a lot of factors like type of honey, quantity of honey, type of yeast and temperature of the room that your batch is stored in. The best thing you can do is learn how to use a hydrometer. It is a simple tool that floats in your brew and tells you when your ferment has finished.

Tip Four: How does a hydrometer work? When you first mix your batch of wine there is a lot of honey in it and the liquid is very dense. It has a high specific gravity. The density of the wine will go down as the yeast ferments and transforms the honey into alcohol. Eventually, as all the honey is consumed and the alcohol content goes up, the ferment will stop. The lack of food and high alcohol content will kill off the yeast. Using a hydrometer will tell you when this has happened.

Tip Five: The biggest problem that new mead makers have is the problem of sanitation. Your batch of new honey wine is an environment that is very friendly for bacteria to grow in. And you want your yeast to be the only thing that grows. But if there are other bacteria, or strains of yeast in the batch, they may take over and ruin your batch or give it off flavors. To avoid this you should always sanitize all of your equipment and tools with a wine maker's sanitiser like Easy Clean. This isn't washing, it is sanitizing with a chemical that kills bacteria.

Mead making really is quite easy and for the most part you just need to set it aside and leave it alone for long periods of time. By following these simple tips you should be able to make yourself some delicious batches of this nectar of the gods.

http://goarticles.com/article/Making-Mead-5-Practical-Tips-for-Beginners/882537/

What is Mead? Dispelling the Myth about an Ancient Drink

By Will Kalif

When the word Mead is mentioned the first thing that comes to mind is a group of Vikings sitting around a fire quaffing down large mugs of a rough and tough alcoholic beverage. This is the stigma that mead has endured for centuries and it is unwarranted. Mead is an extraordinarily delicate and delicious wine.

To dispel the misconceptions about mead we have to first take a look at the misconceptions about wine. Wine is not an alcoholic beverage that is made from grapes. Wine is a fermented beverage made from any number of food or fruit. You can make wine from just about anything that has a high natural sugar content. This is the definition of wine, and grapes are only one thing that wine is made from. So, once you understand this fundamental thing you can more easily understand mead.

Mead is a wine fermented with honey and honey is a perfect food for making wine because it is very sweet and stays preserved for long periods of time. The natural sweetness of honey can be used to make extraordinary tasting wine. How many times have you tried a traditional wine and tasted the tartness or the earthiness of the grapes? You don't get this with mead because there are no grapes, there is no tartness, and of course there is no earthiness.

In Medieval Europe mead was the de-facto drink of choice but it was reserved for special occasions and for royalty or people with wealth. This was because it took a lot of effort to harvest the honey. And this difficulty in production helped mead fall out of favor as the techniques for fermenting wine from grapes were discovered and perfected. It is much easier to grow large numbers of grapes than it is to grow large numbers of beehives. The problem of mead was also further exacerbated by the discovery of how to brew beers from hops and various grains that are even easier to grow.
With beer and grape based wines readily available, and available to the masses, mead quickly became a drink that was almost forgotten. But thankfully this wonderful drink is still made and still enjoyed. If you want to try a wine that is quite distinct from other wines I recommend you give mead a try. You might be surprised.

http://goarticles.com/article/What-is-Mead-Dispelling-the-Myth-about-an-Ancient-Drink/661067/