Beer, cider and mead: We have your perfect Thanksgiving pairings

From burlingtonfreepress.com

Thanksgiving dinner is probably the largest meal that many of us will eat all year, and it can be one of the most complex in terms of flavours and dishes served. Hours upon hours are dedicated to the preparation of a perfect meal, but it seems that when it comes to picking out the perfect beverages for the dinner table, sometimes the energy runs out.

Most sources will direct you to the wine section of the grocery store. While wine is fine for some, not everyone can dig it. So after you grab a bottle of pinot noir and rosé, head over to the beer, cider and mead section for some excellent Thanksgiving pairings.

Before we get started, a few general guidelines. First, think about the main dish. Are you having turkey, ham, or maybe you’re preparing a vegetarian or vegan meal this year. Whichever way you go, start your pairing work from the main dish and work your way out from there.

Second, consider the sauces and any other strong flavours that may play a large part in the complete meal. Salty gravy can swing a pairing away from beverages with bitterness or high tannins, as these both intensify saltiness. Sour or sweeter pairings will help off-set salty dishes. And herbs like rosemary and spices like clove can completely transform the flavour of a dish. Look for complementary pairings to enhance these flavours.

Lastly, consider how heavy and filling your meal will be. In general, for Thanksgiving meals, I recommend picking lighter-bodied styles of beer with high carbonation levels, drier meads and ciders with crisp acidity to help clear your palate and refresh you for another bite.

Jeff Baker's Thanskgiving pairing mantra is "Belgian-style saisons are superb with the bird!" But he also has beer, cider and mead for each dish. (Photo: Getty Images)

Salads

The main things to consider are how bitter your greens are and what flavours are in your salad dressing. In general, blonde ales and tart saisons work well here. But I tend to enjoy semi-dry ciders better with salads, especially if you incorporate apples into the dish and use a tangy vinaigrette. Try Champlain Orchards (Shoreham) Original Cider. If honey or maple are involved in the dressing, check out Artesano (Groton) Traditional Mead.

Turkey

I can’t say this enough: Belgian-style saisons are superb with the bird! Saison Dupont (Belgium), which is generally agreed to be the benchmark of the style, will offer spicy notes of white pepper, citrus and herbs, and a high carbonation level which will refresh your palate with each sip. Malty amber lagers like Jack’s Abby (Massachusetts) Red Tape Amber Lager and von Trapp (Stowe) Vienna-style Lager will bring out the savory notes in the turkey.

Baked ham

Here’s where you can really play with sweetness, especially if you’re involving a glaze or fruit in the recipe. Groennfell (Colchester) Wayfarer Mead, an oak-aged amber mead, has a lush palate with warm oaky flavors somewhere between a barrel-aged Chardonnay and a malty German Kölsch, but a dry finish to cut through any fat or sweetness.

If you’re going with a savoury ham preparation, consider a slightly less-dry cider to offset the saltiness. Check  bottle shops for Farnum Hill (New Hampshire) Semi-Dry Cider or Eden Specialty Ciders (Newport) Semi-Dry Cider, both of which will be robust enough to complement the sweet and salty flavours in the ham, and still crisp and light-bodied enough to refresh you between bites.

Brown ales and are right at home with pork, too. With honey-baked ham, you might try a Belgian Tripel, such as Unibroue (Quebec) “La Fin Du Monde,” which has notes of stone fruit and fresh flowers to complement the honey, and snappy carbonation which balances out the sweetness.

Stuffing and mashed potatoes

Don't neglect the side dishes. Classic stuffing and mashed potatoes need a beer that is crisp enough to cut through their heft and also adds a little spice to the pairing. Try a German-style wheat beer like Weihenstephaner (Germany) Hefe-Weissbier, or if IPA is more your thing, try Sierra Nevada (California and North Carolina) “Celebration Ale,” a fresh hop IPA.

Sweet potatoes

The caramel-y goodness of sweet potatoes will find a friend in a smokey, but not overly bitter, Scotch ale. Consider adding a few ounces of Founders (Michigan) Backwoods Bastard, a Bourbon barrel-aged Scotch ale, into the glaze for yams or sweet potatoes, and then pairing the dish with the same. If maple is involved, try to get your hands on some bottles of Dieu du Ciel! (Quebec) Équinoxe du Printemps, a Scotch ale brewed with maple syrup for spring time, but which ages gracefully into fall.

The caramel-y goodness of sweet potatoes will find a friend in a smokey, but not overly bitter, Scotch ale. (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Cranberry sauce

Belgian-style wheat beers are spiced with orange peel and coriander seeds which really sing next to cranberry sauces. Try Allagash (Maine) White, Hoegaarden (Belgium) Witbier or Unibroue (Quebec) Blanche de Chambly.

If you are forgoing the cranberry sauce, but would like a little pucker on the dinner table, break out your Great Aunt’s cordial glasses and pour each of your dinner guests a few ounces of any one of these options during dinner: Downeast Cider (Massachusetts) Cranberry Blend; Citizen Cider (Burlington) Companion Sour Cherry Cider; or Havoc Mead (Colchester) Psychopomp Sour Cherry Mead (the name is fitting for some family meals, no?). These can serve as a nice intermezzo in lieu of sorbet between courses. And who has time to make sorbet, am I right?

Pies

Thanksgiving isn't really complete without pies. I used to pose that as a question, but at this stage in my life, I know that pies at Thanksgiving are fait accompli. For pumpkin pie, turn up the spices with some Shacksbury Cider (Vergennes) Ginger Spritz, a low alcohol session cider spritzer spiked with a tincture of ginger, galangal and bitter orange prepared by Alice & the Magician (Burlington). With berry pies, try a sweet-and-tart ciders like Boyden Valley (Cambridge) Cran-Bog cranberry cider. Pecan pie is right at home with a roasty-and-rich stouts like Long Trail (Bridgewater Corners) Unearthed. Apple pie and porter pair nicely - look for Queen City (Burlington) Yorkshire Porter or Ballast Point (California) “Victory At Sea,” an Imperial porter brewed with vanilla and coffee. For cream pies maybe just stick with a cup of black coffee, but spike it with a dose of Vermont Ice (Cambridge) Maple Cream Liqueur.

Jeff Baker has recommendations for beer, cider and mead for each Thanksgiving dish, plus some drinks that can be served between courses. (Photo: JEFF BAKER/for the FREE PRESS)

Gluten free

Enjoying a gluten-free Thanksgiving meal doesn't mean you have to skip the beer. Green's (Belgium) “Discovery” Amber Ale and Glutenberg (Quebec) Red Ale are both super versatile at the table. Ciders, meads and some ginger beers are also naturally gluten free. In addition to the ones mentioned above, look for products from Stormalong Cider (Massachusetts) and Moonlight Meadery (New Hampshire). For a spicy addition check out Halyard Brewing Co.’s (South Burlington) alcoholic ginger beers. Or if you’re looking for a funkier flavor profile, turn to Fable Farm Fermentory (Barnard) ciders.

Non-alcoholic

No alcohol? No problem! There are lots of craft no alcohol options available in Vermont which will work perfectly at the Thanksgiving table. Look for All Times Sparkling Cider (Burlington), Barritt’s (Bermuda) Ginger Beer, and Fentimans Botanically Brewed (England) Curiosity Cola.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/life/food/2017/11/16/beer-cider-and-mead-we-have-your-perfect-thanksgiving-pairings/870666001/

Sipping on Moonshine

From thehindu.com

As India’s first meadery opens, we find out why mead isn’t just fermented honey and water, and how the country got a new liquor category

For those of us who have heard of mead, it has always been that elusive drink we’ve read about in the pages of Beowulf or imagined being toasted in the halls of Valhalla. Ambrosia, Heaven’s Dew or the Drink of the Gods, or by any other name, it was a thing of lore forgotten by time. Well, almost.
The last decade has seen the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage stage a comeback. In the US, mead is currently the fastest-growing alcoholic category, a statistic that seems to have ruffled a few feathers, including that of big bird, Budweiser, which mocked it in one of its recent advertisements. In 2003, the US had about 30 commercial meaderies; today, there are more than 350! 2017 mead reports estimate that in the States a new meadery opens every three days. When it comes to the rest of the world, that figure changes to one every seven days.
On home turf, we have Rohan Rehani and Nitin V to thank for drawing this honey ferment out of the make-believe world of dungeons and dragons, and bringing it to our neighbourhood bars. That is, if your neighbourhood happens to be Mumbai or Pune.

Trial and error
Nitin and I first connected when a common craft-brewer friend put us in touch. We later met at a mall during one of his trips to Delhi — he’d carried a sample of his mead, which we sneakily tasted in a Starbucks takeaway cup. That was two years ago. Four weeks ago, Moonshine Meadery, based in Maharashtra, officially became India’s first meadery.
The two 33-year-olds, both mechanical engineers by education, have been close friends for over three decades. In 2014, Nitin had read about meads in an in-flight magazine while travelling from Brussels to Munich. “I took pictures of the article and sent them to Rohan as soon as I landed. Within two weeks, he had bought honey, a carbouy and wine yeast to begin fermentation,” he says. “We had no reference point; it was all about the concept and the excitement of tinkering with brewing. Our first batch was the absolute worst, as we didn’t know anything about temperature control.”
Batch by batch their meads got better as they figured out what they were doing wrong. They started to employ modern fermentation techniques and improve their equipment. Then they experimented with every fruit and spice they could get their hands on, including gooseberries, cloves, mulberries, cinnamon, apples, mangoes, etc. They also played with varieties of honey. “We used multiflora / wildflower honey for meads which have a strong fruit or spice character. For milder, traditional meads, the type of honey fermented imparts the character,” says Rehani, who, during this journey, pursued special courses on bee keeping (from the Central Bee Keeping and Training Institute, Pune) and later, interned with Colony Meadery in Pennsylvania. By late 2015, Rohan and Nitin knew they wanted to set up a meadery.

Millennial toast
The Moonshine duo was aware that obtaining licenses would be troublesome. It’s hard enough for a new player in an established space, but it’s another battle to get one for a category that isn’t recognised by Indian law. Beginning the process in January 2016, multiple rounds of research and bureaucratic back-and-forth finally got it included in the excise legislation. This June, Maharashtra became the first (and currently, only) state to formally recognise mead as a category under wine.
Internationally, the mead boom is largely credited to piqued interests among the Game of Thrones fandom. Ironic, considering the drink has never (yet) made an appearance on the show. While pop-culture references have made the term more common, the popularity of ‘craft beverages’, beer in particular, is what Moonshine Meadery is counting on to drive interest and sales. “Both craft beer and mead are about quality, innovation and small-batch productions. Meads are where craft beer was 20 years ago,” says Rehani. Also, as Nitin adds, “Millennials are experimenting more with their alcohol. This has resulted in a growth in cocktails and innovative alcohol beverages.”
Along with trying new recipes, provenance of raw materials is key. Being a homegrown product, they use all natural, locally-sourced ingredients. Their first bottled variants are an Apple Cyder Mead, which uses honey from Maharashtra’s Western Ghats with Kashmiri apple juice, and a Coffee Mead, with coffee from Chikmagalur.

Testing waters
Educating the market is one of the most important things Moonshine will have to tackle. Shailendra Bist, head brewer at Independence Brewing Company, says, “Drawing parallels to cider, a product that is currently much better known, is perhaps the best way to start.” One of the criticisms they are likely to come up against is that mead is a ‘sweet, woman’s drink’. “For us, it invokes the imagery of Vikings throwing back a drinking horn full of mead before charging into battle. That’s as manly as it can get! It’s up to meaderies like us to decide what the perception will be in five years,” Nitin adds.
So far Moonshine Meadery has done a few collaborative brews with breweries in Pune and Mumbai, which have found instant appeal even with first-timers. Most recently, at the Octobrew fest in Nashik — where the meads were exhibited alongside other craft brews — they managed to go through an impressive 217 litres in just six hours! “Everyone approaches it with curiosity. Once they try it, they are bowled over by how refreshing and balanced it is. We expected our Apple Cyder Mead to be popular, but we’ve been astonished by the love for our Coffee Mead,” says Nitin.
By mid-November, restaurants and a few select outlets will retail Moonshine Meadery’s bottles (at ₹180 for 330 ml). The plan is to expand to all major cities within the next two years. “We want to make this a national brand. We will have multiple variants and we will continue to experiment,” he concludes.

http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/sipping-on-moonshine/article20102883.ece

Between beer and mead, behold braggot

From registerguard.com

Viking Braggot Co. of Eugene crafts the historic fermented drink from honey and barley, often with a deft touch of hops

Beer is made from hops and malted barley. Mead is made from honey. Both beverages date back thousands of years. So does braggot, a hybrid of mead and beer that brings together the best of both fermentations.

While braggot is not as well-known as its malty and honeyed parents, it was especially popular in Medieval and post-Renaissance Europe and the United Kingdom (Geoffrey Chaucer even gives it a nod in “The Canterbury Tales”). Like craft beer, cider and mead, today braggot is making a modern comeback while staying true to its origins.
Technically, braggot is a type of mead (and given its history in areas from Norway to Wales, you might also see it spelled bragget, bragaut, bracket, bragot or bragawd). Instead of being made only with honey, braggots combine as much as half honey and half malted barley.

If you aren’t interested in the hoppy bitterness associated with many Northwest beers, braggots are traditionally hopless, though breweries such as Eugene-based Viking Braggot Co. also brew hopped versions. As with beers, braggot colors range from pale to dark. Honey aromas and textures come through, and hopped versions usually balance sweetness and bitterness.

“People tell us they enjoy that the honey rounds out or smooths the flavour and you aren’t left with that bitter beer taste,” explains Dan McTavish, co-founder of Viking Braggot Co. “Even our IPA-style braggots have a huge amount of hops but aren’t over-the-top bitter, which people really enjoy.”

From left, Viking Braggot Co.’s head brewer Perry Ames, and co-founders Addison Stern and Daniel McTavish inside their specialized brewery in west Eugene. (Kelly Lyon/The Register-Guard)

Finding their brewing niche

Along with craft beer, the public was beginning to take more notice of mead, and McTavish first encountered it while a student at the University of Oregon.

“When I thought of ‘mead’ I thought of tales of big wooden mugs being crashed together and much more along the line of beer,” McTavish says. “After a little research I came across the braggot style and I was hooked.”

McTavish would homebrew in his small apartment near the UO campus, where he was a senior at the Charles H. Lundquist College of Business. Over winter break in 2011, he and fellow Viking Braggot co-founder Addison Stern came up with the idea for a craft brewery, based in Oregon where the industry and market were at the cutting edge. During their remaining time at the UO, McTavish and Stern began learning all they could about the craft-beer industry nationally and within Oregon.

“There were so many awesome breweries out there. Even if you could make better beer, those other breweries would still be better funded, marketed and distributed than we could ever dream of being,” McTavish says. “So the idea of something niche, like braggot, that nobody else was doing, was very attractive.”

After graduating in June 2012, McTavish and Stern began networking and evaluating potential brewery locations. By December they had a facility, and in 2013 produced 114 kegs (57 barrels). With products available in Oregon (primarily from Eugene to Portland), Viking Braggot and its five employees last year crafted 684 kegs (342 barrels), and is on pace to produce 420 barrels, or about 840 kegs, for 2017.

The growth, says head brewer Perry Ames, comes from growing awareness of braggots and an interest in craft beverages beyond beer and wine.

“People tell me they really like the diversity of the styles and ingredients that we use,” he says.

Honey, hop subtleties

The word “braggot” and its variants stem from Irish and Welsh words meaning “to sprout,” a nod to sprouted, malted barley. As with beer, malts could be pale (such as you might find in a blonde ale or pale ale), smoked (for a more traditional flavour), or dark (reminiscent of porter or stout). Strength ranges from a common 5 to 7 percent ABV, to around 13 percent ABV.

Beyond fermentable sugars, honey provides aromas, flavours and textures that bring the essence of the honey to the fore in the glass. Braggots can be hop-forward, but if brewers hop a braggot they often use mellower varieties that won’t dominate but instead enhance from the background.

“Braggots are very similar to craft beer. People worry without having tried them, that they will be cloying or too sweet,” McTavish explains. “We ferment most of the honey so you are left with a subtle, but added complexity of the remaining honey. The biggest taste would be how smooth and full-bodied the brews are.”

For people interested in trying braggots for the first time, McTavish and Ames recommend they start on the lighter side, such as Viking’s Reverence, a red ale brewed with orange blossom honey, or Freyja, a blonde ale that works in local wildflower honey, ‘Crystal’ and ‘Cascade’ hops, and honeybush, a South African herbal tea. Honey character will come through more in lighter braggots, yet balance with subtler malt flavours.

From what Viking Braggot’s team is seeing in distribution trends and in its tasting room, more and more people are cluing in to the world of braggots.

“The educational aspect of braggot was a huge battle right off the bat,” McTavish allows. “It is still a daily thing to describe, correctly, what a braggot is. But one of my favourite things is to overhear a group of people, where one person is explaining what a braggot is to their friends, and that happens more and more.”

http://registerguard.com/rg/life/tastings/35672226-82/between-beer-and-mead-behold-braggot.html.csp#

Wimbledon jockeys for position among Britain’s booziest sporting socials

From swlondoner.co.uk

Brits have always been associated with drinking.
In medieval times ale or mead was preferred because water was unsanitary, and now a casual pint or two after work is seen as the ideal relaxant.
Nothing symbolises British drinking more than how we carry ourselves abroad, whether it’s getting “raga in Maga” or rowdy fans at football matches abroad.
But on home soil it is sporting events that take centre stage as Britain’s booziest socials.
In the summer months of June and July the three most prestigious events have to be Royal Ascot, the Henley Royal Regatta and the Wimbledon Championships; but which is the booziest?
The three types of tipple in the spotlight is champagne, Pimm’s and a good old-fashioned pint of beer.
Wimbledon
The longest of the events, with 14 days of drinking fun, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club is the place to be in south west London during the first two weeks in July.
Centre court may not be the rowdiest of places, compared to a Saturday night at the local Hippodrome, but they sure do knock back a fair quantity of bevvies.
Pimm’s is by far the tipple of choice, with 320,000 glasses served.
Second favourite is a nice ale or lager, with 110,000 pints purchased, and followed by champagne with a mere 29,000 bottles bought.
Over 24 days of the countries finest sporting meets, a colossal 169,765 litres of Pimm’s, 136,951 litres of beer and 63,375 litres of champagne has passed the lips of attendees.
Patrons however, at Wimbledon at least, still feel that it is simply a by-product of the event itself, exclaiming that sport comes first over the idea of it just being a boozy social.

http://www.swlondoner.co.uk/wimbledon-jockeys-position-among-britains-booziest-sporting-socials/

How do I love mead? Let me count the ways, and Redstone Meadery

By Amber DeGrace

Mead is that ancient brew made from honey, the nectar of the gods.

On its own, mead can bring a taste of heaven to your mouth, but you might encounter several substyles of mead on the path to enlightenment.

A cyser adds apple cider or juice to the honey before fermentation. And depending on how much honey the meadmaker added, the cyser might end up bright and wine-like or rich and redolent of honey.

If blending grape juice and honey sounds like your thing, go ahead and put them together and call it a pyment. Considering the many varieties of grapes, the spectrum of colours and flavours in the resulting pyments offer an entire new world of exploration.

A braggot adds some kind of fermentable grain into the mix, resulting in what should taste like a delightful marriage of both mead and ale. Geoffrey Chaucer, in “The Canterbury Tales,” has the miller describe the old carpenter’s young wife, Alison, as having a mouth as sweet as a braggot.

A braggot can be made with any base beer or with smoked malts; this makes the resulting mead-based potable widely varied and fully open to interpretation.

Metheglins take a mead and put spices or herbs into it. Metheglin comes from the Welsh words meddyg (medicinal) and llyn (liquor). These brews, often taken as an aid for ailments, were the over-the-counter treatments of their day.

Most modern folk will reach for their favourite brand of cough and cold medicine when feeling sick, but I’m someone who still favours herbal medicine as a first response. I made my share of honey-based medicinal syrups this past winter using blends of mullein, elder, lemon balm, thyme and more.

Commonly used ingredients in metheglin today include flowers such as rose and lavender, spices such as cinnamon and vanilla, and even stronger additions of chocolate and chili peppers.

Adding any kind of fruit to a mead puts it in a broad category called a melomel. With that in mind, you could say that all cysers and pyments are melomels, but not all melomels are cysers or pyments.

Some melomels made with other fruits have special names, like those with mulberries (morat, rhymes with Borat), black currants (black mead), blueberries (bilbemel), pears (perry), red currants (red mead) and raspberries (rudamel).

Any fruit or combination of fruits can be used when making a melomel and the exciting flavor possibilities are endless: strawberry-kiwi, mango-pineapple, passion fruit-guava. If you can dream it up, you can make it happen.

Redstone Meadery

Colorado’s Redstone Meadery has been concocting honeyed potions since 2000, and one of its offerings is a melomel called Black Raspberry Nectar.

Black raspberries, or Rubus occidentalis, are a species native to North America and grow wildly with their thick-prickled canes in dense bramble patches. A joy to pluck slightly overripe during summertime woodland walks, the sweet raspberry flavour makes the resulting stained fingers and lips worth every thorny stab.

Redstone Meadery adds black raspberry puree to this melomel and notes that it does not use sulfites. While small amounts of sulfites are a naturally occurring by-product of fermentation and generally recognized as safe substances, there were enough instances in the late 1980s of asthma occurring after the ingestion of sulfite-treated raw produce that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration now requires it to be labelled when exceeding 10 parts per million. Sulfites are frequently used as a means of preventing unwanted bacteria beasties from adulterating the pure essence of flavour in wines and meads. It also acts as a preservative and prevents any discoloration from oxidation during aging.

Other foods containing higher instances of sulfites include bottled citrus juices, molasses, canned tuna fish, dried fruit and gelatins. If you don’t have any allergic reactions to these foodstuffs, you won’t likely have any issues with sulfite-added meads. (This column is not intended to act as a substitute for your doctor in providing medical advice.)

Black Raspberry Nectar

Black Raspberry Nectar poured bright cranberry red, crystal clear and with no visible carbonation rising from the bottom of the glass.

Its aroma was full of tart raspberries, floral notes, minerals and the grape juice served during the Baptist communions of my childhood.

In flavor, honey shined above all else. Juicy, jammy bramble fruit melded with floral and herbaceous notes, and the black raspberries added undeniable gummy-bearlike berry flavor. The body started slick and medium and ended slightly dry with a subtle woody scratch.

Overall impression: Black Raspberry Nectar was medium-bodied like other meads I’ve had, with that long-lingering sweetness before drying out at the end. The carbonation was medium-low and quite still, and the lack of effervescence was enjoyable as the body was in no way syrupy.

http://lancasteronline.com/features/food/how-do-i-love-mead-let-me-count-the-ways/article_95c58bd4-3643-11e7-b637-ab1799e2117e.html

Derby Winter Ale Festival 2017 starts today - everything you need to know

From derbytelegraph.co.uk

Real ale lovers can take their pick from more than 350 beers, ciders, perries, meads and even gluten-free brews at the 13th Derby Winter Ale Festival which starts today.
The four-day event, which launches at 5pm on Wednesday, February 15, and lasts through to Saturday, February 18, will take place at the city's iconic Roundhouse. Add food and live music into the mix, and you have the perfect recipe to lift spirits in the middle of gloomy February.

Derby has carved a niche as a city worthy of the pickiest real ale connoisseur and thousands are expected to flock to the annual event. However, it will be a little different this year. For the last three years, Derby has been home to the National Winter Ales Festival, with support from the Campaign for Real Ale to put it on the map.

This year the national festival has moved to Norwich so the Derby branch of CAMRA branch had to make a decision – whether or not to hold a winter festival of their own again. Luckily for beer fans they decided to go ahead. Here's everything you need to know.

When and where is the 13th Derby Winter Ale Festival taking place?

It will be held at the Roundhouse, which is part of the Derby College complex situated on the Eastern side of Derby Railway Station, and will run from February 15-18.

Getting there

If you're arriving by train, use the Pride Park exit at Derby Station. Free buses will leave Derby Exeter Bridge at 11am and then every half an hour until 9.30pm, calling at the bus station (bay 28) a few minutes later. The first bus on Wednesday will be at 5pm. Buses will return from the festival at quarter past and quarter to the hour with the last bus at 11.30pm. Arriva also operates route 4/4A between the bus station and the back of the Roundhouse. There is a short cut opposite the stop which takes you to the front of the Roundhouse.

Opening times and admission costs

• Wednesday February 15: 5-11pm, £3
• Thursday February 16: 11am-11pm, £2 (lunch), £5 (after 5.30pm).
• Friday February 17: 11am-11pm, £3 (lunch), £6 (after 5.30pm).
• Saturday February 18: 11am-11pm, £3 (lunch), £6 (after 5.30pm).

The festival allows access to under-18s during the day but they must leave before 7pm. Pensioners are free at lunch times. Under-26s are half-price to all sessions. Card carrying CAMRA members are free at all times.

Will there be food at the festival?

Yes, as well as cheese, crisps and chocolate hot meals will be provided by the Roundhouse's catering. For example, burgers, hot dogs and pulled pork baps will by £4 - £5 if you add chunky chips. Chilli, both beef and vegetarian, curry and jacket potatoes are also on the snack menu.

How many beers can we try?

More than 360 different offerings with a strong emphasis on Derbyshire beers and a wide range of winter ales, barley wines and session beers. The festival will also feature gluten free beers from Wold Top and Raw. There will also be a dedicated bar showcasing bottled beers from around the world plus a keykeg bar featuring artisan breweries from Italy and Belgium and a chance to try Kolsch as you would find it in its home town of Cologne.

What other drinks will be on offer?

You can try 34 ciders, seven perries and a range of meads from Derbyshire's own Mercian Mead and Lymebay. All will be available by the glass or bottle.

Will there be live music?

Yes, lots, every evening in the Carriage Room. Here's what you can enjoy:

• Wednesday: Local band showcase featuring at least three groups
• Thursday: The Modest will perform classics from the likes of The Who, Small Faces, The Kinks and The Jam but inter-mixed with Northern Soul.
• Friday: Tom Hingley, the singer with Inspiral Carpets will play with his band The Kar-Pets and will perform the big tunes from the Manchester Indie heroes. Plus, Verbal Warning, old school punk rockers.
• Saturday: Kazabian, regarded as the number one tribute to Kasabian.
  

http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/derby-winter-ales-festival-2017-everything-you-need-to-know/story-30131900-detail/story.html

Five Meads to Try

From Bloomberg.com

The following meads can be hard to find in retail stores, but many are available online directly from their producers. They represent the range of flavours of honey wine and capture the geographic assortment of production styles and techniques from around the world.
Enlightenment Wines Saint Crimson, New YorkThis ruby-tinged mead is made from black currants and wildflower honey. The currants add tartness and tannins which is balanced by the sweetness of the honey. Lyon suggests serving it iced, as an aperitif, or mixing it as the base of a summer negroni. ($25 per 375-ml bottle)
Mjödhamnen Suttungabrygden, SwedenMjödhamnen is the project of a nomadic Swedish mazer who travels through the Nordic countryside making mead at different apiaries (bee farms). Suttungabrygden is a rose mead made with heather honey and lignonberries. ($24 per 750-ml bottle)
Nektar Tuco-Style Freakout, MichiganMichigan’s B. Nektar draws inspiration from an infamous Breaking Bad character for this lime zest-infused mead with a base of orange blossom honey. Agern’s Walsh recommends pairing it with a simple dish of oysters. As for justifying the crack pipe on the label, he laughs: “[Mead] is a strange scene filled with strange people.” ($10 per 500-ml bottle)
Makana Iqhilika African Herbal Blossom, South AfricaThis South African meadery is known for infusing mead with such ingredients as chile peppers, figs, and coffee, to varying degrees of success. One of the better experiments is this one infused with tea made from hibiscus, rose hips, licorice, cinnamon, and dried apples. ($23 per 750-ml bottle)
Melovino Berry Boku, New JerseyThis New Jersey-made mead uses a blend of mixed berries including raspberries, currants, blueberries, and strawberries for a blend of sweet and tart flavors. ($22 per 500-ml bottle)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/mead-no-mere-saccharine-ren-faire-staple-is-now-a-serious-drink

Mead: It's Not Just for Hobbits Anymore

From Bloomberg.com

In his recent three-star review of Agern—the Nordic-inspired restaurant in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, from Noma founder Claus Meyer—New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells called out mead as an oddball beverage.
“Strange things are happening in mead,” Wells wrote about the wine list, which includes an entire section of mead, “a beverage that is pretty strange to begin with.”
It’s true: For most Americans, mead is an unfamiliar beverage that’s commonly perceived as sweet and alcoholic and is often equated with Beowulf and Renaissance Faire enthusiasts. But it’s also part of an historic winemaking tradition, one that has been utilized the world over for millennia as a way of making a fermented beverage.

According to the American Mead Makers Association, mead is one of the fastest-growing alcoholic beverages in the country by sheer number of new producers. In 2003, the U.S. had roughly 30 producers. Today, there are more than 300, with meaderies opening in parts of the country as far flung as Portland, Me.; Richmond, Va.; Southern California; and even Alaska.
However, commercially available meads are still relatively rare, and the beverage hasn’t been fully embraced en masse. There’s no widely sold “six-pack” mead, for instance, the way that there is for beer and even cider. The new breed of meads are experimental and funky, infused with fruits and herbs that add tannins and bitterness to balance the honey’s sweetness.
“There’s pressure on the industry to think about mead the same way we think about grape wine,” said Raphael Lyon, a mazer, or meadmaker, based in New York. “They want you to have two or three different meads based on two or three different kinds of honey—‘varietal’ meads,” he says.
But to Lyon, who makes mead under the Enlightenment Wines moniker, honey may be the least important factor.
“People make the mistake of thinking about mead as a wine that’s made from honey and water,” he said. “If you start in the other direction, you’ll see that mead is a way of taking fruits and herbs and adding honey to them and fermenting it all together. The idea of just honey-plus-water doesn’t have any kind of historic authenticity.”
Lyon started Enlightenment Wines in 2009 out of a barn in the Hudson Valley. This summer, he expanded to a small production facility in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and opened an on-site tasting room and cocktail bar called Honey’s. There, mixologist Arley Marks serves Lyon’s bone-dry honey wines, along with several cocktails that feature mead, such as Night Eyes, made with sparkling mead, apples, and cranberries.
A hyper-educated, creative guy with art degrees from both Brown and Columbia, Lyon began making mead in the 1990s as a way of distancing himself from what he calls “the networks of commerce that fuel modern food systems.”
(If that sounds a little out of the mainstream for a commercial beverage producer, it is; mead seems to attract freethinkers and outsiders, as bees are drawn to, uh, honey.)

“I was really interested in, ‘What are the basics of survival?’” he explained. “Not from an apocalyptic sense but just to know what a self-sufficient farm looked like, what heirloom crops were.”
He takes a philosophical approach to making honey wine and sees himself as part of an historical winemaking tradition. He insists on using unprocessed honey, which is richer in nutrients, to make the yeast happy.
“The role of the mazer is about seeing the natural world,” he said, “finding the elements of it that you want to preserve, and using honey as the sugar basis for the fermentation process.”
Lyon said that thinking about mead the way we think about modern grape wine culture is historically fraught because “most alcohol for millennia was made from a bunch of different stuff.” For Lyon, that stuff includes such things as foraged dandelion flowers, wild apples, elderberries, juniper berries, lavender, marjoram, cranberries, tart cherries, rose hips, and sumac flowers, all of which find their way into the mead he makes.
“Mead made from just honey and water doesn’t have any tannin or structure,” said Lyon. “Using herbs and botanicals doesn’t just provide a flavour, it’s critical for the fermentation process. It clears the wine and it prevents microbial spoilage.” (The yeast and proteins are attracted to the botanicals and then fall out to the bottom of the fermenter with time.)
Despite its status as an outsider drink, mead is very much a global beverage.
In Africa, where mead is called Tej, it’s brewed with gesho, the dried roots and stems of a small shrub. Beowulf’s Anglo-Saxon meads were traditionally made with the dried flowers of yarrow weed. There’s even evidence that the ancient Egyptians and Chinese made and drank honey-based drinks.
But globally, mead is nowhere near as popular as it once was. As agriculture became prevalent, more easily grown and harvested ingredients such as barley and grapes became the dominant fermentable sugars of choice, and mead fell out of favour. The relatively high price of honey—up to $2 per pound, compared to pennies per pound for malted barley—is still the No. 1 reason mead doesn’t enjoy more mainstream success.
“There is pressure for mead makers to make a cheap 6 percent alcohol—really sweet, carbonated mead that’s put into six-packs of bottles or cans,” says Lyon. “I’m not saying that would taste good, but there’s always a market pressure to do that.” Lyon’s meads, by comparison, are wine-strength and dry, with flavours and aromas similar to those of "natural" wine.
At Agern, beverage director Chad Walsh said that mead is an important part of the restaurant’s identity.
“It’s a nod to our Scandinavian roots,” he said. “Many of our staff are from Scandinavia, and their first taste of alcohol when they were kids was mead.”
Walsh’s beverage list is populated exclusively by American produced wines, ciders, beers, and meads. He says it isn’t difficult to find great American-made meads; in fact, just as with craft beer, American craft mead makers are leading the reinvention and re-popularization of mead worldwide.
One of his most popular bottles is Utopian, a $180 mead from New Hampshire’s Moonlight Meadery. It is aged for five years in used Sam Adams casks that once held the brewery’s Utopias beer, a 29 percent ABV strong ale that tastes like Madeira. Thick and sweet with notes of vanilla and Bourbon, the mead is robust and sherry-like in flavour.
Walsh admitted that mead is a strange, unfamiliar beverage. But, he said, with that comes a tremendous opportunity for education.
“Education is our biggest challenge,” he said. “But that’s what’s great about mead. The palate is really broad, and the flavour spectrum is unrestrained.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/mead-no-mere-saccharine-ren-faire-staple-is-now-a-serious-drink

Discovering Mead

By Ruth Tan

What is mead? While most people may know that beer is an age-old beverage brewed by fermenting grains, and wine is an alcoholic drink made of fermented grapes, but not many may have heard of mead made from honey. In Europe, honey is fermented to produce this beverage. Simply put, it is honey wine, also called "Nectar of the gods," or "Drink of Love".
Honey wine is the first alcoholic drink brewed by men, earlier than wine or beer, with alcohol level varying between 7% to 15%. It was told that honey wine could have been produced by chance during the Stone Age when honey became wet from rain and wild yeast in the air settled into the mixture. For centuries, honey wine has been renowned as an 'aphrodisiac' (agent which heightens sexual drive) and the word "honeymoon" is believed to be derived from the ancient European custom of having newly-weds drink honey wine for a whole moon (month) in order to increase their fertility and therefore their chances of a happy and fulfilled marriage. Honey wine is also taken as a health tonic drink as it has a good level of antioxidants from honey. Honey wine-making is as easy as brewing beer, however, the fermentation of honey wine takes much longer than the fermentation of beer. Honey wine can take up to two or three years to reach full maturity.

The popularity of honey wine has waxed and waned in the last centuries, especially during the times when honey became scarce and expensive, it fell into even greater obscurity. This ancient brew was seen by most people as an old-fashioned beverage. However, interestingly it has been reported that this sweet exotic wine is making a comeback and is currently on the rise throughout the world. Making their own mead at home has become a new buzz amongst beverage hobbyists and many others are beginning to pay attention and becoming enticed to it.
Traditional honey wine whether sweet, dry, sparkling or still is simply made of honey, water, and yeast. Today, it comes in a dazzling array of flavors, depending the type of honey, the brewing process you use, and the additions like fruit (e.g blue berry and cherry), herbs, spices, malt, and even peppers you use! When fruits, spices, or herbs are added, honey wine takes on a totally different character and a new name, which could be Melomel (made with fruit juices), Pyment (made with grape juice), Cyser (made with apple juice), Metheglin (made with herbs or spices or both), Hippocras (pyment made with herbs and/or spices), or Braggot (honey-ale made with fermented honey and grains). Choosing which floral varieties of honey to use is a decision of taste and the type of honey wine desired. Stronger honeys like buckwheat go well with sweeter, heavy or spiced honey wines and milder honeys like acacia with delicate flavours work well for traditional or fruit honey wines.


http://ezinearticles.com/?Discovering-Mead&id=460929