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.

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