Ancient drink of mead revived by new fanbase of younger drinkers

From theguardian.com

English Heritage among outlets serving up honey fermented ‘nectar of the gods’ in wake of craft beer boom

             Mead-based cocktail called Ye Olde Hot Tod, a tipple devised by English Heritage with The                             Vanguard bar, Birmingham. Photograph: English Heritage/PA

Mead, one of the world’s oldest alcoholic drinks, has been making a comeback on the back of the boom in craft beer.
Sales of the honey-based drink have grown in supermarkets after winning a strong fan base among younger drinkers in pubs and at beer festivals.
The conservation charity English Heritage claims to be the UK’s largest retailer of mead through the gift shops in its 400 historic buildings and monuments as well as online; it said it sold a bottle every 10 minutes.
Sales of mead have increased by an average of 10% annually for the past three years, according to English Heritage, and between April 2018 and March 2018 the charity sold 29,750 bottles, all made by the Lyme Bay Winery, in Devon, the UK’s leading producer of award-winning meads.

Mead, created by fermenting honey with water, dates back thousands of years and was once viewed as the drink of the gods, falling from the heavens as dew then gathered by bees. It was also believed to improve health and prolong life.
“As one of the world’s oldest alcoholic drinks mead has sometimes had quite an ‘olde worlde’ reputation but we’ve seen that dramatically change over the last five years,” said Samuel Boulton, managing director of The Vanguard, a cocktail bar and mead hall in Birmingham. “With the success of [the TV show] Game Of Thrones, as well as the rise in popularity of experimental cocktails, you could definitely call mead the new up and coming drink, and our customers really enjoy that historical throwback with the modern twist.”

Lyme Bay Winery makes seven own-brand meads, with different flavours, for English Heritage. In total it brews and sells more than 10 variations, including chilli and rhubarb flavours and a Christmas variety, predominantly in standard 75cl bottles but also in flagons.
Its drinks are also sold through Waitrose and local Co-ops, as well as in farm shops, delicatessens and garden centres.
Sophie Atherton, a beer sommelier, said: “I see the increase in the popularity of mead as linked to the craft beer boom and the surge of interest in gin, and also our love of food.
“Our culture today is full of desire for tasting new things and experiencing new flavours and despite mead’s heritage it will be new to most people. Perhaps there’s also an element of adding an instagram-able historic setting and you’ve got a drink everyone wants to be seen supping.”

Regional beer festivals organised by the real ale group CAMRA now often have well-stocked mead sections. The Cambridge beer festival this November served up 15 different meads, all brewed in the UK and ranging in alcoholic strength from 4% to 17%.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/29/ancient-mead-honey-revived-younger-drinkers-english-heritage-

Bushwakker Brewing Announces 2018 Vintage of Blackberry Mead

From canadianbeernews.com

REGINA, SK – Bushwakker Brewpub has announced that this year’s vintage of the extremely popular  Bushwakker Blackberry Mead (10% abv) – created using 400 pounds of Lumsden Valley honey and 80 pounds of blackberries per batch – will be going on sale Saturday December 1st at 11:00 AM. Although as always, those hoping to get a bottle may want to show up a fair bit earlier than that to avoid being disappointed, as the line-up traditionally starts the day before.

As always, there will be free hot chocolate for those waiting in line, and for the first time this year, the first 50 people in line will receive a free limited edition t-shirt.
Bushwakker Blackberry Mead will be available to purchase in a limited run of 650 ml bottles that are expected to sell out within hours of going on sale. It will also be on tap at the brewpub while supplies last.
Source & Photo: Bushwakker Brewing

https://www.canadianbeernews.com/2018/11/23/bushwakker-brewing-announces-2018-vintage-of-blackberry-mead/

How to Make Your Own Short Mead (aka Honey Wine)

From themanual.com

The ancient beverage known as mead is essentially fermented honey water. It can be spiced, carbonated, fruited, or sweetened in innumerable combinations. That versatility makes mead as rich and varied a palette for creative expression as wine or beer.

Unfortunately, the range of meads available at bottle shops can be incredibly limited. But for the creative and inspired, mead making is a task you can easily master at home, with minimal equipment and ingredients required. Bonus: you can call yourself a mazer.

Meads are hearty drinks that can  easily exceed 20 percent alcohol by volume, thanks to the base being honey. To reach that milestone, mead requires a long fermentation time and a lot of patience. If you want to taste the fruits of your labour sooner, “short meads” are the answer.

Short meads are intentionally produced with a low alcohol by volume ratio, often not more than 5 percent. That makes short meads comparable to session beers in the brewing world. Short meads require less time to ferment and can be enjoyed in larger quantities with less concern about imminent intoxication. Only have enough space on a countertop to fit a small fermentation vessel? Great, short mead it is!

To get started, you only need three ingredients: honey, water, and yeast. The only necessary equipment is a freshly sanitized 1-gallon vessel. To make the most basic mead, add one pound of honey and top off the jar with water. Pitch the yeast and mix well. After two weeks, the mead is ready for drinking.

How to Make Short Mead

Ingredients:

• 1 lb honey (try to avoid grocery store honey, as it is sometimes not actually honey)
• 1 yeast packet (while you can use an ale yeast, most mead makers use Lavin ICV D-47, a white wine yeast)
• Pure water (if you’re using tap water, it is good to know the mineral content, as that will affect the final product)

Equipment:

• 1-gallon fermentation vessel (something like this is perfect)
• Starsan

Method:

1. Sanitize your vessel, following the Starsan instructions. (If you were to be using any tools — such as a funnel to get the ingredients into the vessel — you would want to sanitize them as well.)
2. Add honey and water to your fermenter.
3. Pitch the yeast according to instructions.
4. Add yeast to the fermenter and mix well.
5. Make sure there is water in the airlock so you can monitor the bubbles (the visual bi-product of fermentation) escaping.
6. Wait approximately two weeks and your mead will be ready (the bubbles will have all but stopped). Depending on the type of yeast you use, it may take less or more time.

Short Mead Tips and Tricks

If you want to take your mead making to a more professional level, consider using a hydrometer to take gravity readings so you’ll know the mead’s ABV. Adding an airlock will allow carbon dioxide to escape while preventing oxygen and other elements from entering, improving the consistency of your mead.
Speed Brewing by Mary Izett is a great primer for short meads. A section of the book is dedicated solely to the history and processes of meads with a handful of excellent short mead recipes tossed in for good measure. Whether you want to make a bochet (mead with caramelized honey) or pyment (mead with grape juice), the basic building blocks of mead-making can be found in Izett’s helpful pages.
Another solid reference for experimentation is The Compleat Meadmaker by Ken Schramm, a book that countless mead makers got their start using.
While making a straight-forward traditional mead or following the recipes of others is a great launch point, short meads are ripe for experimentation. Try adding varying levels of honey for new experiences in sweetness and ABV. Add fresh or dried herbs, fruits or peppers. Throw in some hops. Or try different types of yeast for even more variety in dryness and flavour.

https://www.themanual.com/food-and-drink/how-to-make-short-mead-honey-wine-recipe/

The Amped-Up Ancient Booze Crashing Chicago's Craft Beer Party

From ozy.com

Honey wine is the new craft booze buzz on Chicago’s southwest side.

Chicago is a beer town, and perhaps no part of the city slugs suds like the southwest side. Seven nights a week, crowds flock to a three-mile strip of Western Avenue in the neighbourhood of Beverly where restaurants and Irish pubs — emphasis on the pubs — dot every block. There’s beer and Irish whiskey galore, of course. But there’s a new booze on the block appealing to the craft-alcohol set: mead.

Wild Blossom Meadery and Winery is Chicago’s only meadery on the Northern Illinois Wine Trail. And we’re not talking your standard mead. Wild Blossom is taking the ancient honeyed beverage to new places, establishing itself as a Midwest pioneer in sustainability, production and creative flavours — like one spicy version that might just send your eyes somersaulting backward.

With roots in ancient Africa, mead may be the oldest alcoholic drink in human history. Hunter-gatherers in the savanna, the story goes, stumbled upon pools of water containing the fermenting remains of fallen, honey-filled beehives. What probably began with the shy taste of a dipped finger sparked a honey wine love affair. Varieties of the drink now appear everywhere from Lithuania and Finland to Mexico, northern China and Ethiopia. Now, an American public with a growing taste for craft beers and spirits is creating a market for craft mead.

                                                   The front entrance of Wild Blossom.

                                            Source Courtesy of Greg Fischer, Wild Blossom

“With mead, we can manipulate it to reflect any style that we’re looking for,” says Greg Fischer, founder and owner of Wild Blossom. The mildly sour Cran Apple Cyser is an apple-infused mead, and Pirates Blood, a hot chili-infused version, is smoky, fiery and sweet (the appropriate skull-shaped bottle retails for $19.95). The Wolfcraft — a hoppy, sparkling mead with blood orange — pays homage to both beer and champagne. Then there’s the Charlatan, a dry blueberry mead aged in red wine barrels, and the bourbon barrel-aged Sweet Desire ($35.95, 16 percent ABV) that delivers autumn in a glass. At the winery, with its Finger Lakes-esque backyard patio bordering the shaded corner of the Dan Ryan Woods forest preserve, a six-pour flight will set you back $12 to $15.

Wild Blossom’s meads are made with purified water from Lake Michigan and honey that hails from a variety of local sources: five hives ranging in location from the roof of the Marriott on the “Magnificent Mile” to Indiana’s Ogden Dunes. Each bottle of the sweet, alcoholic final product leads to 2 million flowers pollinated in the area, says Fischer. In addition to meads, Wild Blossom also produces a range of Chicago-themed wines, like South Side Syrah and Chicago Bulls Blood.

The company opened for business nearly 30 years ago as a winery … in a Prohibition-era dry zone. Fischer relied on the skills he had learned as a boy, helping his Italian immigrant grandfather make wine and mead in the family basement. In 2017, Fischer opened the doors to a full-scale meadery, equipped with a tasting room, a 14,000-square-foot backyard and a production space — this time in a building just outside the dry zone.

Still, in beer country, Wild Blossom feels like a hidden gem to those in the know. The new location is helping to change that, as is word of mouth. “People appreciate a local product and our willingness to experiment,” says Fischer. But the new appetite for mead goes to show that it’s not just beer leading the craft craze, at least on Chicago’s South Side.

Go There: Wild Blossom Meadery and Winery

• Location: 9030 S. Hermitage Ave, Chicago. Map.
• Hours: Wed-Thurs: 3 p.m. - 9 p.m.; Fri-Sat: 3 p.m. -10 p.m; Sun: 1 p.m. - 8 p.m.
• Pro tip: Start with a traditional mead, such as the Prairie Passion, to get a taste before progressing to the more creative flavours.

https://www.ozy.com/good-sht/amped-up-ancient-booze-crash-chicagos-craft-beer-party/89242