Mead in Australia: a long-forgotten drink makes a comeback

From afr.com/lifestyle

Once thought fit only for medieval tankards or Viking drinking horns, this ancient honey wine is being revived and refined by local makers such as Louis Costa.

Louis Costa grew up in a village in Bordeaux surrounded by vineyards. Like generations of his family before him, he became a winemaker, working in the local chateaux before travelling the world.

Arriving in Australia, he made wine at Vasse Felix in Margaret River before settling in Byron Bay, northern NSW.

Wine grapes don’t grow well in this warm, damp part of the world, so Costa turned his passion for winemaking into a new career, finding a job at local brewery Stone & Wood. He couldn’t shake the winemaking bug, though, so he started experimenting with another source of fermentable sugar that also happens to be abundant in Byron: honey.

“My grandfather in France was a keen apiarist,” says Costa. “When I was growing up I remember him making beautiful, pure varietal honey. So, in Byron I decided to start making honey wine – mead.
"Honey wine in France has a really bad reputation. It is very sweet, with a coarse flavour. I wanted to create something that is different: clean and more refined, less sweet and heavy, more refreshing.”

Over the past five years, Costa has made countless small trial batches of mead, fermenting honey from single orchards and single flower types and adding local fruits and native botanicals to make still mead and sparkling mead, dry mead and sweet mead.
Now he’s on the cusp of launching the first commercial bottlings under his Aurum brand with locally grown ingredients – a dry mead made from macadamia honey, and an off-dry sparkling rosé mead infused with hibiscus flowers and strawberry gum.
“Rosé wine is very popular at the moment,” says Costa. “Especially rosé from Provence. I wanted to produce a rosé for the Byron Bay lifestyle, using the flavours of where we are.”

Louis Costa is one of a growing number of new Australian mead makers invigorating an almost forgotten drinks category. For many years, pretty much the only maker of mead in this country (apart from a handful of very smaller regional producers and a few keen home brewers) was Maxwell in McLaren Vale, and mead consumers were dismissed as people who liked to dress up as Vikings, or indulged in medieval role play and drank honey wine from tankards.

Mead heads

Now, there’s a surge of interest in this ancient drink, with a new wave of producers looking for more diverse markets and adventurous brewers such as Two Metre Tall in Tasmania delving into the world of mead-making.

Stone Dog Neadery near Goulburn, NSW has gained an enviable reputation for its range of meads since it opened in 2015, with mead maker Steve Kirby in demand as a judge at the growing number of local wine and brewing shows now exhibiting meads.

Sydney wine retailer and producer Brendan Hilferty from Sparrow & Vine  makes his Project B mead using urban honey sourced from Newtown. And Sunshack Cider in the Southern Highlands of NSW now also produce a range of sparkling products under the Bee Mead label, bottled in 500ml bottles aimed at the craft beer consumer.
Another new NSW producer, Sunlight Liquor, has a range of meads that is also aimed at the craft beer and cider markets: the two products currently in the range are available in cans, have bold, exaggerated flavours, and are infused with the kind of botanicals you’d find in a gin, vermouth or sour ale.
In an extraordinary coincidence, the Sunlight Liquor's Gums and Roses is, like Aurum’s sparkling pink mead, infused with hibiscus and strawberry gum – albeit in a much punchier, less subtle way.
Rather than appealing to the craft beer consumer, though, Louis Costa sees his Aurum meads sitting on dining tables next to fine wine.
“I can see them working really well as part of a degustation of food made from native ingredients,” he says. “After all, they're made with wholly native ingredients; we didn’t have to cut down any forests to plant a vineyard. That’s where the added value to this product is: to have it next to the new beautiful Australian gastronomy.”

https://www.afr.com/lifestyle/food-and-wine/wine-and-spirits/mead-in-australia-a-long-forgotten-drink-makes-a-comeback-20190411-p51d8j

Venerable mead!

A rare collaboration braggot from Giant Jones and Bos Meadery

From isthmus.com

A braggot is a combination of beer and mead. It’s a rare treat when one turns up commercially, especially a Wisconsin-made one. Federal laws are different for meaderies versus breweries regarding what each can use as raw ingredients to make alcohol. Therefore, few choose to take on the challenge of making a braggot on their own. Suffice it to say, when Giant Jones Brewing and Bos Meadery worked together to create a dark braggot called Paint It Black, they stayed within the letter of the law.

What is it? Paint It Black is a braggot from Giant Jones Brewing Company and Bos Meadery.

                                                                  Robin Shepard
Style: Braggot, sometimes called bracket or brackett, is closely related to mead, a drink that can be traced back thousands of years — it’s one of the oldest alcoholic beverages. Braggots are commonly made with a high percentage of honey, sometimes at levels of more than half of the fermentable sugars. Because honey is so easily fermented by yeast, it adds strength and unique sweetness to the brew. Braggots will range from 6 to 12 percent ABV.

Background: Any type of honey and any style of beer can go into making a braggot so they have a wide range of qualities in their aroma, flavour, colour and strength. The base beer for Paint It Black is Giant Jones’ Extra Stout. It’s a robust dark beer that the brewery recently introduced as a late winter/early spring seasonal. Brewmaster Jessica Jones says she chose the stout because of its full-bodied creamy texture that blends well with what honey brings to a braggot. Jones wanted to avoid a thin, lifeless braggot without much taste.
Giant Jones and Bos Meadery are only a block apart, so a collaboration braggot seemed like a good fit; the two business owners are also good friends. A few weeks before brewing, Jones sat down with meadery owner Colleen Bos to sample different meads with the stout in order come up with the right match. “If you like stout, you’ll like this braggot, says Jones, adding, “It has the body of the stout with a strong honey component.”
Raw Wisconsin wild flower honey from Pure Sweet Honey Farm of Verona contributes to the mead side of the recipe.

One of the key techniques that Bos and Jones used was to gradually add a mixture of honey and water along with a strain of yeast, four times over eight days, after the stout had finished its primary fermentation. The process kept the yeast active which allows more mead-like character to come through rather than just raw honey. “The mead is quite apparent, and it doesn’t disappoint on the beer front either,” says Jones. The ratio of beer to the mixture of honey and water is roughly 2 to 1. That leaves the braggot at around 8 percent ABV.
Paint It Black sells for $5/glass in the Giant Jones taproom and Bos Meadery’s mead hall. The launch party for Paint It Black will be Wednesday at Bos Meadery with the official tapping at 5 p.m. It goes on tap at Giant Jones beginning Thursday at 4 p.m.

Tasting notes:

• Aroma: A roastedness much like you find in most stouts, only with a light floral background from the honey.
• Appearance: Dark black body, with a bubbly brown head.
• Texture: Medium- to full-bodied with creaminess from the flaked barley that goes into making the stout.
• Taste: The roasted malty stout character is up front and prominent. The honey comes in just a little later with floral and raisin sweetness that lingers.
• Finish/Aftertaste: As the braggot warms, more of the floral honey notes come through. There’s a light spicy sweetness that blends with the roasted coffee-like maltiness. Also, faint hints of stone fruit sweetness from the dark malts come in late.

Glassware: The Belgian-style tulip glass with a slight inward taper helps focus the floral honey notes, so you notice a blend with the roasted malts.
Pairs well with: maybe nothing. It’s a very nice after-dinner drink, and best on its own to showcase the layers of flavour. Allow it to warm to experience more of the mead-like character.

The Verdict: I’m a fan of braggots and I admire anyone who tackles making one. Paint It Black didn’t disappoint. Most braggots I’ve had have been sweeter, which I attribute to being made with base beers like barley wines or scotch or amber ales. Instead, Paint It Black surprised me with its initial wave of roasted dark malts and coffee accents of the stout. I had to wait for the mead flavour. As I sipped, my taste buds gradually became more attuned to the complexity and layers of flavour from the honey. There’s a smooth creamy texture from the flaked barley; however, this isn’t a sticky-sweet drink. Floral, earthy spiciness comes from the honey. This is a nice addition to the taps of both Giant Jones and Bos Meadery.

https://isthmus.com/food-drink/beer/giant-jones-and-bos-meadery-collaboration-braggot/