The oldest alcoholic beverage is making a comeback

From spectrumlocalnews.com

MADISON, N.C. — The oldest known alcohol in the world is mead. It’s made of honey, yeast and water and has gained popularity from medieval-style shows such as "Game of Thrones" and the "Lord of the Rings" movie series.

What You Need To Know

• Mead is the oldest known alcoholic beverage in the world 


• It is made of honey, yeast and water 


• Mead is gaining popularity through medieval shows and movies 

It’s called the nectar of the gods and with at least 16 meaderies across the state, the golden-coloured drink is making a statement across North Carolina. 

Trevor Ogle is the co-owner and mead maker at Wandering Sun Meadery, and after studying in Kazan, Russia, he fell in love with mead. 

“When I was in Russia, I found a lot of mead. And I was really excited about it, because I tried it. It was really good. Then I got back here, and you couldn't find it anywhere,” Ogle said. 

Ogle has lived many lives from being in a 1980s and '90s tribute band, a teacher and studying pre-med and Russian. Using all of this knowledge, he is able to make the best version of his mead possible. 

“Oh, this is definitely basic basic biochemistry. That's what brewing is. So just chemistry and biology together. Chemistry and biology together makes this work, makes it a lot easier, makes you kind of understand more what you're doing and why you're doing it,” Ogle said. 

He says the process starts like any alcoholic drink, with the fermentation process his favourite part. 

"It's just really neat," Ogle said. 

For 500 litres of mead, he says he uses around 360 pounds of local honey from the Rockingham and Stokes County areas. 

“You get the fermentation so strong that you open up one of those larger tanks, and it just looks like there's a propeller at the bottom stirring everything up, and nothing's going on. It's so strong that the yeast are putting out alcohol and carbon dioxide that it literally just churns it as if there's like a propeller in there,” Ogle said. 

He says his mead can be ready in about two to two and a half weeks, far from the common misconception about the ancient beverage. 

“There's this myth that you can't drink a mead until it's a year old, and that is totally a myth,” Ogle said. 

Trevor Ogle smelling the fermentation process of his mead. (Spectrum News 1/Sydney McCoy)

After a good sniff test, he knows his mead is ready for the next step. 

“It gets up to 12%. At that point, we can clarify it and filter it to make it nice and clear and take the yeast back out of it. And after it's clarified, we will put it into separate containers and flavour it up with spices, herbs, fruits, whatever we want,” Ogle said. 

Ogle says it's important to make sure his equipment is clean to help enhance the flavour and quality of the mead. But if any stray bacteria or yeast gets left behind, the fermentation process can ruin the product. 

“There's an old joke that if you want to own a meadery, winery, brewery, you get used to washing dishes, because that's pretty much all you're going to do,” Ogle said.

After more filtration, the mead is ready for bottling. 

He says he makes a pretty mean orange blossom traditional, and some of his favourite flavours are his custom Viking, Pineapples of Paradise and says his best is probably his traditionals. 

“So I think my honestly, my best are my traditionals. Traditional mead is notoriously difficult to make because there's nothing really in it. It's just honey, yeast and water. And so it can be very challenging," Ogle said. 

He says his secret is keeping the mead flavour in it, which is what makes it unique. 

“I think it's just a good solid mead and has a good mead flavour. There was a mead judge that actually came by one time to try to mead, and he said that was the mead-est mead that he had ever tasted,” Ogle said. 

Medals won by Wandering Sun Meadery earlier this year. (Spectrum News 1/Sydney McCoy)

Regardless of what flavour of mead you may try, one thing is for sure, mead is neither a wine nor a beer. 

“And it's really its own beverage. So that makes it kind of stand out. It has a flavour that is kind of like a wine, but it really is completely unique,” Ogle said. 

He says its uniqueness makes the drink appeal to the masses and says you just have to try it!

“It’s kind of a combo, it's its own thing. Yeah. It appeals definitely to beer drinkers. It appeals to wine drinkers. It appeals to people that like sweet wine. People like dry wine, because you really can't make it kind of anywhere you want,” Ogle said. 

Wandering Sun Meadery has won numerous awards, including silver medals for its traditional off-dry mead and semi-sweet mead, as well as a bronze medal for its traditional dry mead at the 2023 NC Wine Competition. 

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2023/09/22/wandering-sun-meadery-mead-

Wye Valley Meadery drink awarded Great Taste Golden Fork

From southwalesargus.co.uk 

A traditional mead in Monmouthshire has scooped a Great Taste Golden Fork award

The Great Taste Golden Fork trophy for Wales has been awarded to Hive Mind Mead & Brew Co. from Monmouthshire, for its Wye Valley Meadery Traditional Mead.

                                     Matt and Kit Newell received the Wales Golden Fork award (Image: Guild of Fine Foods)

Kit Newell, co-founder of Hive Mind Mead & Brew Co, said: “It is a huge honour to be awarded the Golden Fork, especially given the amazing quality of food and drink represented by the entries to the awards.

“This recognition is testament to the passion and dedication of our small team as we work together to craft unique meads which tell the story of our beautiful region, its biodiversity and the quality of the honey it provides."

More on the Traditional Mead:

Described as a “gorgeous pale-yellow mead”, the Traditional Mead is crafted in the  Wye Valley in the Welsh Borders by a small, family run company that takes the world’s oldest form of alcohol and gives it a modern twist.

It impressed the Great Taste judges with its “glorious blossom aroma with woody, earthy elements and a citrus sourness, hinting of fermentation” at every stage of the blind-tasted judging process across 89 days in Dorset and London.

                                                                  Image: Hive Mind Mead & Brew Co

Great Taste’s prestigious judging panel is made up of more than 500 food and drink professionals. This experienced panel, each with trusted palates, have together tasted and re-judged the three-star winning products to determine the Golden Fork winners, as well as the Great Taste Supreme Champion of 2023.

The Great Taste Golden Fork from Wales was sponsored by Food & Drink Wales. Also nominated this year were the Great Taste 3-star Pedigree, Organic, Pasture-fed Hogget Leg from Black Welsh Lamb based in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, and Cold Pressed Sunflower Dressing Oil from Mountain Produce based in Wrexham.

The full list of this year’s winners can be found at www.greattasteawards.co.uk 

https://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/23791796.wye-valley-meadery-drink-awarded-great-taste-golden-fork/ 

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Century Recipe

From openculture.com

Read a story set in the Middle Ages, Beowulf or anything more recently written, and you’re likely to run across a reference to mead, which seems often to have been imbibed heartily in halls dedicated to that very activity. The same goes for medieval-themed plays, movies, and even video games. Take Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, described by Max Miller, host of Youtube channel Tasting History, as “a history-based game of, like, my favourite time period — Saxons and Vikings, you know, fightin’ it out — so I’m assuming that there’s going to be mead in there somewhere.” He uploaded the video, below, in the fall of 2020, just before that game’s release, but according to the Assassin’s Creed Wiki, he was right: there is, indeed, mead in there.

Perhaps throwing back a digital horn of mead in a video game has its satisfactions, but surely it would only make us curious to taste the real thing. Hence Miller’s episode project of “making medieval mead like a Viking,” which requires only three basic ingredients: water, honey, and ale dregs or dry ale yeast. (The set of required tools is a bit more complex, involving several different vessels and, ideally, a “bubbler” to let out the carbonation.)

In it he consults a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century manuscript (above) called the Tractatus de Magnetate et Operationibus eius, which includes not just a letter on the workings of magnets — and “a university handbook on the theory of numbers, proportions, and harmony” and “the seven signs of bad breeding; the seven signs of elegance” — but also “one of the oldest known surviving English mead recipes.”

“When you think of Saxons and Vikings, yes, you think of mead,” Miller says, “but mead actually got its start way before that,” evidenced in the alcohol-and-honey residue found on Chinese pottery dating to 7000 BC and a written mention in the Indian Rigveda. “I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the extreme, that all the gods and all mortals seek it together,” says that sacred text. Even if Miller’s mead doesn’t make you feel like a god, it does have the virtue of requiring only a few days’ fermentation, as opposed to the traditional period of months. Toward the video’s end, he mentions having set one bottle aside to ripen further, and possibly to feature in a later episode. That was nearly three years ago; today, Tasting History fans can only speculate as to what alcoholic Valhalla that brew has so far ascended.

You can find the text of the medieval recipe below:

//ffor to make mede. Tak .i. galoun of fyne hony and to
þat .4. galouns of water and hete þat water til it be as
lengh þanne dissolue þe hony in þe water. thanne set hem
ouer þe fier & let hem boyle and ever scomme it as longe as
any filthe rysith þer on. and þanne tak it doun of þe fier
and let it kole in oþer vesselle til it be as kold as melk
whan it komith from þe koow. than tak drestis
of þe fynest ale or elles berme and kast in to þe water
& þe hony. and stere al wel to gedre but ferst loke er
þu put þy berme in. that þe water with þe hony be put
in a fayr stonde & þanne put in þy berme or elles þi
drestis for þat is best & stere wel to gedre/ and ley straw
or elles clothis a bowte þe vessel & a boue gif þe wedir
be kolde and so let it stande .3. dayes & .3. nygthis gif
þe wedir be kold And gif it be hoot wedir .i. day and
.1. nyght is a nogh at þe fulle But ever after .i. hour or
.2. at þe moste a say þer of and gif þu wilt have it swete
tak it þe sonere from þe drestis & gif þu wilt have it scharpe
let it stand þe lenger þer with. Thanne draw it from
þe drestis as cler as þu may in to an oþer vessel clene & let
it stonde .1. nyght or .2. & þanne draw it in to an
oþer clene vessel & serve it forth // And gif þu wilt
make mede eglyn. tak sauge .ysope. rosmaryne. Egre-
moyne./ saxefrage. betayne./ centorye. lunarie/ hert-
is tonge./ Tyme./ marubium album. herbe jon./ of eche of
an handful gif þu make .12. galouns and gif þu mak lesse
tak þe less of herbis. and to .4. galouns of þi mater .i. galoun of
drestis.

https://www.openculture.com/2023/09/how-to-make-medieval-mead-a-13th-century-recipe.html

Moonshine Meadery: Creating a Buzz

From indiaretailing.com 

Meet Pune-based Moonshine (not only India’s but also Asia’s first meadery), which is experimenting with ingredients to bring the most unique variants of mead to an ever-increasing clientele

Story of growth 

Rohan Rehani and Nitin Vishwas are the co-founders of Moonshine Meadery. It was around 2014 that the duo realised there was an audience looking for a more flavourful choice of beverage. So, they did some research and found that mead fits into the white space that exists between flavourful, non-alcoholic beverages such as Coke and alcoholic bitter beverages such as commercial beer. “This was when we started contemplating if we could start a meadery. At that time, the Indian market did not have an alcoholic beverage that was focused on flavour,” shares Rehani. Unfortunately, there was also no excise policy around mead then. “It took us nearly two years to get a change in the state government’s excise policy, and a few months after that, we got the license to start India’s first meadery,” reveals Rehani. Moonshine Meadery was commercially launched in 2018.

Innovation at the core 

The category that Moonshine is disrupting is commercial beer. For decades, consumers have had to choose between one bitter beverage and another, with no option for a flavourful beverage. Mead, though, is flavourful right out of the bottle, and to showcase this, Moonshine offers a diverse range of meads—fruit forward, mildly sweetened with honey and carbonated. “Moonshine is all about innovation. When we discovered that mead is an extremely versatile beverage, we started using ingredients such as apples, coffee and grilled pineapples to add extra flavour to the drink,” shares Vishwas. The brand’s flagships meads are traditional mead, apple mead and coffee mead, which are available throughout the year. 

Also on offer are limited-edition seasonal meads such as guava chilli mead, grilled pineapple mead and salted kokum mead, made in small batches using single-variety honey sourced from Moonshine’s own bee boxes, as part of its MeadLAB series. “The idea behind creating MeadLABS was to drive home the point that we offer craft beverages made from real ingredients. We are giving consumers a choice to drink better, not bitter. Our most recent MeadLab is the hopped mead, made with multi-floral honey and a mix of Amarillo, Mandarina, magnum and Citra hops [hops are bittering, flavouring, and stability agents]. This mead is fruity and citrusy with a slightly bitter finish,” adds Vishwas. Since Moonshine only uses all-natural ingredients in its meads, its consumers can easily make out the difference between artificially flavoured meads and the brand’s meads. “This focus of crafting flavourful beverages using all-natural ingredients did not exist in the Indian alco-bev space before this. Our clientele thus majorly comprises consumers who were earlier drinking commercial beers but are now choosing our meads because they find them more flavourful,” explains Vishwas. 

Moonshine’s meads are not only flavourful but also contain low alcohol with only 6.5% abv (alcohol by volume), are mildly carbonated and packed in a 330 ml glass bottle much akin to a beer—unlike meads around the world. “This has worked well for us since doing this has made an old beverage like mead, young again. Another USP our meads have is that they are naturally gluten-free, so they will not give you a bloated stomach after consumption,” shares Vishwas.

Being customer ready 

Over the years, as Moonshine has grown, customer feedback has become very important to it. “For the most part, sales in the alco-bev sector happen through distribution channels. But we participate in events or host tours of our meadery to meet and speak to customers. We also occasionally invite them to participate in round table discussions with us,” says Rehani.

Launching new products is part of Moonshine’s DNA. “We release new flavours every few months as a part of our MeadLab series. Last year saw the release of our Grilled Pineapple Mead and the Salted Kokum Mead. This year, you will have to wait—there are quite a few new meads in the pipeline,” says Vishwas. 

https://www.indiaretailing.com/2023/09/08/moonshine-meadery-creating-a-buzz/