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

This Disney Child Star Turned Brewer Is Trying to Make Mead Cool

From hollywoodreporter.com

Dylan Sprouse talks moving beyond his NYU dorm to his first Brooklyn brewery: "My first batches were terrible. But we were 16, 17, so all of us drank the shit out of it anyway." Now he draws comparisons to his first gig, telling THR, "Brewers are entertainers ... they are creating an experience for people."

Dylan Sprouse at his All-Wise Meadery Courtesy of Brad Japhe

In the age of craft beer and CBD cocktails, Dylan Sprouse is trying to make mead the next big thing.
You might remember Sprouse as the former child star who — along with his twin brother Cole — was the face of Disney TV for much of the mid '00s. But today his output is aimed at a more adult audience. In 2015, the actor took a brief break from Hollywood to build a commercial brewery in the hipster heart of Brooklyn. The result was All-Wise Meadery, which opened in Williamsburg last winter. As one of the youngest master brewers in the country, Sprouse's precocious passion is as improbable as it is infectious.
Despite the adventurous drinking habits of the millennial foodie generation, mead — brewed from honey as opposed to grain — remains relatively obscure. A relic of bygone civilizations, it's associated more with Egyptian pharaohs and Viking quests than modern speakeasies. It was the ancient lore, however, that captivated an adolescent Sprouse — a lifelong mythology buff who still dons Thor's hammer on a pendant around his neck.
"I was a pretty piss poor student in high school. I had ADHD and brewing was a way for me to pace myself. I picked mead because a lot of home-brewing books I read said that if you wanted to try something easy, start with mead."

All the while, the nascent hobby fed an underlying enthusiasm for literature, history and fantasy. "I consumed media en masse about mead," he recalls. "I kept brewing and brewing. Obviously my first batches were terrible. But we were 16, 17, so all of us drank the shit out of it anyway."
Yet even back then, Sprouse demonstrated a serious desire to hone his craft. "I went to some home-brewing meetups, faking that I was 21. I don't even know how I got away with that because I don't even look 21 now," admits the fresh-faced celebrity. When he moved to New York City to go to NYU, he set up his brewing set in his dorm room and soon began selling bootlegged mead to friends and classmates across the lower Manhattan campus. It was the beginning of a fledgling commercial enterprise.
Beyond satisfying his own creative urges — and providing some extra pocket cash — his side-gig was helping expose a neglected niche. "When I could finally go to the store and buy it legally, I just hated what was being sold," he remembers of mass-market mead. "It was this sugary, sweet desert wine that was selling for $70 bucks a bottle." He longed for a cleaner, dryer mead reflective of the raw ingredients used to make it. After graduating he set out to create just that.

                      The view from All-Wise Meadery Courtesy of Brad Japhe

It was an elaborate endeavour, as evidenced by the large fermenters and state-of-the-art filtration units that now populate his Brooklyn brewhouse. Sprouse navigates the space with ease, rattling off technical jargon like "terroir" and "lees cakes." "If you ferment all of the sugar out of goldenrod honey," he explains excitedly, "what you're left with is a mead that tastes similar to if you were to actually take the [goldenrod] plant and chew on it. It leads to the herbal, grassy or wheat-y notes that surprise people a lot [when they try] dry meads." (His Ali-Wise Show Mead, $30; and Oolong Mead variation, fermented with Chinese tea, $35, are available at his Brooklyn meadery or online, with shipping to many states).
Sprouse so far has no trouble toggling between his dual professions (he just returned from a six-month shoot for a star turn in the upcoming fantasy romance, Turandot). In fact, he sees a certain symmetry between the two. "Brewers are entertainers whether they like it or not, because they are creating an experience for people. Oftentimes the alcohol is the entertainment at any party you go to."

Nowadays, even when he's on-location, half a world away from his brewery, Sprouse is still thinking like a brewer. "I take it with me wherever I go," he says, noting that downtime in rural China was spent exploring new flavours and local ingredients. The fruits of that labour eventually found a happy ending in mead: "I brewed a batch as a wrap gift for the entire cast."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dylan-sprouse-child-star-turned-mead-maker-1149767

A better beer? Etowah Meadery in new territory

From gainesvilletimes.com

Bottles of mead stand at Etowah Meadery on Thursday, Aug. 9, 2018, in Dahlonega. Blair Housley and the other owners of Etowah Meadery have branched out from traditional mead, or honey wine, into a wide variety of carbonated, beer-like beverages. - photo by Nick Bowman
The honey bee has become a homebrewer in Dahlonega.
Hops, grilled pineapple, caramelized honey, currants, blueberry, raspberry, rhubarb: Etowah Meadery is churning out a bubbling variety of carbonated meads that are taking the little-known beverage to new places — and into the hands of beer fans.
Blair Housley and his team entered an open market when the company launched in November selling wine made from honey, called mead. With only two other producers in Georgia, Blair Housley and his team are banking on the popular return of one of the oldest alcoholic beverages on planet earth.
Mead has existed for thousands of years, traditionally as a simple mixture of honey, water and the little critters that turn sugar into alcohol.
But the shop just outside of Dahlonega is getting its most popular hits on recipes that stray from the traditional.
Classic mead has a warm, sweet, rich flavour and about 16 percent alcohol — not the sort of thing you’d pack in the cooler and carry out with you on the boat on a Saturday.
Housley and Co. have come up with a series of what they call “session meads,” canned, carbonated beverages with about 6 percent alcohol and a deep bench of flavours in the mix.
A few of those recipes brewing at 3003 Morrison Moore Parkway in Dahlonega started out as tests on the tap wall at Etowah Meadery but are now being produced in larger batches.
Southern Luau is a carbonated mead mixed with grilled pineapple and bananas, while IPA Wanna Bee is a hopped, gluten-free mead with a flavour approximating an India Pale Ale — it’s not a beer, but it wants to be.

                       A cask of mead at Etowah Meadery in Dahlonega. - photo by Nick Bowman

Battle Branch is named after a gold mine in Dahlonega where men fought over the gold that lay in Battle Creek. It’s made with cherries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries, cocoa nibs and aged in a chocolate rye whiskey barrel.
Figgy Pudding is an uncarbonated mix of fig mead and fall spices that Housley calls “Christmas in a glass.” If you’re waking up with a pumpkin spice latte (you poor soul), try finishing your evening with a glass of fig-infused Christmas spirit.
“That’s one of the aspects I like about making mead: It’s so versatile and you can play with it so much. With wineries, once you have that particular grape in that particular harvest that particular year, that’s pretty much it,” Housley said at the meadery on Thursday, Aug. 9. “Whereas honey … it doesn’t spoil, we can play with flavours and we can try it on our tap wall to see what people like.
“We’ll do some small batches — some of them we were doing only 5 gallons — and we’ll make bigger batches if it was very popular.”
Kegs of Etowah’s session meads are popping up at Gainesville’s Downtown Drafts and Cumming’s Cue Barbecue.
Look for new Wanna Bee recipes coming later this year — different takes on pale ales and even stouts as Etowah Meadery blends its honey wine and grainless beer-brewing crafts.
Stouts, sometimes called a loaf of bread in a glass, will have to be made “very carefully,” Housley said, because it will require caramelizing large batches of honey.
“We’ll put some coffee beans in it, we’ll put a little chocolate in it,” he said. “By caramelizing the honey it gets some of those toffee-style flavours, it gets it a little darker — we’ll be creative.”

A can of Southern Luau is canned on Thursday, Aug. 9, 2018, at Etowah Meadery in Dahlonega. Southern Luau mead is made with grilled pineapples and honey and then carbonated. - photo by Nick Bowman

https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/go/better-beer-etowah-meadery-new-territory/

Cheers! A Viking drink in Mexican cocktail

From michiganradio.org

                                               

                                          Tammy Coxen preparing the Blooming Paloma.

                                                  Credit Lester Graham / Michigan Radio

Cheers! We've got a honey of a Michigan cocktail for you.
The website for Bløm Meadworks suggests, “…if the word ‘mead’ automatically conjures a drinking hall filled with Vikings for you, think of ours as its friendly, approachable descendants, without the pillage and plunder.”
Cute.
But we’re taking the Vikings to Mexico.


Tammy Coxen of Tammy’s Tastings visited the new Bløm Meadworks in Ann Arbor. It opened in May of this year. The company features a wide variety of session meads. Unlike typical meads which are basically a sweet wine made from honey, weighing in with a hefty alcohol level of around 14 percent, session meads are very dry with an alcohol level of between five and six percent. It’s more like a beer than a wine.
“I immediately thought these are going to mix great in a cocktail,” Coxen said, adding, “I’ve been playing around with them ever since.”

She settled on a riff of a traditional Mexican cocktail called the paloma. You might think of tequila and a margarita, but in Mexico, the locals drink paloma, a mix of grapefruit juice and tequila.
A particular Bløm Meadworks mead incorporates hops. It’s dry-hopped which means it’s not as bitter as an IPA (India Pale Ale), but it does have a lot of those hop aromatics. It matches up with fresh grapefruit juice very nicely.

Bløm Meadworks is owned by Lauren Bloom and Matt Richey. Richey is a brewer who found he was gluten intolerant, a disadvantage for a beer and ale brewer. But, making session mead avoids that problem.
“Their philosophy is to be ultra-local. So, they’re sourcing all of their honey from Michigan and that means their mead will change throughout the year as their honey changes,” Coxen said.
Some of their session meads use rhubarb from the Traverse City area. They’re also working with Ann Arbor Distillery to use some of its spent gin botanicals to use them in their meads.
We like to make cocktails with Michigan ingredients. The Bløm Meadworks dry-hopped mead is a great start, but Coxen added Cabresto tequila which has a strong Michigan connection through the Lopez family in southwest Detroit.
The drink Coxen came up with is an easy drinking summer cocktail that you can mix right in the glass. Just make sure you stir it thoroughly to mix the agave nectar and large pinch of salt into the drink.

Blooming Paloma
2 oz tequila (Cabresto)
3 oz grapefruit juice
2 oz Bløm Meadworks Hopped Mead
1/2 oz lime juice
1/2 oz agave nectar
big pinch salt
Combine ingredients in a tall glass. Add ice to fill, and top off with additional mead as desired.
Update: the mead was mistakenly referred to as ale in one sentence. That has bee corrected.

http://www.michiganradio.org/post/cheers-viking-drink-mexican-cocktail

Meadiocrity has something to braggot about

From sandiegoreader.com

Call San Diego the land of beer and honey, because the guys behind a local mead startup have won a nationally televised beer contest.

Andrew Segina, John Botica, and Mark Oberle co-founded Meadiocrity Meadery in 2016, making occasional small batches in an Escondido winery co-op. But when they appeared on a June 5th episode for the Viceland cable channel show Beerland, they did so as homebrewers of beer.

Somewhat of a traveling homebrew competition, Beerland visits a different city each episode, giving host Meg Gill a chance to meet and drink with teams of local homebrewers. She assesses their brews and advances her favorite to compete in a season finale.

Segina, Botica, and Oberle earned a victory during the San Diego episode with their brew, The Brothers’ Brood, which is actually a braggot: a beer brewed with at least 50 percent honey. Making the drink more unusual is that its base beer was a milk porter recipe, made with lactose (the sugar found in milk).

                Meg Gill drinks braggot with John Botica, Andrew Segina, and Mark Oberle.

However, the distinction that helped Brothers’ Brood beat out four competing beers in the finale was that honey. Meadiocrity operates its own apiary in Valley Center, and the homebrewers supplied their own honey to the beer, lending its unique terroir.

“The winning characteristic of the beer was the terrific self-made honey,” said TV host Gill. “While terroir is a characteristic found often in wine, I had never tasted a beer that truly tasted of the land from which it was made.”

Gill is best known as a co-founder of Los Angeles beer company, Golden Road Brewing, where the finale was filmed. In the episode (which aired June 26th), she cast the deciding vote after discussing the beers with a judges panel that included Nate Soroko, a bartender at Modern Times Beer and North Park taproom Toronado. Soroko previously appeared on Beerland's San Diego episode to share insights into San Diego craft beer culture.

Thanks to its win, 100 barrels of The Brothers’ Brood milk porter braggot has been produced by Golden Road (a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch), and will be distributed in 19.2 ounce cans to select retailers in Southern California.

While the Meadiocrity brand didn’t feature much on the show, Mark Oberle hopes the win will shine some light on a burgeoning craft mead movement. “We were going on with a desire to help promote honey and local honey production,” Oberle says, “to get some air time for mead.” The rare distribution of a braggot in cans may be a good start. “People are always looking for the new thing,” he says, “and braggots are certainly new to most people!”

He adds that Meadiocrity is looking to produce braggot collaborations with local breweries later this year, as it finalizes plans to open its own mead brewing facility somewhere in North County.

Meanwhile, Meadiocrity has timed its latest bottle release to coincide with the team’s win; a carbonated session mead flavoured with vanilla and oak.

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2018/jun/28/beer-meadiocrity-has-something-braggot-about/#

4 Great Places to Sip Drinks In Phoenix

From phoenixnewtimes.com

When the temperatures rise, it's time to get into some drinks. We have spent many pixels on the goodness of the Valley's beer scene. But our chops with booze extend far beyond. There is good local wine. There is good local whiskey (and more coming soon). There is even good local mead. So cheers to kicking back with some friends and one of these beverages. Here are four places that will up your drinking game this summer.

Arizona Mead Company
6503 West Frye Road, #12, Chandler
At Arizona Mead Company, mead is served chilled from the bottle. Ciders and cysers are dispensed from four rotating taps. “I started doing this on the side,” says Cody Brown, the man behind the operation. Now, he’s a full-time mead master, owner, and bartender at Arizona Mead Company. Brown lets his mead ferment an average of six months. This is a long fermentation. He has gone even longer, letting some meads ferment for over a year. How does he know when a mead is ready? It's ready when it tastes good, he says. Meads currently fermenting include bourbon-barrel-aged traditional meads (just honey), a guava-berry mead, a strawberry mead, and a raspberry. Brown is prepping ingredients for a second batch of pumpkin-pie mead and coffee-chocolate mead, both of which will be ready this fall.

GenuWine Arizona
888 North First Avenue, #101 GenuWine Arizona is a self-serve wine bar. More than half the spot's 24 wines come from Arizona vineyards, many with names are sure to tempt you: Dos Cabezas, Arizona Stronghold, Sand Reckoner, and so on. Grape varietals are all over the map. GenuWine balances your buzz with a limited food menu. There's a build-your-own cheese board, hummus plate, and two dessert boards that source ingredients like peanut butter and honey from local suppliers. GenuWine also serve beer on tap and by the bottle or can. Add all that to the cosy furniture, laid-back atmosphere, and the local angle, and you might have just found your home away from home downtown.

Wren House Brewing Company
2125 North 24th Street
Wren House Brewing has emerged as one of the best breweries in metro Phoenix, young or old. The 24th Street taproom seems to wipe the stresses from life, leaving you in a space that has a residential vibe, like a cool friend’s lake house where people bullshit and share pictures and drink good beer. Head brewer Preston Thoeny's most recent stunner is a sour beer series called Las Frescas. Sour beer is a sprawling beer style that spans from gently tart brews like Berliner weisse to ferociously puckering lambics and wild ales. Las Frescas starts with a sour beer base on the milder end, with Wren House’s take on Berliner weisse. Thoeny spikes this base with fruit solids and juice, creating a beer that is part beer, part sangria-like infusion, part nectar. “The original idea was it would be kind of reminiscent of those iced Mexican beverages, like agua frescas – more juice-based, super-palatable beers for the summertime,” Thoeny says.

Flying Basset Brewing
720 West Ray Road, Gilbert Flying Basset Brewing is a realized vision of pilot Rob Gangon and his wife, Sara Cotton. They got married in 2011 and started homebrewing that year. Not long after, Gangon started placing in Arizona Society of Homebrewers competitions. According to Sara, “it’s just been a roller coaster of beer ever since.” The beer menu is written on a chalkboard adjacent to the bar. It covers the 25 brews on tap written and includes the brewery's three house beers. Flying Basset debuted with a classic copper ale. It’s balanced, malted, lightly hopped, and has a hint of caramel. The house copper was followed by a double IPA and a Hefeweizen. The beer list features local favourites like Pedal Haus and Huss. There are also 40-plus bottles to choose from. Flying Basset Brewing is quickly becoming a neighbourhood favourite in Gilbert.

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/restaurants/4-great-places-to-drink-phoenix-10494799

Dogfish Head releases Mixed Media beer-wine hybrid

From doverpost.com

Dogfish Head announced the late-April debut of Mixed Media, its newest beer-wine hybrid creation.

Brewed with a Belgian yeast strain, Mixed Media is a vino-esque ale with a white wine body and notes of sweet melon and white grape. With 51 percent of the fermentables coming from grain and 49 percent coming from grapes, this wine-inspired ale is the closest to a wine a beer can legally be. Clocking in at 7.5 percent alcohol by volume and 15 International Bitterness Units, Mixed Media is pale straw in colour with a tart, dry finish. Late-harvest viognier grape must from friends at Alexandria Nicole Cellars in Washington were used in the brewing process to round out the flavours.
A beer for both chardonnay and mead drinkers alike, Midas Touch, the original Ancient Ale and first beer-wine hybrid from Dogfish, is a sweet, yet dry beer made with barley, honey, white muscat grapes and saffron. Another fan-favourite for those that love wine is Sixty One, a beer marrying Dogfish Head’s award-winning 60 Minute IPA and Syrah grape must.

Starting in May is Festina Pêche, a neo-Berliner Weisse. Available for the first time in 12-ounce, six-pack bottles, this pale straw-coloured beer clocks in at 4.5 percent ABV and 8 IBUs.

For more, visit dogfish.com

http://www.doverpost.com/news/20180423/dogfish-head-releases-mixed-media-beer-wine-hybrid