I’m happy to announce that I’ll be offering a Lore And Craft Of Mead Workshop in Manchester, NH on Thursday, June 30th at 7pm. The workshop will include a small mead tasting of a few brews I’ve done, a talk about the lore and value of mead, and a demonstration of how to make your first batch of mead. Registration for the class is $30, and includes a copy of The Lore And Craft Of Mead eBook.
Register for the class here: [wp_eStore:product_id:2:end]
In addition, I will have brewing kits available, that include all the equipment and basic ingredients you will need to produce your first batch of mead, including a 3-gallon glass carboy, rubber stopper, airlock, funnel, siphon hose, and a hydrometer, as well as a gallon of fantastic local (to me in Maine) honey and a packet of yeast.
NOTE: As of June 25 it is too late to get the brewing kits in time for the workshop. Class registration is still available.
If there are any questions, or specific requests for what the class should cover, please contact us! I’m very much looking forward to sharing the magic of mead with Manchester people! Space is limited, so register now!
Last week Eli and I drove to Boston for MeadFest 2011. There were 4 Meaderies there sampling their wares. It was great to meet some fellow mead enthusiasts, and to finally sample some worthy commercial meads! I must admit, I haven’t had a large number of commercial meads, and very few of those I have tried compare to the homebrews I am used to from myself and my tribe. It was nice to know that there are good commercial meads in the world!
On the trip down, Eli and I recorded a podcast episode, talking about mead (of course), as well as the UFF’s mission more broadly. When I’m not involved with mead, my family and I have been doing a weekly podcast for the past 2 years or so, chronically our family’s journey toward conscientious living through nutrition and sustainability. We began the podcast as raw vegans, and have evolved our thinking/practices since then to a more primal, locavore-oriented philosophy. We’ve been anxious to get Eli onto the show since I first encountered UFF last year.
So if you want to hear more about mead, or the UFF and its mission, point your browser to our podcast page and listen to Episode 97 (the most recent one as of this writing). Mead enthusiasts might also be interested in Episode 86 (interview with my meadmaking mentor, Harper Meader), as well as Episode 49, where I talked about mead (basically an intro to mead from my point of view). There are many other topics on the podcast that might interest UFFies as well; take a peek at the contents page and see what sounds good to you.
Very excited to be attending Meadfest 2011 in Boston this Thursday. I’ll be going with Eli from UFF, and there will be several meadmakers in attendance, including the guys from B.Nektar Meadery in Michigan, Moonlight Meadery in New Hampshire, Green River Ambrosia from western Massaschussetts, and several others.
As I’ve written here in the past, I don’t have a ton of experience with commercial meads, so I’m looking forward to meeting these guys, sampling some quality commercial meads, and networking. Should be a good time! This event IS open to the public, so come on down if you are in the area and want to dive in to the full-on mead experience.
I’m so excited to finally be able to share this with everyone. I’m bringing Bardic Brews Mead to the marketplace! We’re going to put the first batch (Cacao Mead, of course….) in soon, so the first bottles will be available later this summer (whenever they are ready).
I’m teaming up with Urban Farm Fermentory in order to make this happen. Starting an alcohol-producing business requires significant upfront investment, including legal fees to navigate the complex government documentation and licensure (alcohol is a heavily regulated substance), as well as in proper equipment to produce alcohol on a commercial scale.
UFF has already done all this. They are a fully licensed facility, with all the gear necessary for commercial fermentation. They’ve been doing quite a few ciders this past year, which have all been outstanding. Also, UFF was the site of the Lore And Craft Of Mead Workshop I did with Daniel Vitalis last year. We’ll be doing contract brews together, which avoids all these upfront expenses for me.
Here’s how it works: the mead will be made on the UFF’s premises, using their space and equipment, but using my recipes, ingredient specifications, and techniques. Eli has been making mead for several years now, so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot by taking my mead to the commercial scale with him. Each batch will be many times greater than what I’m used to in my small 3 gallon homebrews. I expect my brews to get even better in this enviroment, with regulated temperatures, state of the art gear (I wonder what aging my mead for 6 months in an oak barrel would do? Let’s find out!), and constant supervision. This is the thing I love about working with UFF: our missions and values are completely compatible and intertwined. We are committed to doing things the right way.
My commercial brews will hold to the same standard as my homebrews: we will use real wild-harvested spring water, the best honey available in Maine, and high quality, local, and wild ingredients. I’ll make teas where appropriate to start each batch, and will also use tincturing as the mead ages. The only difference will be the size of the carboys. :-D
For the first batch, Cacao is a natural choice, given that I’ve had a few successful brews with it, and that my wife is a chocolatier. I’ll definitely be picking her brain a bit on this. It will still use wild-harvested chaga tea as a base, along with the best quality raw cacao available. The quality of these ingredients is off the charts! And the price point will be very reasonable as well.
Sales, at first, will be local to Maine. Alcohol interstate commerce is quite complex; you need permits and licenses within each state you want to ship to, and some states are impossible to ship alcohol to under any circumstances. Bardic Brews Mead will always be available at the UFF itself in Portland, Maine, as well as other shops, bars, and restaurants in Maine.
We might consider doing a preorder for the first 100 bottles (possibly numbering them). Watch this space for more info on where to buy Bardic Brews Cacao Mead.
Lastly, this website will not change. We are still committed to education, and building awareness on meadmaking, homebrewing, and the best ingredients you can use. Indeed, this site continuing as it has been is essential to our strategy moving forward. If anything, we’ll be ramping this end of the equation up as the site continues to grow. We’ll still encourage people to make their own mead using ingredients in their area. But now, our mead will also be available commercially as well, giving consumers an opportunity to sample mead made our way without having to do it yourself.
But first, we have to make some mead. I’ll provide updates on this site in real time as we go through the process. And for now, I’ll pour myself some Prickly Pear Mead and start to settle down for the evening.
By talking about “slow fermentation,” I’m not referring to a fermentation technique but rather about the phenomenon that fermentation seems to slow down in the colder weather. Despite the fact that my brews stay indoors where we have heat, the ambient temperatures are lower, which is enough to slow down the yeast.
Last summer, I was blasting through berry meads that finished primary fermentation in 3 or 4 weeks. Now, I have a batch of Cacao Mead 2.0 that’s been fermenting since mid-December, and it’s only now ready to rack (now gotta find time to do it). In addition, the Prickly Pear Mead is ready to rack as well. Finally!
In the winter, my mead stocks get low because they aren’t replenished as quickly. I’m definitely looking forward to both replenishing my mead stock, and brewing more frequently with fresh ingredients from my ecosystem!
In addition, I have some INCREDIBLY exciting news in the pipeline that I can’t quite share just yet. Watch this space, because when this news becomes reality a lot of things will change, for the better (how’s THAT for a cryptic message)!
Out of all the ingredients that consistently end up on my labels, I am by far asked most often about chaga. The notion that one can enhance their alcohol using mushrooms is, I suppose, somewhat counterintuitive; I think people picture mushroom gravy from a deli mixed with beer or something similar. But as it turns out, chaga adds a delightful layer of flavor, a beautiful darkening colorization, and plenty of nutritional reasons to include it.
I remember the first time I harvested chaga from the wild. I was spending the weekend with a friend, a quiet retreat in a cabin in the Maine woods. We spent the entire trip in to the cabin looking at every white birch we encountered, combing the surface of each tree for the blackened, charred-looking protrusions, the telltale signs of chaga growth. We saw no sign whatsoever of chaga on the hike in.
After searching for several days, we finally found some ripe chaga — on a birch tree not 10′ away from the corner of the cabin. The tree wasn’t doing particularly well; once chaga is blossoming the tree is doomed and will die within a few years. There was a ladder handy, and with a good knife the chaga came right off. It was a large tree, and we harvested enough to last each of our families several months. It’s no coincidence that my companion on this trip was a friend with whom I’d spent a lot of time brewing beers, before I discovered the benefits of mead.
Normally I decoct the chaga into a delicious tea, simmering it for several hours, most often in a crock pot, until I have a beautiful beverage that looks like coffee and tastes very clean, with a hint of maple and vanilla. I use chaga tea (sometimes with other herbs such as reishi) as a base for my elixirs, which I drink nearly every morning in the winter.
This same tea is the basis for many of my meads, particularly fruit meads using berries. Beginning with chaga tea rather than water has several benefits for the mead. First, you get all the nutrition and herbal benefits of the chaga. Second, the chaga adds a nice mellow layer of flavor that is subtle in the finished mead, but mellows things out nicely. Third, while the finished mead isn’t coffee-like in color like chaga tea, it does darken the final mead product noticeably and beautifully.
When I brew mead with chaga, it’s usually a 3-gallon batch. Therefore I will brew 2 gallons of chaga tea, adding about 2 fistfulls of chaga to 2 gallons of spring water, and decocting for 4-6 hours minimum. With this 2 gallons of tea, I follow my basic mead recipe, which is described in detail in my meadmaking eBook.
I have not yet experimented much with tincturing chaga, either done traditionally with vodka or another distilled alcohol, or in the mead during secondary fermentation. UPDATE: I have now done several double extractions with both chaga and reishi, my technique is detailed here.
In addition, I tested meads in the Mad Trad Trial, 2 of which used chaga, the other 2 did not. The color of the finished mead was every-so-slightly darker, but perhaps more importantly the 2 batches done with chaga cleared much more quickly than the 2 non-chaga batches. This preliminary empirical evidence suggests to me that there is something in the chage, perhaps electrolyte related, that causes the mead to clear more quickly.
All in all, chaga is probably my #1 favorite herb in my life, and I absolutely love what it does to my meads. I encourage you to experiment with it (or whatever your favorite herbs are) when you brew.
It’s the First Day of Spring — Eostar, Ostara, the Vernal Equinox — in Maine, and I’ve been interacting with trees in my ecosystem as of late. They are like old friends that I haven’t seen in a few months. I wanted to honor this part of the seasonal cycle with my next batch of mead. We still have some snow on the ground, but it’s melting fast and there’s as much mud as snow. The trees are waking up, and I knew it was time to make a Treequinox Mead.
In northern New England, spring also means maple tapping season. It takes 40-60 gallons of sap, boiled down to reduce to 1 gallon of maple syrup. A friend was kind enough to bring me 4 gallons of maple sap the other day (thanks Jason!), and I knew I wanted to use it in a mead. Another friend, Arthur Haines, just posted a video about maple season:
Arthur is a botanist, and has written the best field book for my ecosystem that I’ve yet seen. He explains the process of getting maple sap skillfully and sustainably.
I used 2 gallons of the sap for the Treequinox Mead as a base, rather than the spring water I normally use. The other two are presently reducing into syrup on our stove.
I also had to cut down two trees in my yard for mushroom cultivation. We live on 2 acres of forest, and get little sunlight. We haven’t had much luck trying to grow vegetables, but I’m hoping that mushrooms will fare better. I wanted to use plug spawn, which requires fresh logs, so I knew I would have to take down a tree. I wanted to grow chicken of the woods (Laetiporus conifericola) and Phoenix Fir Oyster (Pleurotus pulmonarius), both of which grow on the Eastern Hemlock tree. Hemlocks are plentiful on our property, so it was easy to find one that was ready to be taken down. We also had to take down a fir tree to get the hemlock down safely. Both trees have been cut into 4′ logs (thanks again Jason!), which will rest for a month or so. Live trees contain anti-fungal compounds that dissipate a few weeks after the tree is cut. Both mushrooms grow on both hemlock and fir, so I’ll plug some of each species of mushroom into both species of log.
This also meant I had an abundance of both hemlock and fir boughs, that are now going to dry out and decay. I wanted to use as much of the tree as possible, so I gathered about a gallon of the boughs, along with some additional spruce in my yard, and made a Fir, Hemlock, and Spruce tea in the maple sap. I rinsed the leaves and then decocted them for 15 minutes in 2+ gallons of maple sap, removed the heat and put the pot on the back porch to cool off.
Once the tea had cooled to blood temperature, I brought it in and strained it. It tasted delicious! The sap is already sweet and the evergreen flavor was really good. I then added about 3/4 of a gallon of honey, adjusting the amount until I got an alcohol potential reading of 17.5%:
The conifer leaves have some citric acid in them, but I did make 3 cups of organic black tea for the tannins. I then pitched the yeast as normal, and am left with a beautiful 3 gallon batch of Treequinox Mead:
Don’t worry, Spruce Mead fans, I still plan on making another batch of Spruce Mead this year….
UPDATE: I just racked this mead and it’s delicious! Very similar to the Spruce Mead I made last year, but not as cloyingly sweet. It is still quite sweet though, at 5% remaining alcohol potential, meaning this batch is 12.5% alcohol. This mead is already starting to clear, unlike the Spruce Mead from last year which is still not clear!
UPDATE: I haven’t been posting labels much recently (since they are all variations on the same theme), but this one turned out especially cool I thought, with the maple leaf in the background and the hemlock tree in the corner:
I’m really amused by this mead, on several levels. Obviously the name might have a familiar ring to some, but I’m actually referring to the generic ingredients: Coca leaves and Kola nuts. These ingredients were originally used in the more familiar iteration of these particular words.
In past decades, I drank a lot of modern cola industrial soft drinks, most of which were made with corn syrup and contained no coca at all. I’ve often wondered what the original formulations would have tasted like, so I decided to recreate it with a mead.
First, let’s take a closer look at these two ingredients.
Coca
In preparing for this mead, I wanted to thoroughly research coca for somewhat obvious reasons. Coca is very controversial because it contains the alkaloid cocaine, which is of course illegal and has become a problem with its use in its commercialized, concentrated form of white powder after having been extracted from the leaves. Regular Coca Leaves, in the United States, are also illegal, categorized as a Schedule II drug. What is not so widely known is that coca leaves can be “decocainized” in the same way that some coffee beans are decaffeinated. These sort of decocainized coca leaves are legal to import into the US, and are not scheduled in the same way regular coca or cocaine is:
Coca leaves (9040) and any salt, compound, derivative or preparation of coca leaves (including cocaine (9041) and ecgonine (9180) and their salts, isomers, derivatives and salts of isomers and derivatives), and any salt, compound, derivative, or preparation thereof which is chemically equivalent or identical with any of these substances, except that the substances shall not include decocainized coca leaves or extraction of coca leaves, which extractions do not contain cocaine or ecgonine. Source:
[Code of Federal Regulations]
[Title 21, Volume 9, Parts 1300 to end]
[Revised as of April 1, 2005]
From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access
[CITE: 21CFR1308.12] [Page 94-96]
Cocaine, however, is but one of several alkaloids in the coca plant. Coca tea, in South American circles where it has been used for thousands of years, produces effects very similar to coffee, another drink from that region that Americans have grown quite accustomed to. And since it was a common ingredient in old brews including the original colas, I wanted to use it in this mead.
Kola
The Kola Tree is an evergreen tree native to west Africa. The tree produces nuts as seeds to reproduce itself. The Kola Nut, in its native land, is valued for its stimulating, aphrodisiac and healing qualities, which to me seems similar to how people use cacao in South America. The trees are related.
Kola contains a significant amount of caffeine, and as such is sometimes used as a remedy for asthma.
The cola can be extracted by boiling or tincturing the Kola nuts. For this mead, I decided to tincture the kola, which will happen after primary fermentation, after I’ve racked it into jugs for clearing it will sit with the Kola nuts to extract their colors, flavors, and other properties.
Mead
I began this mead by making a coca tea. The coca I was using was powdered, which maximizes its absorptive surface area. I was concerned about being able to filter it after the tea was done, as the powder is too fine for my screens/sieve, so I used a new kind of DIY teabag designed for a teapot (as opposed to a cup). With this sort of bag, you fill it half full of your tea (coca powder in this case):
Then, once the bag is half full, you use a common iron to seal it shut:
This left me with two large teabags containing coca leaves:
I wanted a strong Coca tea, so I decided to decoct it. On the other hand, I didn’t want it to be too tannin-y, so I opted for a short 15 minute simmer:
After the simmer, I wanted to continue to let it infuse for a few minutes. I also added a sumac drupe for its acids to help the yeast:
I let the infusion sit for about an hour, then strained the teabags and the sumac drupe out. After it cooled for several hours I poured the tea through a strainer (to get the small bits of sumac out) and added it to the pot with just under a gallon of honey, dissolving until I brought it to 17.5% alcohol potential (I wanted a strong and sweet mead for this batch):
I was left with a relatively neutral color mead, with a slightly golden hue. The mead’s color will not shift much during primary fermentation, but I expect the Kola nuts that I will add after racking to darken it considerably:
This is a somewhat complex batch with many steps, there will be several updates along the way over the next few months.
UPDATE: June 28
I racked the mead tonight, tried a bit of it, and failed to take a hydrometer reading, since I dropped the hydrometer and it shattered on my floor. Ah well. I’ll pick up a new hydrometer soon and get a reading up here.
Coca Leaves and Kola Nuts, photo by Morgan Lindenschmidt
The mead tastes fantastic. It has a smooth, tangy effervescence to it (it’s not sparkling, but the tangy part of the flavor is not unlike 7up in a strange way).
I racked it into one-gallon jugs, into which I had stuffed 4 handfuls of Kola nuts and Coca leaves, so it will infuse/tincture over the coming weeks.
The mead that I racked into the waiting Kola nuts got darker very quickly, and the kola nuts caused a slight bubbling to form:
I will continue to update people as this mead develops! Very exciting, this could end up being one of the best batches yet.
UPDATE: June 29
I got a new hydrometer, so I took a reading today. It’s 4.5%, so it’s still quite sweet and about 13.5%. I’m not 100% sold on the accuracy of this reading since the “before” reading was taken with a different instrument. I don’t know how consistently calibrated these are. It does sound about right though; this mead is sweet but not cloyingly so.
Also, the bubbling has slowed down but is still happening….
UPDATE: July 27
I just tried the first bit of Coca Kola Mead. Wow! The Kola Nuts definitely add a layer of strong flavor. It’s a deep, rooty flavor, definitely reminiscent of cola, or perhaps even root beer. I need to bottle this soon so it can begin to age a bit. I imagine this will be extraordinary in a few months!
This week on the Sweet Peas Podcast, we were very happy to interview Harper Meader, who in addition to being a contributor to this site and my meadmaking mentor, is a fabulous storyteller and interviewee.
He was kind enough to bring a 1996 pumpkin mead — fermented inside of a pumpkin — that we shared on the air. If you’ve never had a 15 year old mead, well, words fail.
This is one of my favorite interviews we’ve done for the podcast…. check it out (get the mp3 here, or the rss subscription file here). In this episode, we refer to a posting on this site by Harper, called So You Brewed Some Mead…. You can find it there.
