I’d like to acknowledge and apologise for Mead Geeks in general. It’s just easy to get excited about beers’ ancient cousin. And this week was a doozy. Let’s begin.
It’s hard to consider a more versatile product. From conditioning on any type of fruit, spices, herbs and flavours, to wild ferments, barrel aging, backsweetend for sticky versions or left bone dry, to still or carbonated versions, mead expression is replete with choice. This week, and over the coming months, we’ll be packing the culmination of the last couple years of tinkering. Three bottled and two canned products, using the incredible rooftop and local honey from @hoodlumhoney.
Four years ago, in our search for local microbes, we took harvested honeycomb from our rooftop hive, and grew two cultures. Both fermented, while one was clean, the other was funky, clearly having some acetobacter and possibly lactobacillus in it. The first culture made our OG session hive, and while it was clean, it took months to ferment, so we don’t utilise it anymore. The second, we squirrelled away until last year. Then we whacked it in a wine barrel with some fresh honey and let it rip for 6 months. A wild, barrel fermented, bone dry sparkling mead in a can.
One year ago, we scored a beautiful ex-Shiraz Hogshead from @sonsofeden. Into this went a big, 13.5% stainless fermented mead, for aging. This was further split into a bone dry, carbonated product for can, and a backsweetend sticky, not carbonated product for bottles.
One month ago, we fermented another big mead in stainless. This became the base for two melomels: meads conditioned on fruit. Along with backsweetening, we conditioned some on raspberry, and some on mango with hand toasted macadamia. These two products will see bottles.
Dry, sweet, funky, clean, car engines, people, dark matter, there is nothing mead cannot be.
Bees
