Yogi Bear eat your heart out (and get that replacement liver on order)! It’s that time of year again. The sun is shining, the skies are blue as can be, and the birds and the bees are, well… you know.
Saturday, August 1st, marks this years installment of Mead Day. Organized by the American Homebrewers Association, Mead Day is a national event to help increase drunken friendship and camaraderie between homebrewers and meadmakers and to introduce or reintroduce the meadmaking hobby. Homebrewers around the nation are encouraged to invite both their brewing and non-brewing friends, family and favorite booze hounds to celebrate by making mead.
Last year, more than 950 people produced more than 820 gallons of mead at over 50 sites in 29 states and even Russia! That’s a whole lotta meadmakin’.
So what is mead exactly? Simply, it is a fermented beverage made from honey. Some even call it “honey-wine”. True mead is simply honey, yeast and water. Conceivably mankind’s very first fermented (read: delicious) beverage, mead has evolved and expanded its definition through the ages to include other fermentables such as fruit and malt, with the malted varieties sometimes being called “braggot” or “bracket”. Various herbs and spices (usually ginger, cinnamon sticks, mint, rose petals, or juniper berries) can be added to the mead to create a metheglin or “spiced” style of mead.
I personally have never made mead. I don’t think I’ve ever even had a sip, but I’d like to. I’ve brewed with honey before, namely Sunshine Honey Pale Ale, and it was damn good. And I do have a bunch of empty carboys right now… maybe I’ll have to fill one of them with a batch of the “Beverage of Kings”. Sound good to anyone else?
