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UKTony

UKTony

Worker Bee
Registered Member
Dec 24, 2012
270
1
18
Richmond, VA
Chaucer was the first commercial mead I tried upon landing in the USA.

To my taste (and my wife's) it was ghastly. Apologies to those that love it, but to my taste buds, it had was complex and noisy, no clear notes for me, other than the one that gives you a "whiskey face" due to the enormity of its sweetness. We tried leaving it a day or so in the assumption that our tastebuds were having an off day, and quickly realised our tastebuds were just fine. This mead is single handedly responsible for the incentive to make my own. Maybe I was just spoiled by good (subjectively speaking) mead in the UK.

I'd expect a decent amount of people tasting this as their first experience of "mead", would go away saying things like "I don't like mead" (which I've heard numerous times since letting people know I'd make my own); in the same way that most of the wine consumers don't spend their time drinking dessert wine, and dessert wine represents less than perhaps 5% of all commercial wines available, likewise, drinks like Chaucer represent just a small part of the mead world but tend to tar all mead with the same taste brush

It doesn't help the mead public image in my very subjective opinion, when wine can be categorised by it's different varietals, and regions and styles (burgundy, malbec, chardonnay, etc), where as the commercial mead is usually categorised as nothing more than honey-wine, or "mead" with little else to help the consumer understand that there is more than just "syrupy mead". (Obviously this is just as relevant to people that taste very dry mead and dislike it)

Sorry... will get off of my soapbox now. But isn't there a better way in the industry of making categorisation and labelling far more clear like it is in the win world, even if that's to prominently indicate sweet/medium-sweet/medium-dry/dry/brut etc?
 
Of the commercially made ones I've tried made here, have all turned out to be dessert meads (Lurgashall, Lime Bay, Lindisfarne and another I can't recall). All tasting good but cloyingly sweet (all in the 1.040 region when tested).

If you dig around the forums, you'll likely find some of the members who make it commercially do varying types of meads, your only stumbling point would be sourcing it, given the dumb regs about interstate shipping of alcohol products and how some states are fine, others take a more sharia view........

And your location suggests Virginia i.e. bible belt country........
 
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Virginia actually has a ton of wineries, several of which produce meads. However, it's true that most often they are sweet meads.
 
Thanks for the tips regarding where to find good mead. I think the root of my rant, was more about Mead not gaining the commercial recognition it deserves (like wine or beer) due to stereotypes that are constantly reinforced by the currently widely-available brews.... for example, how will mead ever lose the renaissance fair stereotype, if every brand that is widely available via supermarkets has pictures of knights and monks and other medieval stuff; after all monks also made and drank both wine and ale, but these beverages have managed to move beyond such dogma.

Additionally how can mead become widely accepted so as to encourage new potential markets/consumers to try different varieties, when the only varieties widely available are ultra sweet, and set the benchmark to be judged by.

I take on board the comments from fatbloke about moving mead around the USA, I don't know much about the laws concerning this, but the fact that several brands can be found in Kroger, et al, indicates that it's far from impossible, especially given how popular independent micro-wineries and micro-breweries have become of late?

Mead is wine like any other with a different base ingredient, yet many of the commercial meaderies seem to want to perpetuate the caricature of the renaissance fair.

I'm not sure I'm proposing anything exactly, just not so sure why the people in the best postion to help themselves and other micro-meaderies, don't seem to want to do so??

Or maybe I have it all wrong?

Tony.

P.S. I'm in sales for a living, so I apologise if this is all uninteresting stuff.
 
I think mead actually is growing. I read an article a while back about how the number of meaderies in the US was growing pretty quickly. I think there are now over 150 in the US from just 50 or so from year 2000.

I have noticed some liquor stores even have a separate section for it. However you make a point. Of what I would guess being the highest distributing meads, are Viking Blod and Chaucer's, both use the medieval kind of theme. I'm sure Moonlight Meadery is not far behind in terms of distribution, and they're marketing towards women, so even their "dry" ones are on the sweeter side. I still enjoy them without finding them cloying however.

Many of the smaller ones I've seen are more humble and less "Renaissancey",

featuring more of a local town history, modern hive type of symbols with hexagons
Honeymaker mead
images


Isaak's of Salem, which uses a witch on a broomstick, Playing off the Salem witch trials
images


Saphouse meadery just uses images of the ingredients in their branding.
images
 
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TheAlchemist said:
Not to mention Chartreuse!
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Well, they made most stuff like that, and, if still made, is invariably a bit "niche market".

Meads being harder to make quickly, have a lower commercial interest, slower turn around and less predictable annual cropping.

The last thing the "big boys" want, is competition from any other markets. They're all set up for wine, beer and spirits........
 
I played with the stereotype "medieval/Nordic" theme with my label design. I have a hand drawn lightning with storm cloud (screams Thor to me) and the name is Thara Cyninga ("of the kings" in Anglo Saxon).
I talked to a drink server at the ren-fair here when I asked about what mead they had (chaucers of course), and they were very interested in the fact that I made my own, and that it was dry.
I think an issue is the fact that you can't put a year/vintage on it. I understand that braggots and most melomels would be very hard to apply vintage to, but honey you most certainly can.
One of the biggest issues I see is the where does it belong issue. A lot of the mead produced is either made by beer guys who turned mead, or wine guys who turned mead. It doesn't really belong in either, but its closer to wine, and yet it is not a wine person drink from what I see. If fine resturaunts could start offering a dry mead with their seafood dishes things might improve (I think dry mead pairs much better with seafood than Chardonnay or Sauvignon blanc), but that won't happen because of the dogma surrounding mead: it's too sweet, or even worse, "it's not wine".
 
When I made lables for my mead in the past, I tended towards a Fairy Motif with a colage of the flavor. Such as my Strawberry had various strawberries on it and a fairy or two. I also have used goblins. I like playing up the fantasy motif. But my Strait honey brand I call rockbitter, I have a picture of the Never Ending Story's Rockbitter on it in his "Scout's Honor" Pose.

I also made a Pumpkin Spice lable where I used a dragon draped over pumpkins and a picture of Harry Potter's Hagrid character. I named the mead "Hagrid' Secret Stash"

But then again I am a gammer. To me the largest public that accepts mead are those that go to Ren Fair, or are of a religious persuasion that uses mead as a sacrament, like the wine of some more standard religions.

Mostly, The marketing is targeted to fill the nitch. I see that it is becoming less nitch and more mainstream. Little by Little. As that does, Marketing will change. Trying to market for Mass public is a little difficult. After all, most of the big beer groups are targeting some group in their adds. The weekend warrior, the "Guy", The more refined palet of the historian with Sam Adams in some cases. So Mead has the medieval end of things. But that's just a start.

I don't think that many meaderies have the cash to hire a marketing company to market for them. Most of mead has been word of mouth, or mead to mough, heh. Also, Wineries don't like the idea of Mead becoming mainstream and have the clout to do something about it. Same with big beer. Sure a winery will do a mead but that isn't their bread and butter. And that which competes, seriously, with your bread and butter is usually discoraged, or stomped into the ground until it's a quivering pile of nothing. But mostly, I see meads at the craft brew end of things. We take great care to craft it to taste and make sure people know that it's special.

That said, I still see room in the market for much more mead, and even Big Mead that can be put into the open market and seriously contend with Beer or Wine. I think that attitudes are changing and we home brewers and those that have gone professional are chaging how people see mead. Even though it's still disconcerting when someone mishears me and thinks I said "Meat" rather than mead and immediately have the concept of a bottle of liquid meat or meat based beverage in mind. Sigh.

But I think it would be good to campaign for getting a better rep for mead. Less Ren Fair and more mainstream.

Sorry, Didn't mean to rant.

Matrix
 
When I have looked for mead in liquor stores, they may only have one type of mead. Most of the time it is a sweet mead. Sometime they do not sell mead. I think the biggest issue around finding good mead are the people who sell it.

Craft beer has put a lot of time and money into educating seller and drinkers. There work has led to better beer and more sales. Mead needs the same type of program to educate people.
 
Bob1016 said:
I hate when people think I said meat!
Click to expand...

Every time...

Anyways, I think with some of the meaderies opening that used to be home mead makers, instead of wineries producing mead; We will start to see a more "craft mead" type of scene start to grow. Ken Shcramm comes to mind, and he may change what the world knows of mead yet again.

Also, B. Nektar seems to be more on the crafty side of things. I've only had their zombie killer cyser, so I don't know how the rest fair in dryness / sweetness. But they do seem to experiment more than the big box commercial brands.

It's going to take some patience and talking to people.
 
Matrix4b said:
To me the largest public that accepts mead are those that go to Ren Fair, or are of a religious persuasion that uses mead as a sacrament, like the wine of some more standard religions.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure this is why it's still all ren-faire-y, pagan/wiccan or medieval, the only people I know of who already know what Mead is before I told them know it from fantasy books, pagan circle, Game of Thrones or they're SCA or into the study of medieval arms, armour and fighting styles...

I do fully agree with you that it'd be nice if fruit wines and meads had an indiction of sweetness. I include fruit wines in my statement because that's where I started and I've found that fruit wines are another thing that when made commercially often ends up syrupy-sweet or even artificially flavoured as people think it should taste exactly like the fruit it was made from, like grape wine somehow tastes like grape juice, and runs into just as much "it's not real wine" stereotyping from people who don't know anything about it... my very first wine kit was a Raspberry Merlot and I was terribly disappointed to find that it contained natural raspberry flavour, not raspberry juice. Same with a very tasty Tropical Riesling. It took me a while to make a straight grape wine kit, because I'm not much for grape wines, I often find them either so dry I can't drink a glass in less than an hour, or they're just plain boring... When I was on my honeymoon, we did a tour of some of the Niagara region wineries and I bought one bottle of a grape wine (Gewurztra-howeveryouspellit) because I read the tasting notes afterwards and it said exactly what I tasted, and it was the only grape wine I had like that. I brought home a few different bottles from the one winery that did fruit wines. That was a neat experience, I determined that I liked my blueberry wine better than theirs (too strong and musky when undiluted) and my strawberry wine tasted exactly like theirs did, and my first raspberry wine had a ways to go to catch up with theirs but my recent one is now at the same level.

I'm lucky enough to have a friend who orders online from Munro's Meadery and I think they do actually indicate whether their traditionals are sweet or dry right in the name on the bottle, although I'm not sure if they do the same for their melomels or if you have to read the description, so every now and then I get to compare my meads with commercial ones. I got into fruit wines and meads because it was really hard for me to find anything other than grape wines. I did have one dry mead once that my grandmother got me for Xmas or something, and I found it too dry for my taste. I keep trying dry things because people keep telling me that my taste is supposed to change as I get older, but so far it's like tomatoes, nope, still waiting to like those too :icon_puke_l:

And the way I get around the mead/meat thing after the first couple of times it happened? "Yeah, I make fruit wines and meads, you know, honey wine."
 
A search on Beer Advocate shows 2 active listings and 4 retired ones. Do you know of other sites BBBF? Then again, this site would be a logical place, as it also sponsors the Mazer competition.... Someone send Vicky an email !!!
 
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