The name conjures up images of golden chalices, medieval royalty, and old school indulgence, not small plates and Saturdays in the park. But mead, a fermented combination of honey and water, is seeing a decidedly new school renaissance in the Bay Area.
"There's a lot of energy around mead in San Francisco right now," says Oron Benary of the San Francisco Mead Company. "When you get drunk on this ... you're going to have the time of your life."
Benary and his wife, Sarah, are part of a small but vocal resurgence in craft mead production in the United States. In addition to rebranding the beverage for a modern audience, they're aiming to educate drinkers on what mead is, and as importantly, what it isn't.
"When I do tastings, 75 percent of people have never heard of mead!" he says. "Or if they have, they assume it's sweet. Mead doesn't have to be sweet. And there are so many ways that you can make it."
To get some basics out of the way: Mead is an alcoholic, fermented beverage that must contain honey, water, and yeast (for said fermentation to happen). From there, it can be flavored with everything from spices to fruit purees. Mead crops up in ancient histories from the British Isles to Asia; in those contexts, it's sometimes referred to as honey wine. It is, according to some beverage scholars, one of the earliest examples of a fermented drink.
William Bostwick, a brewer for Woods Beer Co., developed an interest in mead while digging into historical styles of beer (his book on the subject, The Brewer's Tale, was published in 2014).
"As you read about these ancient, historical beers, you keep coming across mead," he explains. "Historical literature is packed with people drinking mead."
The regular reappearances of mead in his research made him interested in trying it for himself. The only problem was, he had a hard time finding any to sample. The solution was an obvious one: He'd have to make some for himself.
He made his first batch using his own honey (Bostwick keeps bees, too); the result was a simple mead made of honey, water, and yeast. From there, he got into "weirder, historical styles;" began writing on and reviewing mead; and started teaching classes on mead-making to other enthusiasts.
Benary's mead at the San Francisco Mead Company is an excellent example of the diversity in a seemingly simple combination of ingredients. The company offers three types, flavored with different honey (orange blossom from Ohai, earthy from Mendocino) and spices. All of the meads are aged for at least two years, which allows them to develop a dry, bracing flavor, contrasted with the rich roundness of honey. Cloying sweetness, however, is not a part of that.
"My mead is all about the honey — showcasing those flavors," Benary says. "I love making it because of all of the elements that contribute to it — the beekeepers, the environment that the bees are in."
Benary is experimenting with making a cyser, a straight-up blend of honey and Gravenstein apples; along with a mead featuring local blackberry puree. He's playing around with aging his mead in wine barrels, too.
With their current and upcoming releases, San Francisco Mead Company wants to celebrate the specific flavors found in California honey. Echoing this local philosophy but producing wildly different mead is Bear and Bee, a brand-new meadery from beloved local craft brewers, Calicraft.
"There's a whole wave of people that are redefining what mead is," says Blaine Landberg, the founder of Calicraft and Bear and Bee. "It's really exciting. And we're really staking our claim in this industry — similar to the beers we've made at Calicraft, we want to create something that's different and innovative."
Landberg dived into mead-making as a direct result of working on Calicraft's signature brew, Buzzerkeley, which is made using, "pounds and pounds of honey." He was running in the Berkeley hills when inspiration struck — he had copious amounts of honey, Champagne yeast, and oranges. Why not try making mead?
"I went home and made a batch in maybe... thirty minutes? I'm used to beer, which takes hours," he recalls. "That first batch was just okay. But I began tweaking on it, researching mead, and playing around with different fruits. Soon, I had a clear concept for a beverage that was medium alcohol, carbonated, and sweet... but not two sweet."
That experimentation, and the enthusiastic response from the rest of the Calicraft team, resulted in Bear and Bee whose first line of meads will be released this May. Calicraft's specifically focusing on fruit-based sparkling meads, or "sparking honey wines" which are meant to be consumed fresh (i.e., unaged) and have a 6 percent ABV (versus San Francisco Mead Company's 13 percent meads). Its initial releases will include pomegranate and strawberry-flavored mead; black cherry and grapefruit will follow later in the year.
Flavor-wise, they're worlds away from SF Mead Company's headier, more alcoholic meads — they're bright, frothy, and would fit right in at a Dolores Park picnic. For two beverages rooted in the same core ingredients — honey, water, and yeast — they're different, and delicious. And Benary and Landberg believe that the time is ripe for people to understand and fall in love with mead.
"We're finding that so many people can really appreciate it," Landberg says. "Maybe someone has never tasted mead before. But when they do, they're liking it ... across the board."
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