The Mead House

Home meadmaker Greg McNulty stops by the house to share some insight. Getting started 3 years ago with a pin cherry mead, as he put it, "the rest is history." "I am now in the R&D phase of starting a small Meadery in Buffalo, Ny, focusing on crushable sessions. Along the way, I found your show, and decided to give the famous Ryan Braggot a try since now I have the proper equipment!"

We're back after an extended hiatus, and in this episode we find out that over the break, Ryan scores at the Mazer Cup! Jeff re-visits Graf with a new recipe he found at Brulosophy. JD talks about way back when Mississippi Chris was on the show how they both started a Graf using a recipe found at HomeBrewTalk.com. In segment 2, we hook up with Will Otte, a homebrewer with a bit of useful science behind using bentonite as a clearing agent.  Get your pen & paper out guys, you'll want to take notes on this one! We wrap the show with Will and a few Facebook friends.

In this episode, make sure you have a pencil & paper with you, you'll want to take notes! Home meadmaker Tom Repas is back in the house to share some insight on making a mead to go with your meals. Rather than trying to pick a mead off the shelf, why not make a mead yourself. Check out his Facebook page for some inspiration, he's quite a cook, gardener and beekeeper! The we wrap the show with  our Facebook/Reddit friends!

Evan Henderson is in the house this episode. Beginning a career as a civil engineer, he spent 10 years behind a computer monitor before he decided he needed to move on. He was hired on at Sap House Meadery and quickly mastered the mead making production there, evident by many of their meads.

Adam Thoms, our second place medalist in the Iron Bee 2020 secret ingredient category, is a home mead maker who started off home brewing beer a few years ago and really found my ideal hobby/addiction after pitching the yeast on my first batch of mead in January 2019. What he did with Rose Hips and Cacao Nibs was amazing for his very first competition entry ever! He lives by the idea that there are many ways to make mead, and he's not afraid to fail forward and experiment! 3 We move into a category seldom dicussed here in the house, and we promise, we will be exploring this further for sure, Pyments, mead made with grape juice and honey. As usual, we wrap the show with a few Facebook/Reddit friends.

There was a time when gluten-free beers tasted like, well, the leftovers at the bottom of a slop bucket used to feed hogs with. Well, maybe not that bad, but they were sort of disgusting. Then along came Grouse Malt House, that changed everything. Gluten-free malts with the same awesome flavors of regular grain malt from brown sugars and caramels to coffee and cocoa, now those with intolerance have a valuable source to produce gluten-free beers & braggots.

We're back! With this episode, we toss the mic around the table and talk about what we did or didn't accomplish during our 2 week hiatus. Jeff has some 411 on another method of carbing up mead, and we wrap the show with a laundry list of questions from our Facebook/Reddit friends!

A free for all! This episode, we go all over the map just talking mead, plus Mead Day is coming in a couple days, how are you spending yours? We'll give you an idea of how we're spending ours. Then, we do an extended Facebook Friends. Just a reminder, this is show 6 on our 6 & 2 calendar, so we'll see you in two weeks when we come back for episode 170!

This is another nugget show. There is much to say about Nathan Steigman, however, it would take several pages to explain it all. Nathan lives in the heart of mead country, Minnesota. He's a tinkerer, an experimenter, and a qualified master home mead maker. His meads, some with very unusual ingredients, are much sought after around his hometown and beyond, and if you've been lucky enough to have one, you would remember it for a long time.

Like many recent grads, Martin Key and Justin Schoendorf found themselves relatively poor and possessing an insatiable appetite for craft beer. As Martin and Justin learned to make new and interesting beers, they tinkered with various styles and recipes creating things that were not yet available in the market. Eventually, they stumbled upon an alcoholic drink made with fermented honey.

With an avid interest in archaeological and historical research he has been making mead using traditional pre-modern techniques, wild yeast and local, often foraged ingredients since 2000. With a  license in 2010 he founded the first commercial meadery in New York State, and opened the first meadery in New York City. These meads have been embraced by the natural wine community and are served at some of the finest restaurants and bars in NYC. This episode we talk with Raphael Lyon of Enlightenment Wines Meadery.

Aloha! In this episode, Stephanie Krieger from Nani Moon Meadery in  Hawaii stops by the house to talk about the only meadery in the Hawaiian Islands, and a few of her amazing meads like Buzz Squared, crafted from Kona Coffee and organic local honey. With access to Hawaiian vanilla straight from the Orchid which grows wild there and some of the most unique and sought after honey's in the world like Macadamia Nut and Ohia Lehua blossom honey, she has an amazing list of meads. 

There is only one man who can claim the title, Chairman of Mead. David Myers of Redstone Meadery is one of those men. His flagship Black Raspberry Nectar put Redstone Meadery on the map, and pretty much set the standard.  He joins us this episode for some fun and entertaining thoughts on mead making. Redstone Meadery is also one of many proud sponsors of the 2020 Iron Bee Competition.

All the way from the UK in 2011 to Sleepy Eye, Minnesota where he makes his home, he started out as an accountant, when he got here, he became a beekeeper!  In this episode we talk with Jonathan Gardner of Gardner Bees, about melter honey, something new to the meadmaking world. If you're looking for honey that has a head start on caramelizing for a bochet or a dark grain braggot, maybe this is your honey!

Another Facebook Friends episode! From continuous fermentation, bourbon bochet and elderflower mead to adding a smokey flavor, using centennial hops and no, really? Coffee meads again?! It's all here in this episode!