Chenin Blanc and Mead

The source of the honey is definitely evident in well made meads that use a "single crop honey". I can personally attest to this with clover, orange blossom, and apple blossoms on which the bees were let loose.

One of the best places in North America to find commercial meads is a shop in Jean Talon market in Montreal called La Maison des Saveurs. There, one can find ciders, meads, and many of the various combinations and permutations of fermented beverages from farm producers all over Quebec (melomel, cyser, pyment, metheglin, braggot).

I have also had a sparking mead that was wonderful.

The best mead I ever tasted was a melomel made with five different field berries. Each berry's contribution was apparent in a choreography of ordered appearance. It was one of the most fascinating things I have ever tasted. I believe it won the American Homebrewers Association Mead of the Year that year.

And I will echo Thor's response. Y, Y, N.
 
I find parallels between some white wines and ciders; Cascina Degli Ulivi Gavi has a very cider-esque quality to it, for example. Many Vinho Verdes Ive had, too. Not something I can define away from the dining table, though.

Rahsaan:

You cant really contrast beer against wine as an agricultural product. Even if a brewery took their barley and hops solely from nearby fields the barley still needs to undergo a malting process and a process to convert the starches to fermentable sugars. This is all before fermentation. Then the addition of hops would make whatever terrior you were trying to express even more complex. Thats not to say beer cant be a profound drink, just that head-to-head comparisons are somewhat meaningless.

Honey, on the other hand, can be sourced from one area, during a short period of time. It only stands to reason that youre going to be able to see differences between honeys of different flowers as well as where the flowers were grown. Does it make it more complex than beer or wine? Surely the answer doesnt lie in mathematical equations. Its just us animals that are drinking it.

The limitation I see with honey as a pure fermentable is its natural lack of acid. Im curious to see Schramms take on this discussion once he returns from fishing in Chile.
 
originally posted by Todd Abrams:
Honey, on the other hand, can be sourced from one area, during a short period of time. It only stands to reason that youre going to be able to see differences between honeys of different flowers as well as where the flowers were grown.
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Good.

The limitation I see with honey as a pure fermentable is its natural lack of acid.
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Yes, and we sure don't want unnatural additives do we!
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:

Yes, and we sure don't want unnatural additives do we!
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I assume you mean to be provocative with that statement. Maybe someone else will bite.

All I can say is that it seems apparent why mead has had so many additives throughout its history and why fruit melomels seem to be quite popular in today's market.
 
Hey, while we're discussing fermentable stuff with no natural acid, has anyone ever had a maple wine? I've tasted one and it was actually very nice, low alcohol, sherry tasting stuff. It had some kind of acidity though, probably lemon or orange peel. There is a huge debate about maple terroir and the maple flavor was very much intact in the wine I tasted.

Also, is there a traditional mead recipe? I would love to pass this on to my bee keeping buddy. I have searched the Internet and found a lot of mead recipes but no definitive, this is the way it's always been done, list of ingredients.

Kay
 
I have had maple beer, made from boiling down the maple sap to about a 1050 specific gravity, then fermenting it out close to finish with ale yeast and ending it early with sulphites (it will ferment almost completely out, losing the maple flavour in the process, for reasons that I do not know).

Locally, wineries add some maple syrup to a "port-like" beverage made from fortified red wine. It comes out tasting surprisingly good. And there is also a sweet wine made with maple syrup and brandy. From www.gaspereauwine.com

Reserve Port (Medium) $19.99/500ml
This non-vintage, port-styled wine is reminiscent of cranberry, raspberry and plum preserves. A velvety finish of butterscotch and maple toffee makes this wine a perfect complement to a relaxing evening, dark chocolate truffles or blue cheeses. Easy to enjoy and difficult to share.

Maple Wine (Sweet) $14.99 200ml
Maple syrup, the popular delicacy harvested from our Nova Scotia maple forests, was used to make this smooth, rich maple wine. Fortified with wine brandy made from one of Nova Scotias signature grape varieties, LAcadie, this truly is a Nova Scotia treat. The combination of rich maple flavour and clean, aromatic LAcadie brandy makes this dessert wine unforgettable. Maple wine is a wonderful treat on it own but goes equally well with dessert.
 
I recently tasted a homemade maple wine. It was quite nutty and sherry-like. Not something I imagine would catch on especially due to the cost and seasonality of maple sap. Black Star Farms makes a really nice fortified apple wine with maple syrup added. Chase it with straight up puff pastry.

Kay, buy your friend a copy of The Compleat Meadmaker.
 
has anyone ever had a maple wine?
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Not pure. It was (if I'm remembering correctly) an apple/maple wine from the Ottauquechee Valley Winery in Vermont. It tasted like apple wine with maple syrup added. The mistake they made, I think, was trying to get it drier than it wanted to be; it tasted so outrageously sweet whatever the actual sugar content, that the wine-like aspects seemed to deform it.
 
originally posted by :

Honey, on the other hand, can be sourced from one area, during a short period of time. It only stands to reason that you’re going to be able to see differences between honeys of different flowers as well as where the flowers were grown. Does it make it more complex than beer or wine? Surely the answer doesn’t lie in mathematical equations. It’s just us animals that are drinking it.

The limitation I see with honey as a pure fermentable is its natural lack of acid. I’m curious to see Schramm’s take on this discussion once he returns from fishing in Chile.
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Jesus. How did this get past me? Damn trips to Chile. And while Joe was still with us, no less.

I will post on this later this weekend. After re-reading the thread, there is much I want to comment on.
 
Where to start? (long)

Yes, honey does reflect the source of the nectar from which it was made quite well, and other location- and human-based factors have major influences. If you have never tried them, some of the most spectacular honeys I know are South or Central American coffee blossom, Meadowfoam, Scottish Heather, and Tasmanian Leatherwood. The differences are profound. In the US, Sourwood, Fireweed and much Basswood (Linden) are good examples of honeys that are great on their own but don’t make impressive mead.

Varietal, or single source honeys are collected for the most part as the by-product of pollination services rendered to crop growers. Our favorites of that type for mead making are Orange Blossom and Raspberry Blossom. Some honeys like Tupelo, Mesquite and Sage are collected by beekeepers who move their hives to the source and leave them there to collect the flow. Since there is no revenue in that, the honeys are more dear and often less available.

“Average” honeys (those without many dramatic aroma and flavor characteristics) do not make impressive traditional mead (just honey and water), in my opinion. Honey does lack the levels of acidity that wine grapes possess, and lacks any tannin at all. One of the world’s great honey experts was Eva Crane. The one time I had a conversation with her, she told me she thought that big, bold honeys make the best meads. We have only made three straight meads at Schramm’s, and they were with Scottish Heather, Tasmanian Leatherwood, and Michigan Wildflower. The Wildflower sucked. A dumper. That lack of acidity is why we make so may fruit meads. I love acidity, and we get ours from high acid fruits like tart cherries, raspberries, blackberries and currants. Further, the primary acid that occurs in mead is gluconic acid, and it has a very different profile than malic, lactic or tartaric.

We do make some meads - like our Nutmeg - that some would consider lacking in acidity and “cloying.” But one person’s cloying is another person’s delicious, and who am I to deny someone their delicious?

Another limitation to honey as a fermentable is its lack of YAN (yeast assimilable nitrogen). I am sure it is not news to the assembled here that without nitrogen, yeast struggles to reproduce, and to metabolize sugars. Meads made without nutrients can be full of higher alcohols, which can account for Kay’s hangover. That will happen whether they are finished dry or sweet. Making traditional meads as a non-interventionist is problematic. There are yeasts like Prise de Mousse that will do it, but the resulting meads taste and smell like dry cleaner fluid as a rule, and are commonly referred to as “rocket fuel.”

That term - “traditional mead” - itself is bullshit, as far as I am concerned. The oldest residues of any fermented beverage from Jiahu China from ~7000 BCE contained honey, hawthorn berries, grapes and rice. It seems like the oldest fermentations contained anything sweet we could find, and humans may well have understood the need for acidity for balance well before we understood how to write anything down. Traditionally, people have been putting all manner of stuff other than honey in their meads.

On the other hand, the adage that mead is the oldest fermented beverage in common to southern and northern European as well as African cultures, and that alone may be a telling coincidence.
 
Ken,
If I want to brew an ale with honey, when do you recommend adding the honey?
I tried adding honey after the primary fermentation was done to retain the most character from the honey, but still found it mostly just fermented out and raised the alcohol without adding a lot of honey character.
 
originally posted by Marc D:
Ken,
If I want to brew an ale with honey, when do you recommend adding the honey?
I tried adding honey after the primary fermentation was done to retain the most character from the honey, but still found it mostly just fermented out and raised the alcohol without adding a lot of honey character.
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I add mine at the end of the boil. When I make honey beers, I pick huge honeys, as they do ferment out pretty much completely. If the honey doesn't have a ton of aromatic volume, it gets lost. If you can find some Blackberry blossom, it is a good choice.
 
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