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Why Isn't Mead More Commercial?
Most people have never heard of mead - it definitely does not have the popularity of beer or wine - why do you think that is?
I have been wondering why it is so rare to find mead in a liquor store...any ideas?
I was in Rexburg, Idaho a couple weeks ago and in the wine rack at the liquor stor they had a bottle of a local huckleberry mead. It had a layer of dust on it and the clerk looked like she'd never sold any before. I thought it was quite good and the friends I shared it with agreed. I don't know why Mead isn't more popular but after this experience I'm going to make some of my own and also start searching for it at every liqour store near me.
Can't speak for your neck of the woods, but if the product isn't available, or people don't know about it, why would they bother?
When I was back in Virginia, nobody except a homebrew shop owner had ever even heard of a wheat beer, it was all Bud, Miller, Sam Adams, Fosters, and the like.
If there is no distribution, or people don't know about it, then it never leaves the shelf. Fortunately for me, the store I did find a wheat beer, it was always untouched. People there wanted the highly available commercial beers, which meant more for me!
Yeah, I'd have to agree. I had an idea of what mead was but didn't get a good grip on it until I started reading about homebrewing. I guess that means if you've got a good product a little advertising could go a long way. Although I have heard that it is difficult to get consistent honey as far as sugar content and such goes. That would make an inconsistent product which would be hard to sell.
is it more expensive than wines? i've never seen it myself but i'm looking for it in local shops.
I've only seen it once in a beer / liquor store, but have never tried it. what does it taste like?
I heard it's an acquired taste, plus you can't find it anywhere.
I seem to always find a bottle of mead in stores such as Whole Foods. In North Carolina, there was store called Earth Fare, similar to Whole Foods, that carried mead, and around the Bay Area, Whole carries it. There is usually only one or two types, though. A sweet mead isn't too hard to enjoy, but a dry mead can really be an acquired taste.
It's simply because most brewing companies nowadays prefer not to use mead. I don't used mead too eversince I started brewing.
According to some historians, mead was the original alcoholic beverage made by humans, others say beer was.
Mead takes a lot of honey to make, and it was very expensive to collect enough honey to make big quantities of mead. Hence, beer and wine making took precidence over mead.
By modern day standards though, when a good bottle of wine cost $20 or more, mead should be quite competitive. I was at a wine pairing dinner at Millenium Restaurant in San Francisco about 6 months ago. (It's this fabulous vegan restaurant that has a multi-course meal with various wines paired for each course. Incredible! And very educational.) I asked the guy from the winery if they ever considered making mead (he stated that they kept bees to increase grape production) and he sneared at the idea. I thought that was quite foolish actually.
I've made my own mead several times. What I've discovered is that mead needs at least 3 years to mature, 4 or 5 is even better. The last batch of mead, the one in which I discovered you need to wait at least 3 years to drink, tasted like fresh of the vine concord grapes. It was very bright and crisp. Perhaps the best fermented beverage I ever drank.
Now I've started making mead in bigger quantities. I'm doing about 6 gallons every 3 months. I started about a year ago, so in about 2 or 4 more years, I'll be in mead heaven. The trick with mead is to be patient.
I get my honey at the farmers market. My favorite "honey lady" gives me a good deal on a 12 pound jar. I use 15- 18 pounds to make a 6 gal batch.
What's the alcohol content of mead?
I've heard of it but I don't know how sweet or strong it is. Would it compliment a meal like a good wine?
I have been making mead since 1982 (Geeze - that's been a quarter century now!!), and from my experience both making and drinking, the best way to describe the breadth of mead is probably to say that there are as many different styles and flavors of mead as there are of white wines - or perhaps more! Mead is typically regarded as more of a wine than a beer, although the classifications are really too limited to describe what can be encompassed by the term mead. Meads can be still, sparkling, or just slightly bubbly. Meads can range from extremely dry to very sweet, from low-alcohol (the 5-7% ABV in hydromels resembles typical beer percentages) to almost the same as "fortified" wines, upwards of 17-18% ABV, all produced through fermentation - no distilled augmentation added! Meads are rich with history, and since mead has been produced as long as, or longer than beer, the recipes are similarly rich and varied. So, instead of asking what foods would be complemented by mead, it is more correct to ask which particular mead would complement a given food.
BTW - Although I've been brewing (beer as well as mead) for a long, long time, I am an absolute newbie to this forum. I'm glad that I stumbled on to you guys! I'm enjoying everything that I've read thus far, and I'll occasionally post a comment or two if I think that I have something of value to add.
As far as what meads I like to produce personally, I have a few favorite recipes that have sustained me over the decades but recently I've developed an interest in brewing traditional Polish style meads. Probably a hearkening back to my ethnic roots.... 
I have a hard time finding mead for sale where I live as well. I've made two batches, both of which were made with berries. I made a rasberry mead with 18 lbs. of what seemed like very high sugar content honey and ten pounds of rasberries. I basically let it sit in a fermentor until it quit which turned out to be a couple of months. Wound up with a 24% abv! I tasted one after only a month in the bottle ( just to get a feel for what I'd made) and whoa! Definitely could taste the honey coming through but what I was hoping would be a sweet rasberry flavor was actually closer to a rasberry robotussin. I'm hoping after a year or three that this will mellow out and turn into a fine beverage but I remain sceptical. My other batch was more of a small experimental 2 gallon batch of rasberry-blueberry mead. Used a little less honey but close to same ratio for ingredients and after maybe five months in a bottle it was simply amazing. It was fairly light on the palate with some definite berry tartness. I split this batch with a friend which leaves me only a couple of bottles to age. I'm going to have one helluva time aging this; it's just so damn good! I'm going to start making mead on a more regular basis now so hopefully down the road a year or two I'll have a variety of meads to sample.
For good ideas on the low popularity of mead check out the book Sacred and Medicinal Healing Brews. It documents the history and prohibition/ discrimination of certain alcholic beverages. Interesting, i promise.
As for it not being avaliable.. I prefer homebrew, higher quality.
andrew jensen wrote:
I have a hard time finding mead for sale where I live as well. I've made two batches, both of which were made with berries. I made a rasberry mead with 18 lbs. of what seemed like very high sugar content honey and ten pounds of rasberries. I basically let it sit in a fermentor until it quit which turned out to be a couple of months. Wound up with a 24% abv! I tasted one after only a month in the bottle ( just to get a feel for what I'd made) and whoa! Definitely could taste the honey coming through but what I was hoping would be a sweet rasberry flavor was actually closer to a rasberry robotussin. I'm hoping after a year or three that this will mellow out and turn into a fine beverage but I remain sceptical.
Wow! You've worked a minor miracle there, my friend; I've never heard of a yeast that could survive in a brew that alcoholic. From my own experience, and from everything I've ever read on the subject, most every yeast will give up the ghost before you get to 20% ABV. Only the rarest of combinations of strains, conditions, and nutrients will even get you into the neighborhood of 18-20%.
That all said, you may be on to something remarkable. Just be prepared to let that batch age for a decade or two before it mellows sufficiently to be drinkable. The general rule with meads is, the higher the honey/water ratio, the longer the result will take to develop, but the more "interesting" it will be when you get to that point. As a case in point, Jadwiga mead (a Polish Poltorak - 3 parts honey to 2 parts water by volume in the original wort!!) takes 25 years of aging in oak barrels before it is ready to bottle, but WHOA what a rich complex of flavors results from all that care!
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