I’ve been asked on multiple occasions how I got in to mead making. My start in the world of fermentation was brewing beer. The first beer I brewed was in 2009 or 2010. It was just a simple extract kit, and despite many things not going quite to plan, it came out pretty tasty.
My first exposure to mead (as far as I recall) was at a beer festival in State College. I don’t remember much about the mead other than it was very sweet and I didn’t really care for it. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but probably around 2005. My next exposure to mead came a number of years later at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. They had a honey mead which I enjoyed quite a bit. Although since that experience, I’ve been told it was actually a wine that had just been sweetened with honey.
Now let’s jump up to 2014. In August I brewed a honey brown ale, and for this beer I purchased a gallon (which is about 12 pounds) of Brazilian wildflower honey. I wasn’t really thinking when I bought it, and didn’t realize until later I only needed a few pounds for the beer. So I was left with a bunch of extra honey. I decided to try making mead, and that September I made two one gallon batches. One was made with three pounds of honey, and the other with four.
The two meads were first tasted at a beer sampling party the following April. I got some (sympathetic) positive feedback from the group, but I found neither mead to be particularly good. At this point the mead was 6 – 7 months old, which is quite young in my opinion (but I didn’t know that at the time). I was disappointed and wondered what I could have done differently since both batches were traditional meads with nothing fancy whatsoever.
The second tasting of those same meads came the following summer. I was brewing another beer and had some friends over. One of them asked about the mead. He had tried mead before (not mine) and was a fan of it. I told him it came out okay, but not as good as I’d hoped. He still wanted to try it, so we opened a bottle. I could not believe what a difference a couple additional months of aging made. That which previously wasn’t very good at all, was now quite delicious. I was absolutely stunned and haven’t stopped making it.