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11-17-20 Tonight at 9PM ET on GotMead Live, we’ll be talking metheglins, (mead with spices), with multiple medal winning home meadmakers Amy Olsen and Josh Holbrook. We’ll be exploring making metheglins, when and how to add spices, choosing your spices, flavor profiles and tips and tricks, as well as how to avoid problems.

Amy was sucked into meadmaking by Frank Retell, meadmaker at Kuhnhenn Brewing in southeastern Michigan. Amy is a classically trained chef, and now teaches culinary arts, baking and pastry arts and run a restaurant in her school district. So, food and flavor are a huge part of her life and background. Mead seemed like a very logical and natural progression. Amy entered her mead in her first competition, the Michigan Mead Cup in 2014. She earned a gold medal and won Best of Show with her very first entry. It was Michigan wildflower honey with Medjool dates, black mission figs, and sultanas…all desert fruits. She called it A Gift to the Khaleesi.

Since then, she has earned several gold, silver, bronze and honorable mentions at numerous competitions around the country. As well as 4-AHA National Home Brewers Competition 1st round ribbons, and 7 Mazer Cups. 2 of which were for the special Digby category…It’s kind of fun to say that she is the only person to have ever won in that category. in 2019 she won Best of Show at the Great Northern Brew Ha Ha, and at the Mid-Winter Homebrew Competition,  and also won Best of Show and The Meadmaker’s choice award. One of her meads will be produced by Moonlight Meadery as the prize for that ProAm.

She has attended 2 MeadCons, 3 Mazer Cup International competitions, 2 AHA Conferences, took 2 classes at UC Davis, got elected to the AMMA Home Brew Committee, became a BJCP Mead Judge, joined the Michigan Mead Coalition and was recently voted in as the Vice President.

It’s safe to say Amy is a pretty talented meadmaker, and she’s done some great stuff with metheglins.

Josh Holbrook has been home brewing for 9 years and making mead for 7 years. He discovered mead at his local homebrew club when a club member brought a bottle of an attempt at Curt Stock’s Triple Berry Melomel. Clouds parted, angels sang, and Josh became obsessed with mead.

Josh is now the president of his local homebrew club, the Blue Ox Brewers Society in Brainerd, Minnesota. He enjoys droning on about mead and putting on honey tastings for his beer-centric club members.

Josh has won numerous medals for beer, cider and mead, including a couple Best of Shows at competitions such as Minnesota Mashout and Hoppy Halloween. He is also a certified BJCP judge and mead judge as well as a novice beekeeper.

One of Josh’s long term mead goals is to make mead with each of the 300+ varietal honeys found in the United States. He has a couple dozen under his belt already and shows no signs of stopping.

Join us on the live chat and don’t be afraid to call in if you want to!

This player will show the most recent show, and when we’re live, will play the live feed. If you are calling in, please turn off the player sound, so we don’t get feedback.[break] [break]Click here to see a playable list of all our episodes!

If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @GotmeadNow and we’ll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT Join us on live chat during the show Bring your questions and your mead, and let’s talk mead! You can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323), or Skype us at meadwench (please friend me first and say you’re a listener, I get tons of Skype spam), or tweet to @gotmeadnow.

Upcoming Shows
  • November 24 – Sam Slaughter – Sam’s meadjucation and mead cocktails
  • December 1 – Metheglins Part 2 – Michelle Scandalis and Jeremy Kyncl
  • We’ll be back January 5
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Vicky Rowe
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