6-2-20 Tonight at 9PM ET, we’re continuing our series, bringing on a group of talented meadmakers to talk shop, and we’re starting in the midwest, this is part 2. We’ll be talking with Adam Bystrom, Josh Holbrook and Matt Weide. They are part of a number of talented meadmakers in Minnesota that are making some seriously amazing meads, and each of them is making some amazing award winning meads. We’re going to be talking mead, how they got into making it, what they’ve learned and what they’re making now.

Minnesota-native Adam Bystrom is a mead maker who’s currently in first place in the 2020 AMMA Mead Maker of the Year series. Last year he won 5 medals at the Mazer Cup International, including the Heavy Medal Award (and was a significant part of the storming of MCI last year).

He’s also won Best of Show at the last two Minnesota State Fair Homebrew Competition. And, he’s only been making mead for about two and a half years. In that time, he’s made 80 batches. When he’s not fine tuning his libations, Adam enjoys spending time with his family, wife Danielle and two year old son Truman, in St. Louis Park, Minnesota.

Here he is with his *stack* of Mazer Cup awards from 2019.

 

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.

You might remember Matt Weide, we had him on the show a couple weeks ago.

Matt has been home brewing for over 20 years. He began making mead in 1998, but didn’t get serious about it until 2007, when he took a BJCP exam prep class and found out just how good mead could be.

Since then, Matt has been the Vice President of the Minnesota Home Brewers Association, won the AHA Meadmaker of the Year award in 2014, and has given talks on bochet style meads at the National Homebrewer’s Conference and MeadCon.

Most recently, Matt has helped start the Valkyrie’s Horn Mead competition and in 2020 was elected to the AMMA Home Governing Committee

Come on in and have a listen!

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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.


New Honey on Sale!

African Bronze Honey in Ontario, CA is offering Zambian Dark Honey 60% off: 3.85/lb in 375g squeeze pks or Tanzanian Amber Gold Honey 60lb overfill pail $3.07/lb Plus 6 lbs FREE! It has a smoky, spicy note, w/ caramel and tobacco flavor. Go get yours: https://www.africanbronzehoney.com/collections/gotmead-collection

Coming up:
  • June 9 – Southwest Mead – Carvin Wilson, Warren Earlie and Allen Martin
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Vicky Rowe
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