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Why isn't mead more mainstream?

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I actually think that a year on the bottle doesn't go far enough - with wines, a year is plenty, because you know roughly what month fermentation started based on whether it's from north or south of the equator, so you know how old it is.

But mead can be made any time of year - so if I buy a bottle of 2010 mead right now, it could be 5 months old, or it could be 16 months old! I'd go with year and month that fermentation started.

But, this would certainly cost money. Breweries that I know of that do this use a blank spot on the label and a machine that prints onto it. That way they don't have to worry about having too many of a label on hand, or having to order small qtys. That machine's gotta cost money though, and that also means more administration to keep track of it.

But for me it's a big deal, I would like to know how old what I'm drinking is.
 
AToE said:
I actually think that a year on the bottle doesn't go far enough - with wines, a year is plenty, because you know roughly what month fermentation started based on whether it's from north or south of the equator, so you know how old it is.
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Like Budweiser's Born On Date.

If you want to play with the big boys, you gotta play by their rules. Let them spend the big bucks on marketing and copy what works.

Great marketers don't borrow, they steal. Ideas that is.
 
If you do date, or month, I think it should be attemptred to be done by the honey instead of the fermentation, since that is how they do it for wines. And another reason to do so, is that honey can vastly different in different parts of the year, even if it has the same or similar nectar source. So if you're using spring, or autumn honey, that will be affecting the mead quite a lot. Same goes for fruit, berries and anything else that grows if that is used in the mead, as they too will go through stages of development throughout the year.

Either would be an improvement though.
 
I'm going to dissagree on that - with wine the grapes and the wine have the same age, so it's a bit of moot point to say they're dating one or the other specifically.

I agree that the location and year of the honey would be cool, but it's not as necessary as the age of the mead in my opinion.

I'd rather know how old the mead itself is. If it happens to be a honey that varies a lot depending on whether it's from the spring or fall, then I would hope the meadmaker is just using one or the other for a specific mead, and if they're not, then yes, I agree that would be good info to have (I know in some cases spring vs fall honey might as well be considered totally different things - especially when we're talking wildflower. When it comes to varietals though I don't think there's as much drastic swing, possibly because that variety of flower only blooms for one period a year (not in all cases)).
 
Well, it's not a moot point for me.

I've been making mead from 2010 honey so far, but the majority of the batches have been set in 2011. By June/July the new batches will start to be made with honey from 2011, and I kind of want to differentiate between that, so that people know what year the honey is from.
 
Smarrikåka said:
Well, it's not a moot point for me.

I've been making mead from 2010 honey so far, but the majority of the batches have been set in 2011. By June/July the new batches will start to be made with honey from 2011, and I kind of want to differentiate between that, so that people know what year the honey is from.
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When I say moot point I'm refering only to grape wine - where they are always (pretty much) the same age.

I totally agree that what you're planning with listing the age of the honey makes sense, and is good info for the customer, especially if there is a noticable difference between the honeys. But I would also strongly encourage the age of the mead to be included, because aging is such a huge factor in mead.

If I had to pick between one piece of information or the other I'd go with the age of the mead, but in a perfect world I'd love both bits of info!
 
Vintage dating is a good idea; most wine consumers will expect to see a date on the bottle, front and center, along with either the brand name, batch/blend name, or varietal name. Basically copy the new-world style of wine label. Personally I would go by the year the honey was pulled, regardless of the date of fermentation. Yes, these could be very different, but for a meadery with limited storage space I'd guess the dates would not be more than 6 or so months off. I'd stay away from including month/season in the large print (that would be peculiar to mead, and possibly confusing), but would like to see it in the fine print, e.g. "made with Spring Colorado Wildflower honey" if that is useful information or part of the branding of the product.

Use of place-names sounds like a good idea (e.g. "2010 Adirondack Wildflower Mead" or "2010 Wildflower Mead, Adirondack Mountains") insofar as it mimics the wine labels. Kind of like the AVAs and AOCs of the wine world. These would not have the regulation of the wine labels, but hey you have to start somewhere.

Basically the consumer is looking for a few key pieces of information on the label. A savvy/snobby consumer might read the small print, but for the most part people just want to know: what, when, and where/who. That's how you pick out a bottle of wine after all. The big print should just capture those things, e.g. B. Nektar 2010 Dry Cyser (optional below that: location of honey, apple source). Done. Adding anything else will confuse the person staring at the bottle and they'll find something they recognize. Put a logo nice and big above the words and you're set.
 
I agree with all that, a big bold year on the front (we can argue all day about whether that year is for the mead or the honey, let's agree to dissagree!) and then the month of fermentation/month of honey production in fine print on the back.
 
wayneb said:
BTW - the origin of the Foreign Extra in North America being in Canada allows Guinness to mark those bottles as "Imported" when sold in the US, and that (somewhat intentionally) obfuscates the actual source of the beer.
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That struck me as hilarious...
 
AToE said:
I agree with all that, a big bold year on the front (we can argue all day about whether that year is for the mead or the honey, let's agree to dissagree!) and then the month of fermentation/month of honey production in fine print on the back.
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I think if I went commercial, the front label would be the pretty one with the generic info (logo, name of wine/mead, alcohol content and pitch year), back label would be simpler (less expensive to print in small batches) and would include things like honey source/date and stuff specific to the batch...

But yeah, we could argue forever about what date to put on things. On my own house labels I list "Started on" and "Bottled on" dates so there's some indication of the actual age of the wine...
 
Whoa. Where to start?

I'd be delighted to host the new Food Network program on mead, but I haven't heard from Alton's producers yet, and I don't think I should be holding my breath. The networks and production companies are only - in the last couple of years - getting into wine TV, and the market among wine lovers is huge. But it's a nice thought, and I'm flattered.

Simply put, you can quadruple the production of a vineyard by plowing 4 times the acreage and planting the vines. You can say the same for grain production, even more so, because you don't have to wait 10 years for the vines to start producing. The same cannot be said for quadrupling the output of an apiary. The scalability is simply not as straightforward. Beekeeping has a pretty serious skill set in comparison to broken ground agriculture. Vines and cereal grains don't sting. And there is a whopping big market outside of mead for virtually all of the honey produced in the US, whereas the grapes used in wine and the barley used in beer are essentially produced exclusively for those markets. There are too many grapes in many places around the planet right now, and that is not at all true with honey.

The ability to ramp up production rapidly helped a ton in moving wine and beer into the mainstream of Eur-Asian drinking. Mead has suffered from a thousand year head start, in terms of market development, advancements in production technique and meadery food science knowledge. We have much to overcome.

The use of the appellation system and vintages as marketing fodder is a great example. Mead, this far, has no industry marketing strategy for helping consumers understand the quality spectrum and product differentiation. That also goes for varietal designations. Beer has its styles, which are getting better and better known by the public, as well as a strong locavore following. That is benefiting meaderies, as well, though.

Another real challenge that we face is the limited supplies of some of the best mead making honeys. No matter how much we want more, there is not going to be an unlimited supply of Tupelo, or even Orange Blossom honey. To some extent, this creates a true luxury element to the best varietal meads (if demand increases as it has been, supply can never be expanded to meet it), and that is something we can capitalize on.

I don't see any reason to shy away from sweet meads in pursuit of an expansion in the market. d'Yquem, world-class Ports and German TBAs do not get slammed with the pejorative use of "syrupy." They are fantastic, exquisitely crafted and complex sweet dessert wines. Great mead can stand in their midst without any apologies (I tried it at a $500-a-head tasting event, and THoD not only held its own, it rocked the house). There is more than enough revenue in that sector to support a dandy little mead industry. We do our industry a disservice if we diss sweet meads here or anywhere. Maybe sweet is not your style, but that does not mean that great sweet meads are not great beverages.

I'm supposed to be pruning raspberry plants. More later.

Ken
 
I definitely don't mean to diss sweet meads, and I know it must get tiring for people to hear me talking about wanting more dry ones! I had some great sweet meads at the Mazer Cup, and I know a lot of people do like this style. There's obviously tons of people who like it, look at 90% of the recipes on this forum, and 95% of what meaderies are producing. Obviously sweet mead is popular.

But I'll hold by my statement that everyone I've ever talked to that had tried mead said the same thing: too sweet. Now, this isn't a huge cross section of people, we're talking maybe 30 or 40 people have said this to me (shows how few have even tried the stuff), but still, 100% said the same thing. The only person I ever met who'd had a chance to try a dry mead had made it themself. (Note, that when I say "everyone" or "only person" and such, I'm leaving out anyone on this forum or from the Mazer Cup, I'm just talking about people I've talked to about mead in my brew club and friends/family/etc)

Also, please bear in mind that I'm up here in Canada, where our selection of mead is much lower than the US. I'm not intending to slam sweet meads at all, just reporting what I've heard!

So I'll stand by my opinion that there simply needs to be more high quality dry (or even off-dry) meads out there for the rest of the people who don't like the sweet sweet stuff. I don't think sweet mead is a problem, I think the problem is that too many people think it's the only option.

Another issue is simply labelling, I've seen a lot of meads that make no mention of whether they're dry, sweet, inbetween, etc. And some of them seem to not understand what "dry" means, I've had some fairly sweet meads that were labeled as dry. Many meaderies are doing a great job of making this clearer for the public though, and I think this is essential.

So yeah, my main things are proper labelling (make all the sweet mead you can sell, just let me know it's sweet before I buy it!) and at least some expanded availability of good quality drier meads to show people that mead doesn't have to be sweet.

Definitely don't want to offend anyone!
 
AToE said:
So I'll stand by my opinion that there simply needs to be more high quality dry (or even off-dry) meads out there for the rest of the people who don't like the sweet sweet stuff. I don't think sweet mead is a problem, I think the problem is that too many people think it's the only option.
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Couldn't of said it better myself.
 
I think the biggest issue for most folks is what some folks refer to as flabbiness - sweetness without balancing acidity or tannic astringency. AKA: Cloying.

Acidity is what makes great dessert wines inviting. All of the wines I mentioned earlier finish with a "thwack." Curt Stock is great at nailing that with his fantastic black currant meads, and it is what makes THoD seem far less sweet than it is. Lack of acidity is a big issue in many sweet traditional meads which do not have acidity or crank from fruit or other components kicking you in the pants on the way past. If that is what y'all's friends are objecting to, I have to agree. That imbalance will prevent mead from gaining much cred with the wine critic set, who will (rightly) blast overly sweet mead with no mercy.

I judged dry meads both days at the Mazer Cup. While there were very good entries in both camps, there were more good entries in the amateur competition than in pro. Some of that may come down to the fact that amateur meadmakers have access to excellent honey in quantities scaled just nicely to their production, but commercial meaderies may not have the same options. Good honey is critical to good dry mead, as what is left after you strip the sugar away is the character that the nectar source, and to some extent the fermentation, provides. In all instances, any unappealing component that may have been hidden by the sweetness is now front and center. shaking a tail feather. It is the equivalent of what brewers of light lagers call "naked brewing." You need to pair that honey with a yeast that will highlight the pallet of aromatics and flavors that the variety brings to the game, and there is scant research to make all that clear to meadmakers, commercial or amateur.

These hills can be climbed. If we really want to build this dynamo to the heights we think it can reach, we all have work to do. Pete and I have already been discussing an idea to initiate collaborative efforts to help the hobby/industry in that regard. Let's let him catch his breath for a couple of weeks, and then we'll drop that news.

KDS
 
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