Time for your weekly Thursday Fun Fact!

Disclaimer: All Thursday Fun Facts are culled from millennia of texts as well as random statements around the internet and they are also made up. They are only facts in the loosest sense of the word (or possibly not at all). Please note the dearth of citations.

When our Head Meadmaker Ricky graduated from Middlebury College, a classmate delivered the following toast: “I was going to write something myself, then I found this, and I think it says it all: May you always have old books to read, old wood to burn, old wine to drink, and old friends to share them all with. Cheers!”

Everyone likes a good book, and old wood is better because it’s drier. Old friends are great because if they’ve put up with you this long, they’re probably not going to quit now. But, what really makes old wine special? We’re sorry to inform you that, alas, nobody knows exactly.

The process goes by many names: bulk aging, bottle aging, mellowing, and secondary fermentation, to name but a few. This is the time after fermentation has completed and our mead is just sitting around waiting. No bubbles, no swirling yeast, no dramatic pH changes, no change in alcohol content, nothing that would tell the casual observer that we are witnessing a mystery of modern chemistry, but boy are we!

A chemical engineer working for Chaddsford Winery put it best, “People always ask me what exactly is going on in the tanks behind me here. I wish I could tell them, but there are 112 known compounds in this Pinot Noir here, and that’s just the known ones. That means that there are 112 Factorial potential interactions. That’s a 2 followed by 182 zeroes. And I repeat, that’s only the known compounds.” Mead is no simpler, a recent article from the Lithuanian Institute of Agriculture identified 93 volatile compounds in honey, not to mention dozens more previously known. [1]

Even the most commonly cited advantage of aging mead, reducing the harsh alcohol flavors, is not fully understood. Young meads (also wines and high alcohol content beers) are referred to as “hot” because of the burning experience one gets from the alcohol. Yet, without any change in alcohol content, a year or two in the bottle can almost completely eliminate this heat. The most common answer – that fusel alcohols break down – very well may not be true. [2]

Does this mean that we have to throw our hands up in despair and call it magic? Absolutely not! Through experimentation and research, meadmakers  – professionals and homebrewers alike –  have discovered numerous, reliable, replicable ways to make mead. It’s right on that beautiful line between science and art. Unless, of course, you’re at a Renaissance Faire, in which case it is magic and we'll drink to that! Cheers!

Update 4/19/2018: The folks over at Wine Turtle just sent us a link to a comprehensive piece they wrote on the oldest wineries on earth, check it out: www.wineturtle.com/oldest-wine-companies/

Time for your weekly Thursday Fun Fact!

Myth: Before the reworking of the SAT in 2005, there was an analogy question which read: Caterpillars are to Butterflies as Honey is to ___________. The correct answer was “Mead.”
Fact: Nope, actually just made that up right now. But, it would have been awesome, right?

Disclaimer: All Thursday Fun Facts are culled from millennia of texts as well as random statements around the internet and they are also made up. They are only facts in the loosest sense of the word (or possibly not at all). Please note the dearth of citations.

A little while back we gave you the secret formula to every mead ever made. Well, sort of. Mead, in its simplest form, is nothing more than honey, water, and yeast. Honey obviously comes from bees and water comes from a lot of places, but where does yeast come from?

Well, for many meaderies yeast comes in a sterilized plastic container from a reputable company with an excellent track record of low infection rates. But that’s like saying that dogs come from the pet store (which would have made the very excellent Nova documentary Dogs Decoded much shorter). However, since yeast is one of the three essential ingredients for mead making, we’ll dig a little deeper.

It is estimated that yeast comprises 1% of all fungal species on the planet.[1] It is found floating in the air, nestled on the skin of fruit, hanging out on the human body, and a trillion other places. In addition to these wild strains, there are cultivated strains primarily derived from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and also to a much lesser extent from Saccharomyces bayanus and Brettanomyces.[2] Each has its own nuances and raison d'être.

With thousands of species described and hundreds of strains available, how do we know which one to use? For our purposes, the primary function of yeast is to turn sugar into alcohol, carbon dioxide, and a few other components (fermentation), at a known rate (attenuation), in the high alcohol environment of mead (alcohol tolerance), then get the heck out of the way (flocculation).

At Groennfell Meadery, we prefer a dry mead strain. Using the terms above, this means that we like a yeast that: Ferments cleanly with very little ester or phenol production, has a very high attenuation and alcohol tolerance, and also a high rate of flocculation to produce a bright, pretty mead. To make sense of this, let’s take another common yeast strain to see how it stacks up. Hefeweizen Yeast ferments with a very high level of ester and phenol production with medium attenuation, low alcohol tolerance, and extremely low flocculation. This is why a good hefeweizen is slightly sweet with a distinctive banana and clove flavor; it rarely if ever has a high alcohol content, and is as cloudy as a London morning. 

Just imagine if we used a porter yeast instead of a dry mead yeast! But we don’t. So now you know our secret formula. (Except for our honey source, how we treat our water, our fermentation conditions, our aging regimen, and our stabilization process.)

Time for your weekly Thursday Fun Fact!

Myth: Mead has to be aged approximately forever before it’s any good.
Fact: Some meads do take years, others can be ready in only a few weeks. Aging requirements are primarily a function of initial sugar content and final alcohol content.

Disclaimer: All Thursday Fun Facts are culled from millennia of texts as well as random statements around the internet and they are also made up. They are only facts in the loosest sense of the word (or possibly not at all). Please note the dearth of citations.

Hello My Little Vikings,
It’s time for a business update, but instead of dumb ol’ words, it’s a slideshow!

Time for your weekly Thursday Fun Fact!

Fact: Vikings did not invent mead. Mead has been around for a very, very, very long time (probably about 7,000 years at that point). The Vikings just really, really, really liked it.

Disclaimer: All Thursday Fun Facts are culled from millennia of texts as well as random statements around the internet and they are also made up. They are only facts in the loosest sense of the word (or possibly not at all). Please note the dearth of citations.

One of the most common statements we hear about mead is, “I tried Mead once and it was way too sweet for me.” And it’s often true that the first mead many people taste tends to be cloying, viscous stuff with enough alcohol to disinfect a wound. There are, of course, people who like their mead like that. But we have good news for everyone else: It doesn’t have to be that way!

People assume that because mead is made from honey and honey is very sweet that the final product has to be sweet. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. To figure out why this is so, we have to introduce you to our best friend in the whole wide world, our bff, our bosomest of buddies, our inter-speciel soul mate: Saccharomyces cerevisiae who goes by the nickname “Yeast.”

Everything that ferments – whether it is beer, wine, mead, or the myriad other alcoholic beverages – starts out sweet; it’s just a mixture of sugar, water, and flavoring components. When Yeast is invited to the party, it converts that sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

How sweet the final beverage is depends on one thing and one thing only: When the yeast quits. Four things can make Yeast quit and these factors vary from yeast strain to yeast strain. They are:

1. When the yeast runs out of sugar to consume. This may be all of the sugar or only the varieties that Yeast likes to eat. (Yeast tends to be Maltodextrin and Lactose intolerant, but don’t say anything because it’s really sensitive about it.)
   
2. Killing the yeast. Yeast really does not like high temperatures or sulfur dioxide and it ain’t too fond of freezing weather either. If it’s dead, it stops eating (which is also true of humans). 
   
3. The yeast strain’s Alcohol Tolerance. All yeast dies, or at the very least stops doing anything, at a certain level of alcohol (again, also true of humans). This level can range from 8% alcohol by volume all the way up to 24% in some specially formulated strains.
   
4. The yeast strain’s Attenuation. This is, roughly speaking, what percentage of the sugar the yeast will consume. With low attenuation yeast, this means that the more sugar one starts with, the sweeter the final beverage.
   

By selecting how much honey to mix with the water and choosing a particular yeast strain, a meadmaker is able to create beverages with varying alcohol levels and sweetness. Because Groennfell Meadery uses a high attenuating, high alcohol tolerance yeast strain, all of our meads are dry. Why? Because that’s how we like it.