Tag: <span>mead</span>

Tag: mead

Brewing

Local Meads

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A local meadery, Haymaker Meadery, decided to run a fun competition among local beekeepers across three counties.   The idea was that beekeepers from Philadelphia, Chester, and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania would bring in honey from their beehives which would then be turned into three separate meads using only honey from each individual county.   They collected the honey in August 2017 and in February 2018, the meads were finished, bottled, and ready to be tasted and judged.

Since I make mead at home as well, I was pretty psyched to be a part of this and rustled up two jars of honey to participate.   Each 2.5 lbs of honey is returned to the beekeeper in the form of a bottle of mead which is a pretty great trade!   Plus, participants also received a discount on purchases during the judging day.

The honey in the photo above is late Summer honey from my hives, so it’s darker than its earlier Spring counterpart.   As part of Chester County’s mead, the final product was indeed the darker of the three meads, so I have to imagine I wasn’t the only one bringing in fresh, late summer honey that was probably mostly clover-based.   After judging, the winner was declared to be Montgomery County’s mead, a lighter mead reminiscent of a Riesling with a touch of lemon and floral notes.   I’ll hand it to Montgomery County bees and beeks – they really put together some lovely honey to create a great mead.   I mean, they’re all good, and I was hard-pressed to pick a favorite since they all have their merits, but it was neat to see that even a matter of 10 or 20 miles could create honeys so different and as a result, meads that were so different.   Haymaker Meadery is looking to start another round of county-specific meads this year on Mead Day in August of 2018, so beekeepers, be sure to set aside some honey to participate this year!   It’s exciting to see your honey made into a professional mead, and getting to chat with other area beekeepers while sipping on delicious meads at judging day is a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.   There may still be bottles of these three available at Haymaker, so I’d definitely suggest visiting the shop and trying some truly local flavor!

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 10b

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Still another catchup post, but I think as of next week I’ll be back on track.  This week, even though the husband was home, I contributed a good bit!  We have a basil plant that’s gone wild and before it bolted, I thought I’d gather up the basil and put it to good use as basil pasta and pesto.  I blenderized the basil with some whey leftover from a batch of cheese the husband made earlier that week, olive oil, and a small amount of non-local pine nuts, then combined that mixture with flour to make the pasta (1 cup flour to 1/4 cup liquid).  The meatballs were part veal, part pork with onions, chives, basil, and some salt and pepper, baked in the oven.  Then grilled zucchini and a cucumber salad finish the meal along with a glass of mead (technically a pyment) from the Sap House Meadery in New Hampshire.  Okay, that’s not entirely local, but it did follow us home from vacation and didn’t take a special trip to get here, so I’ll allow it!

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For something special this dinner, we made dessert with leftover milk from the waffles last meal, honey, and raspberries from the bush in the yard.  Paired it with a raspberry mead from Moonlight Meadery (another followed-us-home mead from New Hampshire).  It was the perfect end to a lovely evening!

Ingredients:
Zucchini – Clover Hill Farm
Basil – My Garden
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Equinox
Ground Veal – Birchrun Hills
Ground Pork – Countrytime Farm
Cucumbers – Clover Hill Farm
Onion – Clover Hill Farm
Flour – Whole Wheat Pastry Flour, Mill at Anselma
Milk Camphill Kimberton
Honey Baues’ Busy Bees
Raspberries – Our Yard
Raspberry Mead –  Moonlight Meadery
Pyment  –  Sap House Meadery
Non Local – Pine nuts, salt, pepper, olive oil, homemade vinegar

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 16

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Oh yes, it’s crock pot season!  The husband is a master of the crock pot and always manages to work up meals that blend perfectly together in that steamy cauldron of good cooking.  It’s funny, crock pot meals never tend to look all that appealing, but you can be sure my mouth was watering for the last two hours of cooking because the whole house smelled amazing!  Starting with a base of apple cider from our local orchard, husband added a Pork Loin Roast to the pot and topped that with cabbage, apples, onions, a little maple syrup, salt and pepper, and a little dried mustard powder.  Such easy prep for such amazing results.  By the end of the six hours, the pork had become incredibly tender, the cabbage simmered down, and the apple cider had infused its way into everything.  Add to that a little bread (not entirely local, but from a local bakery), a chunk of cheese, and some delicious Hopped Blueberry Mead from a Meadery in New Hampshire, and we had a great fall dinner.

Ingredients:
Pork Loin Roast – Countrytime Farm
Onions – Hoagland Farms
Cabbage – Jack’s Farm
Tomme Mole Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Bread – St. Peter’s Bakery
Cider – North Star Orchard
Apples – Grandparents House (tons of apple trees!)
Mead – Sap House Meadery
Non Local – Vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard powder

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 15

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And now we’re surpassing the goal of 14 with ease!  I think this is the best attempt at cooking Bison Ribs the husband has ever had.  They’re a little tricky being much lower in fat and need to be cooked low and slow.  The ribs were back ribs and were put in the smoker with apple wood, cooked for about 4 hours resulting in DELICIOUS ribs.  On the side we have those popular corn fritters, a grilled peach with melted blue cheese, and a bowl in the back with tomatoes from the garden, a sprig of basil, and some local cheese.  The wine is a homemade mead made partially with cherries I picked in Maryland and was a great match to the rest of dinner.

Ingredients:
Bison Ribs – Backyard Bison
Corn – Brogue Hydroponics
Peaches – North Star Orchard
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Peppers – Neighbor’s garden (we share!)
Blue Cheese and Equinox Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Tomatoes – Our Garden
Basil – Our Garden
Non Local – Wine, spices, olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 3

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Another One Local Summer meal, shared with the same friend from the prior post!  Yep, two in one week, and it was really easy to put together.  I had a ton of salad greens in the fridge, so I put the other vegetables in a foil packet on the grill with the zucchini and we had a REALLY filling salad.  Dear friend was enjoying the zucchini so much that she was sneaking the ‘small’ pieces off the grill before they were even cooked.  She may or may not have been swatted at with the grill tongs.  All that, paired with a glass of homebrewed ginger mead, and it was quite the nice dinner outside on the patio!

Ingredients:
Zucchini – Jack’s Farm
Broccoli – North Star Orchard
Fennel – Charlestown Farm
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Garlic Scapes – Jack’s Farm
Lettuce – Charlestown Farm
Non Local – Salad Dressing

Brewing

A Tale of Two Meads

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MEAD!  When husband got into homebrewing beer, he made a batch of mead that came out really spectacular – won awards even!  When I saw how much less time-consuming it was than brewing beer, and tasted how good the results were, I stepped up and proclaimed myself as the household MEADSTRESS because awesome name, and then we could share in his  new hobby.  A bunch of years later, here we are, still brewing beer and making mead.  I’ve definitely gotten better (scored a 2nd place with an agave mead in the local Valhalla competition a few years ago), and here are my two latest attempts  – a Double Cherry Mead and a Ginger Mead.

Just the basics up here, recipes/details below the jump!  I’ve just finished Quality Assurance testing these two, so pardon spelling errors and any boozed-up-exuberance  🙂

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DSC_7503		 Double Cherry Mead  (left in the photo)
Double cherry, technically a melomel, was a combination of 4 quarts of Trader Joe’s Red Tart Cherry Juice and 2lbs of Yellow Cherries picked from a local orchard, frozen a few years back.  I picked SO many at the time because a friend and I went and we were gabbing away, filling up out buckets and before I knew it, BUCKET OF CHERRIES.  After a batch of jam and eating a ton of fresh cherries, I just didn’t know what to do with them all and stuffed them in bags in the freezer.  So hey, why not add them to mead?  The resulting mead didn’t really clear (probably a pectin haze), so it wouldn’t be able to go to competition like that, but I don’t really mind so much because it tastes SO great.  The tart juice adds a nice bite, and the whole cherries add this sort of earthy, warm character to it and keep it from tasting like cherry cough syrup.  That glass in the front is REALLY hazy only because it was the dregs at the bottom of the carboy.  The bottle in the back has already cleared a good bit and collected some sediment at the bottom.  19 wine bottles total from this 5 gallon batch.  I’m fighting the urge to drain one tonight.  Mead went from ingredients to bottle in one year!

Ginger Mead  (on the right)
HOOBOY.  I wasn’t sure this was even going to work at all.  I started out with WAY too little honey in the mead in May 2011.  It sat, ruminated, and went wrong for two years before I checked it in April 2013.  It was .. off.  Dry, but not a good dry, very little ginger character, and the alcohol content was WAY too low.  I figured it could be saved, so I added more honey and a buttload of ginger, repitched the yeast, and crossed my fingers.  Well, two pounds of ginger later, I have a winner.  Ginger tickles the nose and gently dances across  the tongue without burning.  It really is JUST the right blend of ginger and honey to be sweet without cloying, spicy without hurting.  It cleared VERY nicely – all the ginger dropped to the bottom.  Some of the grated ginger slipped into the bottles, but I figure that can’t hurt too much.  Ended up with 16 wine bottles, 11 beer bottles (with sugar added for carbonation), and 3 of the 22oz bottles (also carbonated).  I added plain brown sugar for carbonation (about 1/4 tsp per bottle) which isn’t the best way to do it, I know, but we’re not going for scientific here.  This is just a test to see how it turns out.  The big inspiration for this batch was to make a carbonated mead that was like alcoholic ginger beer.  If the carbonated bottles turn out well, I’ll do another batch and carbonate the whole thing properly with a bucket and priming sugar and all that jazz.  We’re affectionately calling this the Red-Headed Stepchild, and I even got confirmation from a red-headed stepchild that this name is wildly appropriate.

 

And now the jump, read on for more details about the recipes and brewing.

Continue reading“A Tale of Two Meads”

Brewing

Brew Day

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It was a multiple brew day.  Whew!  For a little background, the husband started homebrewing a few years ago and I started a batch or two of mead this year.  I was surprised and thrilled when my Agave Mead won 2nd place out of 31 entries in its category and things have taken off from there.

Every year, the homebrew club does a competition called the Iron Brewer based on the second runnings from a brew pub’s Barley Wine.  Everyone starts with the same wort from the second runnings and adds only one pound of fermentables (steeping whatever you can dream up) and then in a few months, the brewers at the pub judge the entries.  Last year, the husband was around and did the competition, but he isn’t in town for pick-up day this year, so I stepped up and said that we should do a team effort brew so that we can still take advantage of this awesome opportunity.  Having tasted a really great Saison at the same local brew pub, I asked if we could do a Saison (French farmhouse ale) using the wort and the husband said it was possible.  I went and picked up my bucket of wort (from 100% Weyermann Pilsner grain) and lugged it home today.  I’ve never brewed beer before – just mead – so I’ve had a bit of help from the husband.  He ground up the malt I brought home yesterday and even got a yeast starter ready for me as well as helped with directions so that I could do everything today while he’s out of town.  I managed to lug the 5 gallons of wort up the stairs and fill the brew pot and get the pot on the stove without spilling anything.  Steeped the malts, added the Sterling hops at boil and then the Saaz for the last 15 minutes, going by a recipe I had found online.  Ran the wort chiller and got the temperature down, drained it into a carboy and pitched in the yeast.  Everything went well and there were no disasters!  Granted, I still don’t know much about brewing beer since I was mostly following directions, but it will be fun to see how it comes out (and have a finished product in less than three months!).

Since I had all the equipment out and ready to go, I figured I’d do a few other things since I had the time.  There was a prickly pear agave mead and a mesquite honey mead that refused to clear (in well over 6 months), so I hit them both with a little sparkalloid and hopefully they’ll finally clear out.  Then it was on to brew another batch of mead.  This one is a modification of the last agave mead with less agave and a 1 liter container of passion fruit juice added.  I was looking to add a little more acid and a little less sugar overall.  It should work out well, but you just never know.

So, that’s it for today.  I feel pretty productive!  Hopefully I’ll be finishing up a pair of socks I’ve been test knitting and will have details of that coming up in the next post.