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Mead
Mead Day was declared by the American Homebrew Association in 2002 as the day to celebrate the making and drinking of our favorite beverage, Mead! Mead Day takes place on the first Saturday in August. Since we didn’t start making mead as home mead makers until 2004, we heard about it a few years after it’s inception. We started celebrating with our friends…
Now, as we venture into the cider industry, we’re finding a similar level of friendship and assistance there too. Last week, Ben and I, plus Ethan and Erin (the production team), and their spouses traveled down to James Creek Cider House in Cameron to discuss cider and all things cider making. Ann Marie and David were so welcoming…
Some of you may have heard that we purchased Chatham Cider Works in January from its original owners, Maureen and Jim. This month, we finally have our first ciders, produced at Starrlight Mead, on tap and in bottles ready for your enjoyment.
Maureen and Jim approached us back in November and said they were moving out of the area and asked if we were interested in purchasing Chatham Cider Works (CCW). Our first reaction was an emphatic NO!
We see a lot of people each year in our tasting room. Many of them come to see what mead is all about. Some come to see the Mead Hall we’ve built. Most of them come to do a tasting. Many people are curious about mead, having never had it before, others have a long-time love affair with mead. Some are nervous about doing a tasting.
What if I don’t like it? What if it’s too sweet?
We love showing people what makes mead amazing and are always happy to answer questions. Especially, how do I do a tasting? Do I have to spit it in the bucket? What’s up with swirling?
Here at Starrlight Mead, we teach the 3 S’s of wine/mead tasting (others will teach anywhere from 5 to 7 steps!): Swirl, Sniff, Sip.
Swirling the mead in your glass isn’t just to make you look pretentious, there’s actually a method to our madness! The easiest way to swirl is to leave your glass on a table or counter, hold the stem like a pencil, and go around in circles like you are drawing on the table. This should rotate the wine without sloshing all over.
Try this experiment – pour a small amount of wine/mead in your glass just out of the bottle. Give it a sniff. You’ll get some aromas, but not much usually. Then give it a swirl and smell it again. You should get a lot more aromas from your wine/mead.
Swirling opens up the “bouquet” – the aromas of the mead and allows you to smell more of the good things to come.
Where you can only taste 5 basic qualities, the human nose can smell over 1 trillion different scents! If you don’t smell what you are eating (think about the last time you had a stuffy nose!), your food doesn’t taste right. That’s because what we smell informs our brain of how something is going to taste. Sniffing your mead gives your brain a head’s up about how it might taste.
Smell your mead gently as if you are smelling a flower. Breathe in deeply and gently.
Take a sip of your mead. Make sure you get enough in your mouth to swish it around and get to all your taste buds involved in the fun. Then take a second sip! Often, the first sip is mixing with whatever flavors you had in your mouth before the sip – water, crackers, coffee. The second sip is a much better indication of how it’s really tastes to you.
Fun fact – we have had meads that taste completely different on the second sip! You are missing out if you throw it all back at once. Anyone remember the Current Mead?
Some tastings will suggest Slurping as a way to pull air through the wine. Ben can do this. I, Becky, end up coughing and choaking when I try! Give it a try… or not!
Anna Haddock photographer
The question of spitting – if you are out enjoying a mead tasting, you do not need to spit. If you are judging a competition or trying a lot of different meads at one sitting, you might want to spit to keep yourself from getting too drunk or judging the meads unfairly at the end.
These steps help you to get the full experience of the mead, but when it comes right down to it, you can taste your mead any way you’d like.
Hello everyone! Ben, here. I have taken over the blogpost this month.
I was looking at a calendar and realized that I will turn 60 next year on December 7th. I decided I wanted to do something to celebrate with my closest friends and, well, my closest friends just happen to be Mead Club members! I decided I wanted to make something special to share with you.
As many of you may know, I love all types of drinks. I have been heard to say that my favorite drink is whatever is in a glass in front of me! I do love a good aggressive red wine. I also like an assertive IPA. One of my favorite drinks this time of year is a full-flavored Imperial milk stout style. These tend to have lots of coffee and dark chocolate flavors from the type of malts they use. They can also be very creamy. And, if you didn't already guess, they can be a little boozy too (typically 10 to 12% ABV). So, I decided to make a mead in this style. As I started to put together the recipe, I realized this was going to take a long time to make. To get some of these flavors, I would need to age this mead.
So, I decided to start this brew this year on my birthday, When I told Diane from Honeygirl Meadery about this, she was very excited about it, so she is coming down to Pittsboro to help. We decided we'd live stream creating it on Facebook and Instagram, so we'd have a record of it.
I'm only making 15 gallons, so we won't be bottling it. I've posted my recipe for it here; in case you were curious. Join me next year to celebrate my 60th and enjoy a glass with me. Hold the date, December 7, 2023 is when we will launch this mead and it will be available by the glass until we run out.
Cheers to Ben’s 60th Birthday!
Welcome Fall! We love when the cooler weather shows up because that means it’s Spiced Apple Season! Spiced Apple is our bestselling mead year-round, but so many people say it reminds them of fall or the holidays that we have to make double batches of it just to keep up.
Do you know the story of this favorite beverage?
If you’ve ever been to Pittsboro, there’s a good chance you’ve visited our neighbors over at Carolina Tiger Rescue. Year after year, they rank as the number one thing to do when visiting Pittsboro. Our staff’s favorite tour is the twilight tour during the warmer months when the lions are often “singing” to each other. (You must make a reservation to visit the animals.)
We are having some fun this year making all kinds of new flavors of session meads. What’s a session mead, you ask? That’s a good question!
We started making session meads a couple of years ago with two favorites, Auriga (“Moscow mule – lime and ginger) and Little Dipper (dark cherry and spices). Everyone seemed to really like these, so they have become our standard flavors and are available on tap and in bottles most of the time.
Recently I asked Ben how he comes up with new flavors to try:
Who doesn’t love a good festival? It’s magical being at a festival because you can enjoy food, vendors, and entertainment that you don’t normally see and pretend that the “real” world doesn’t exist, at least for the day. But what does it take to practically pack up a tasting room and move it off site to pour mead at one of these events? More planning than you probably expect!
It’s the month of love and roses… and chocolate! So of course, we’re wanting to pair our meads with chocolate, because that’s what you do, right?
Each year, we do a Mead and Chocolate pairing, and people love it. Ok, it might be the FREE CHOCOLATE. Or it could be that just like wine and chocolate, mead and chocolate are a great combo.
I love the holidays! I feel like a little kid looking at the lights, basking in the smells of baking treats, singing along to songs I only get to hear one time of the year, and marveling at the joy of it all. Sublime!
But then comes the shopping! Ugh!
Somewhere in the frenzy of finding just the right gift for EVERYONE, I get crazed and lose the joy of the season. The crowds and pressure get to me and then it’s just not fun any longer.
Hoping to save you from the crazy of it all, here are a few suggestions of unique gifts that you can find at the meadery…
Tuesday, August 29th, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper proclaimed September 2017 as “NC Wine and Grape Month.” A fitting month to celebrate North Carolina’s amazing, and rapidly growing, wine industry, as most of NC’s grape harvest is brought in during the month of September. With over 180 wineries and 525 commercial grape growers, the wine industry contributes 1.7 billion dollars (with a “B”) to the state economic impact. An industry with a long history that deserves celebrating!
The official proclamation signed by Gov. Cooper for "NC Wine and Grape Month"
Of course, we over here at one of the state’s HONEY wineries, can’t fail to notice that it is also National Honey Month! Proclaimed in 1989 by the USDA, assisted by the National Honey Board, National Honey Month is a month to celebrate our favorite little pollinator friends and the luscious, golden nectar that they create. (Check out the Honey Board’s website for tons of ideas and fantastic recipes for your own celebration! And if you haven’t signed up for their recipe newsletter, I would highly recommend it!)
A coincidence, that these two months coincide, you ask? I think not! Or, as Gov. Cooper would write:
WHEREAS, National Honey Month and NC Wine and Grape Month are celebrated during the same month; and
WHEREAS, mead is wine made from honey; and
WHEREAS, mead is the oldest fermented beverage;
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BECKY STARR, Head Mead Wench of Starrlight Mead, do hereby proclaim September 2017, as “NC Mead Appreciation Month” and commend its observance to all citizens.
There, that should take care of it, don’t you think?
