Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/670021
w w w. v w m m e d i a . c o m M a y - J u n e 2 016 | V I N E YA R D & W I N E RY M A N A G E M E N T 8 3 is "The Mead of Poetry," aged in oak for as long as 16 years. Says Faul,"There's nothing like it in America, if not the world. Thank goodness I thought to start aging mead back when I did!" San Francisco Mead Company San Francisco, Calif. In 2010, owner Oron Benary and his wife, Sarah, got involved with mead as investors and opera- tors in a commercial meadery in Columbus, Ohio, which had fizzled. That year, they moved from San Francisco to Ohio, rebooted the business (called Brothers Drake Meadery) and it's now a popular operation making 13 kinds of mead. They returned to California in 2013 to make a go of a second opera- tion. Oron makes strictly 100% dry meads (with the exception of his Apple Pie), with no residual sugar or added sulfites, bottling them in 375 mL and 750 mL formats with corks. He sources from sustainably man- aged hives in Ojai, the Mendocino forests and the Sonoma Coast. He purchases 30,000 pounds of honey yearly for the San Francisco opera- tion and estimates it took 10 million bees to produce all the mead cur- rently resting in his tanks. Benary's meads are aged for up to two years before release: much like wine and very unlike the rapidly produced, quick-to-market meads of most producers. "I can't even drink most commercial meads," Benary, a wine and craft beer lover, says. "They're just too sweet." He ages some of his meads in wine barrels. He has a blackberry mead in a Pinot Noir barrel and a dry Gravenstein apple cyser in a funky white wine barrel that, he says, is really more like an apfel- wein (common in Germany). Most of his meads are between 13% and 14% alcohol and priced between $20 and $40. He feels many meads are overpriced and aims to keep his more like wine. His "Bourbon Barrel Apple Pie" mead, aged in bourbon barrels, is a top seller. Through his weekly pour- ings at Whole Foods, he's seeing great interest in mead on the part of the Year by the American Home- brewers Association. When they met up and Schramm tasted Pfeiffer's mead, the light went on. "Whoa! That's really deli- cious!" Schramm remembers say- ing. The advice he got from Pfeiffer on yeast and nutrients totally trans- formed his mead making. A number of other brewers and mead makers, mostly University of Michigan professors, began to meet regularly to compare notes. A competitive lot, they eventually created the Mazer Cup Mead Com- petition, named for the bejeweled chalices from which mead was con- sumed during the Middle Ages. S c h r a m m a n d U n i v e r s i t y o f Michigan research microbiologist, of wine drinkers, who can relate to his drier style. But, he says, "Craft beer folks know mead, but not my type of mead!" Schramm's Mead Ferndale, Mich. Mead maker, meadery owner, author and lecturer Ken Schramm has become "the godfather of mead." He's a farmer with 50 kinds of apple trees in his backyard and a connoisseur of the best cherries and honey he can find. He started out as a homebrewer who thought he was pretty good at mead until he called up a fellow Michigan mead maker, Bill Pfeiffer, who'd just been named 1985 Mead Maker San Francisco Mead Company offers 100% dry meads almost exclusively. Book author and mead maker Ken Schramm (left) makes meads with stories behind them.