“I was at Charlie Papazian’s house one evening, and he pulled out a bottle of his prickly pear mead,” says David Myers who owns Redstone Meadery in Boulder, Colorado. “That’s how it all got started.”
Myers made a lot of mead in the nineties with Paul Gatza, current director of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA). The aspiring mead maker was an assistant manager for the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup on the competition side. He recalls the days in Boulder, Colorado, when the AHA was just getting started.
With the help of this homebrew network, Myers discovered one of the secrets to his homemade mead’s success. He brewed two batches of mead—one with liquid ale yeast and another with Narbonne, a wine yeast that he says is good for young, fruity wines. Then he walked through the AHA offices with both meads, asking each staff member which one he or she preferred. “Everyone preferred the Narbonne yeast,” says Myers.
In 2000, Myers considered opening a brew pub on the Colorado Front Range. “I really wanted to be in the alcohol business,” he remembers. “But I was watching this craft-beverage movement take off—saké had a resurgence, the tequila shelf filled up—and I thought mead would have a real opportunity on the market. I already had about thirty-five carboys of mead fermenting in my house, so I decided it was time to skip the Olympics and go pro.”
Instead of a brew pub, Myers opened Redstone Meadery in Boulder, modeling his production facility after a craft brewery. “We’re very [much like a] brewery other than not having a mash tun,” he says.
Redstone’s pasteurization system for its mead involves a stainless-steel kettle that is heated to 180°F (82°C) before the honey is added. The heat is shut off before the honey addition, which drops the kettle down to 160°F (71°C). “And then after that it really is a brewing process,” Myers explains. “We use a heat exchanger to cool off [the mead], we force oxygen to get fermentation started, we have jacketed fermentors, and we infuse fruits and spices.”
Most of Redstone Meadery’s honey comes from Colorado and Arizona. “Just like different malts make different beer, different honeys make different honey beers,” says Myers, “so where the bees have been matters a lot in the flavor profile. For example, when you get citrusy notes you can tell the bees have been out in an orange grove.”
Honey is a highly fermentable sugar, Myers explains, so when left to itself, honey will ferment down to zero sugar content. “In beer you have fermentable malts, which give alcohol content, and you have your unfermentable malts, so there’s your sweetness,” he says. “You could make a mead that’s totally, completely bone-dry with zero sweetness. The only problem is you’ll have zero flavor because all the honey has been converted. One of the biggest challenges in making mead is making dry meads that still retain enough flavor from the honey.”
Redstone achieves the balance between sweet and dry in the mead by crashing fermentation when the mead has reached the desired sweetness and alcohol content. “Everything we make starts a little sweeter but ends drier. It has that dynamic that adds another layer and texture to Redstone meads,” Myers says.
The sweet-starting, dry-finishing meads at Redstone come as three different product lines: Nectars, Mountain Honey Wines, and Reserve Series.
The Nectar series is a line of carbonated, low-alcohol meads meant to be served cold. “Low-alcohol” in mead is a relative term, as these meads weigh in at about 8 percent ABV. The series, which ferments with Narbonne yeast, includes the flagship Black Raspberry Nectar, the Sunshine Nectar apricot mead, Boysenberry Nectar, Mango Nectar, and the hopped mead, Nectar of the Hops. “When we opened 13 years ago, nobody was making low-alcohol, carbonated meads,” Myers says. “Now, of course, they are the norm in the market, and draft mead is much more common.”
The Redstone Nectar series is kegged, bottled, and even canned. The advantage to canned mead, besides a smaller package and consumer savings, says Myers (tongue firmly planted in cheek): “You can shotgun it.”
Redstone’s second product line, the Mountain Honey Wines, is fermented with French wine yeast to 12 percent ABV and bottled still. These meads are similar in body to many red or white grape wines. The line includes the Vanilla Beans and Cinnamon Sticks Mountain Honey Wine and the Juniper Mountain Honey Wine. “I was never clever as a homebrewer,” Myers jokes. “I always named what I made. So other than the Sunshine Nectar, none of our products have fanciful names—they are exactly what we say they are.”
The Vanilla Beans and Cinnamon Sticks is Myers’ winter solstice mead. “This is the one true seasonal mead that we have. We make it on December 21; it sells the following October until we run out,” he says.
“Coincidentally the second mead I made was the Juniper,” says Myers about another Mountain Honey Wine, which is made with gin and tonics in mind. “We use orange-blossom honey because we need citrus notes in a good gin and tonic,” says Myers. “And desert-blossom honey that is mesquite-y and earthy, which I think is much like gin. And then oak to round it all out.”
The third line of Redstone Meads is the Redstone Reserve series. These port-like meads age for five to six years before hitting the market. “This one is 10 years old,” Myers says about a bottle of Black Raspberry Reserve (see recipe). “It’s port-like and very jam-y. I like it as a post-dessert drink with cheese and fruit.” No two Redstone Reserve Series meads are the same, Myers explains. “We make them because we can.”
Redstone produces about 26,000 gallons (or 850 barrels of beer) each year and uses 2.5 to 3 tons of honey each month, proof alone for Myers’s hunch that mead would make a resurgence (not to mention the 200+ craft meaderies operating in the United States to date). “When we started making mead, nobody had heard of it,” he says. “Today with the education, the pushing, the talking, and the press—at least fourteen or fifteen people have heard of mead.”
All of Myers’ jokes aside, mead is indeed making a name for itself on a national scale. “What people are realizing about mead is that it’s not a singular beverage that’s always heavy, sweet, and thick. Mead is a wide-ranging beverage—it can be dry or sweet, sparkling or still, high alcohol or low alcohol,” says Myers. “Since I’ve been saying for 13 years that it’s coming back, it’s nice that it’s actually coming back.”
Mead + Beer Blends
Myers regularly creates mead and beer blends with his friends in the craft-beer industry. Here are five of his experiments.
Veritas 002
dark ale + Flemish ale + black raspberry mead
Port Brewing Company’s Old Viscosity Dark Strong Ale (San Marcos, California) + Lost Abbey Sour Flemish Ale (San Marcos, California) straight from the barrel + Redstone’s Black Raspberry Nectar
Meadusa
white lager + orange blossom honey mead
Shmaltz Brewing Company’s Coney Island Albino Python (Clifton Park, New York) + Redstone’s Traditional Mountain Honey Wine
Black Hefe
wheat beer + black raspberry mead
Dry Dock Brewing Company’s Hefeweizen (Aurora, Colorado) + Restone’s Black Raspberry Nectar
Red Stonewall Stout
English-style stout + spiced mead
Nickel Beer Company’s Stonewall Stout (Julian, California) + Redstone’s Vanilla Bean and Cinnamon Sticks Mountain Honey Wine
Black Folie
sour brown ale + black raspberry mead
New Belgium’s La Folie (Fort Collins, Colorado & Asheville, North Carolina) + Restone’s Black Raspberry Nectar