Ask a mead maker how he or she got started, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear a story about Charlie Papazian’s prickly pear mead. For Brad Dahlhofer at B. Nektar Meadery in Ferndale, Michigan, reading about Papazian’s prickly pear mead was all the motivation he needed to get involved. “If anybody could write that poetically about a beverage, then I ought to try it,” the homebrewer-turned-mead maker says about Papazian’s Prickly Pear Cactus Fruit Mead recipe in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.
Dahlhofer compares the transition from homebrewing to mead making to learning to cook. “You can learn to make pasta, but eventually you make a soup and a roast and eventually you start barbecuing.”
B. Nektar, ranked in the top 100 breweries in the world by ratebeer.com for the third year running, is a culinary-focused meadery, explains Dahlhofer who launched the company with his wife in 2008. “We make a lot of meads based on foods we’ve had in the past,” he explains, describing his Cherry Chipotle mead that was inspired by a marinade someone had done with chicken. “Our mead making is the equivalent of fusion cooking,” Dahlhofer says, “in which we shamelessly steal from things that are already good.”