(bees buzzing)
(upbeat music)
- [Jeff] We make something
that no one knows about.
And it's really expensive
to make it and to sell it.
A mead is the most delicious beverage
that you've probably never tried.
(upbeat music)
- [Tyler] You see the honey
mix it in there with the water.
No better way to drink than
get to the source right here.
- [Man] I'm so excited about tasting.
- [Jeff] You know, all your
friends and family will say,
"You know, so many 90%
of small businesses fail
"and all of that."
Well now looking back
like, well no kidding,
it takes a lot to pull this off.
(upbeat music)
Oh wow.
(upbeat music)
It's not beer.
It's not wine.
It's not cider, it's its
own category of beverage.
We have a warehouse in Phoenix,
we have a warehouse in Sweden.
We are sending mead all over the state,
the country in the world but
it's all made right here.
- So basically right now
we're just gonna be re-circulating
this water while we pump in honey,
so it mixes all together till homogenized.
- [Jared] For the recipe,
it's basically like
two parts water to one part honey.
- [Tyler] Alright.
Let me start this big guy
up, he's our honey pump.
This guy does all the
heavy lifting essentially.
So you can see the honey
going through here,
it's gonna be going through this hose
over into a three way valve over there.
And that three way valve is
also pushing water through
as the honey goes through.
So it's mixing it in line,
as well as in the tank while circulating.
So if we just had, you know,
put in a bunch of honey
at the bottom of it,
it will still ferment.
You know, cause it's
gonna eat up that sugar,
but it's gonna be way
too high concentration
of sugars at the bottom
for a healthy fermentation.
So you wanna really get
to that target gravity.
- [Jared] Gravity is a fancy term
for the sugar content basically.
With the recipe that we
have designed for this,
it's designed to ferment to about
13 and a half percent alcohol.
To get to that, we have to start
at a specific sugar
content, a specific gravity.
You can see the honey mixing
in with the Must right here.
It's a it's the winemakers term
for just basically the bare
sugar-water is our Must.
(gentle music)
- Mead is the world's
oldest fermented beverage.
And all of our ancestors no
matter where you're from,
whether it's Europe,
Africa, even Meso-America.
Our ancestors were all enjoying mead.
Honey was really one of
the easiest sugars to get
because nature's making this
beautiful source of honey.
- So this is the honey that we use here.
A lot of honey that you get at the store
is probably rice syrup from China.
You can't really tell the
difference by tasting it.
It's a pretty good imitation,
but fermenting it is very different.
If you're a consumer
buying honey at the store,
you wouldn't know by tasting
it or by looking at it
that it was not real honey.
Buying local, like the
more locally sourced
you can find the honey the better.
- [Tyler] Whether you're
cooking, you're making beer,
you're making wine.
The ingredients are really
what make the product.
Fermentation is very important
for the quality of your ingredients.
And where you source them
from are almost as important
as the work that goes into it.
- [Jeff] Different honeys are
just like different grains,
different hops, different
varietals of wine grapes.
So when you take Arizona Wildflower honey,
or Arizona, Mesquite honey,
or a honey that was extracted from a hive
in the end of the summer,
that almost cooked
and turned dark brown.
All of those different
honeys are gonna wind up
tasting different, not just
as honey but after you ferment
them in a mead.
The bees actually will put that honey
into the honeycomb in the hive.
And they have to dry
out the moisture content
to be below about 18%.
And that will be stable.
So when we talk about
stability and alcohol,
it means that it won't ferment.
So they remove so much
moisture from the nectar
that honey is something that is stable
and will not ferment inside the hive.
If they didn't do that,
the bees will be making mead themselves.
And there are cases in nature
where a beehive in the, you know,
cracks of a tree will become
swamps from a big rainstorm,
and then that'll actually start
with some just ambient heat
dissolve some of that honey and mead
can happen spontaneously in nature.
People knew that there was
something magic going on,
because there was always going to be this
resident East culture sitting
around in those vessels
that were creating alcohol.
And so people all around
the world were making mead.
- I'm gonna prepare the yeast.
And to do that, we need
specific water temperature
and this is coming out at 105 degrees
which is exactly what we need.
So like, if you're making bread,
you normally rise the yeast
in a water that was
about this temperature.
All the water in the building is filtered.
We've got a very large charcoal filter
that filters everything
as the water comes into the building.
So, even the water in
the toilet is filtered.
Alright, so we've got our
two and a half gallons.
And then I need...
675 grams of these nutrients.
It's an Appetit, if you will
for the yeast so that...
it can start chowing down on the honey
we're about to give it.
Quite simply, yeast eat
sugar, creates alcohol.
And that's the basis of all fermentation.
This here is...
It's dry yeast, billions and
billions and billions of cells.
This is going to rehydrate
and get all nice and hungry.
- [Jeff] We get to use
techniques from the wine world
from their craft brewing world
in order to create things
that are truly unique
and like you've never had before.
- [Tyler] So gravity is actually
a measurement of density.
Like the gravity of water is like 1.000.
And so we're measuring
on a scale of like water
to thick water.
So what I'm looking for here is well,
this is like 1.125.
For our purposes, the
density is indicative
of the sugar content.
It can be used for other things as well,
like rocket fuel is also
measured by gravity.
The gravity tells us the sugar content.
And so, with a recipe like this
that we've made many, many times,
we wanna make sure that it's consistent,
and this will become
important as we ferment.
As this ferments, the
gravity will get lower
as the yeast consumes the sugar.
And so, if we take a
measurement in a few days,
this will drop down and down and down
until it's to the point where we wanna
stop the fermentation basically.
- In this process of making mead,
there's a lot of science
that goes into what we do.
And we're looking at the
pH and the gravities.
And the temperatures, and
all these different factors
that go into having a
happy healthy fermentation,
creating the best product we can.
Well then there's the artistic side,
and that's what the Barrel
program here really represents.
The different qualities
that we're gonna get
from the different woods,
the different barrels,
the different way that
they were all treated.
Really put in flavor to what we're doing,
that is sort of magical in the way that
we don't know exactly when this
is gonna be ready to drink.
And it's gonna be different
tomorrow, just a little
than it is today.
And it will definitely be
different in six months
than it is today.
When you cook or toasts the wood,
the lignin that makes up wood,
you can chemically
change lignin to Vinilin.
And Vinilin is the exact same flavor
that you get from a vanilla bean
or that you have in vanilla ice cream.
So, you can get flavors like vanilla,
and even coconut and nutmeg from Oak.
There are so many factors
that can be considered
when it comes to barrel aging.
This is actually a Ruby
Port barrel from Portugal
that we imported.
So...
I'm gonna get this just right.
Now we're taking a sample of
some beautiful raspberry mead,
that's aging in a Port barrel.
(gentle music)
That is something.
So the first thing we wanna do
is evaluate the appearance and the aroma.
And it is just, this
beautiful Garnet red color.
So that's spot on.
And it's just everything
honey and raspberry
bustin out of that nose.
Oh, wow!
Wow!
This is just one of the best
things that we've ever made.
Even though mead is the
oldest fermented beverage,
at some point in time, people
developed ways to make wine
and beer and develop distilling.
And mead had a lot of competition.
Mead was never an inexpensive product,
because the primary fermentable ingredient
that defines the category is honey.
Honey is the most expensive commonly used
fermentable ingredient in alcohol today.
The good news is that we've
been able to transition
that great challenge into
one of our greatest assets.
And that's that, we get
to define in industry.
We get to define, what is mead to everyone
that comes into our tasting room.
A traditional mead is when you take
honey and water and yeast.
Yeast is the catalyst to
start the fermentation.
And that's really it.
We try and source the very
best international ingredients
from all over the world.
But we pair those, with what
we feel is the best honey
in the world, which is Arizona honey.
Don't just drink one mead and think
that's what it's all like.
I mean, imagine if you
only had a Bud Light
and you felt that's what all beer was.
And you're like missing the
whole world on, you know,
barrel-aged stouts and double IPAs
and this crazy cool
flavors that are out there.
If you have the opportunity,
go somewhere that's offering.
Go to a meadery.
Look them up, see where they're at.
And do a flight, try different meads
because some are gonna be
just like a white wine.
Some may taste kind of like a beer.
The tradition of the honeymoon
was across many different cultures,
especially when there
were arranged marriages
and like, the husband and
wife didn't know each other.
And so, the tradition
is that you would give
a newly wed couple a cycle, the moon
or a month supply of mead,
and that was your honeymoon.
And so that would help break down barriers
and get the guy and
girl to know each other,
and then start a family.
And that's where the story of mead
being the world's original
aphrodisiac comes from.
Mead is amazing.
And I use that word on purpose
because the word amazing
like how many times have you said that?
But you don't know what it means.
So the etiology of the term is based
on this ancient wooden bowl
that you would drink a
mead out of called a Mazer.
And if something is amazing,
it's as good as being drunk on mead.
It's like caramel covered raspberries,
and a hint to alcohol and
the ports shining through.
That's just beautiful.
The creativity and the potential
to make something really
unique in the mead world
rivals our best, anything else
out there that I've ever had.
So, that's why I think mead is amazing.
And you should try it.
(gentle music)
