GotMead Live Radio Show GotMead.com

5-21-24 Tonight we're talking with Adam Bystrom, Josh Mahoney, Al Boyce and Josh Holbrook, members of the aptly-nicknamed 'Minnesota Mead Mafia'.



Josh Holbrook has been home brewing for since 2011 and making mead since 2013. He discovered mead at his local homebrew club when a club member brought a bottle of an attempt at Curt Stock’s Triple Berry Melomel. Clouds parted, angels sang, and Josh became obsessed with mead. Josh has won numerous medals for beer, cider and mead, including AMMA National Mead Maker of the Year in 2020, and a couple Best of Shows at competitions such as Minnesota Mashout and Hoppy Halloween. He is also a certified BJCP judge and mead judge as well as a novice beekeeper, and one of the organizers for Valkyries Horn Mead Competition. One of Josh’s long term mead goals is to make mead with each of the 300+ varietal honeys found in the United States. He has 44 under his belt already and shows no signs of stopping.



In November of 2017 Adam Bystrom suddenly got a craving for that sweet nectar we all know; mead. With no meaderies in the area and little to no availability at liquor stores he decided to learn how to home brew. Since then mead has been the exclusive beverage he's fermented with a particular focus on session meads. He's been fortunate to win awards in a number of competitions all around the country and is a proud member of the Minnesota Home Brewers Association.



Making mead since 2008. BJCP mead judge, addicted to collecting Mazer Cups, thinks JAOM is underrated, and his favorite spice is vanilla.



Al Boyce has been a homebrewer since the early 1990’s.  He tasted his first mead at Bunratty Castle in Ireland, and was hooked. Orange Blossom is his favorite honey, Sangiovese is his favorite grape, and 71B is his favorite yeast. He is obsessed with Jamaican Sorrel (hibiscus), and vows to keep making Sorrel meads until he finally gets it right.  He recently moved to a lake home in central Minnesota where he lives with his wife Beth and his Golden Retriever Cooper.



Join us for what will most likely be mead madness!



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Sponsor:



Honnibrook Craft Meadery. Rated the very best winery in Colorado! Visit our state-of-the-art meadery and tasting room south of downtown Castle Rock, Colorado, in a converted man cave. Mention the Got Mead Podcast this month for a free draft taster!  Google H-O-N-N-I Brook for hours and directions. They love visitors!  www.honnibrook.com







If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @realGotMead and we'll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT

Join us on live chat during the show







Upcoming Shows



*



Show links and notes



* Let There Be Melomels by Rob Ratliff

* The Big Book of Mead Recipes by Rob Ratliff

* Let There Be Session Meads by Rob Ratliff

* Monin liqeuer concentrates



Upcoming Events

5-7-24 Tonight at 9PM ET we will be talking with Christopher Clarke, Owner/Meadmaker at Four Fires Meadery and Head Brewer at HEAVY Beer Co. in Toledo, Ohio. 

Chris got into making mead after first getting into homebrewing.  In late 2014  he took up homebrewing, a short half a year after first getting into craft beer. His brewing buddy at the time, Mack Garton, and he would brew every single Monday for a year and a half, and somewhere halfway through that they made their first meads. In the next few months he would meet a new friend group and eventually went in on a mead together. Of that group, 4 of them continued further and began making meads as a collective, to share amongst the group as a whole. The 4, Andrew Lynch, Athreya Rajan, Josh Kirk, and Chris would go on to form Four Fires Meadery!

In 2015, Chris had his first mead, B. Nektar’s Episode 13, and was in love. He jumped in and made his first mead just a month later. That same year, he met the other Four Fires guys at a local craft hideout called the Local. They kept meeting at Chris’s place, and continued their confederation of mead makers who wanted to create a meadery. Their first group project that year was Hail Satin.

In 2016, they made meads, and homebrew beers, and enter contests, taking some awards and started forming the base business plan, and reaching out to angel investors, and worked on looking for a location. 

Chris’s enjoyment of craft beer, and meads intertwined with the fun he was having homebrewing, and eventually professionally brewing, seemed to have been accelerants for one another, so in the time between making his first mead, the meadery opening, and now, a LOT has changed. 

In 2017, Chris was hired as a production brewer at Maumee Bay Brewing Co. with the intent of revitalizing the portfolio. Later that year, Four Fires signed a lease on their building, and work began immediately on converting the space into a production facility. And the first mead found its way into the tanks in early 2018. As they neared their first release, Four Fires gained visibility amongst mead lovers with them getting some of their pre-production mead out there for people to try. 

Join us to check in with Chris and see what Four Fires is up to!

This player will show the most recent show, and when we're live, will play the live feed. If you are calling in, please turn off the player sound, so we don't get feedback.[break]







Sponsor:



Honnibrook Craft Meadery. Rated the very best winery in Colorado! Visit our state-of-the-art meadery and tasting room south of downtown Castle Rock, Colorado, in a converted man cave. Mention the Got Mead Podcast this month for a free draft taster!  Google H-O-N-N-I Brook for hours and directions. They love visitors!  www.honnibrook.com







If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @realGotMead and we'll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT

Join us on live chat during the show







Upcoming Shows



* May 21 - Minnesota Mead Mafia



Show links and notes



* Let There Be Melomels by Rob Ratliff

* The Big Book...

Tonight we're talking with Bryce and Savannah, husband and wife owners of Fox and Raven Meadery in Carollton, Texas.

Fox & Raven Mead is Savannah and Bryce, a husband and wife team, creating Meads inspired by the stories that enchant them. They met at a movie theater eighteen years ago where they worked (mainly for the perk of free movies). They are self proclaimed Bibliophies, cinephiles and just all around big nerds.

Bryce initially began homebrewing beer as a hobby but switched to Mead making due to a lack of availability of mead in his area. He’s been making Mead for about 9 years now. Savannah is a graphic design school dropout and artist. She mostly handles marketing and design but also has a hand in helping craft flavor profiles as well.

Bryce and Savannah are committed to never releasing a mead that they would not be happy to drink themselves. With a focus on balanced flavors, their mead tends to stay on the dry to semi-sweet side. Designwise, each mead label is designed to look like a comic book, book cover, or movie poster to tie back to their love of storytelling,

Currently, the meadery is a production only with no taproom but you can find Fox & Raven out at several local markets as well as special events from time to time. Their Mead has also found their way into a few local breweries and bottle shops with more to come soon.

Come hang out with us as we talk mead with Bryce and Savannah!



This player will show the most recent show, and when we're live, will play the live feed. If you are calling in, please turn off the player sound, so we don't get feedback.[break]







Sponsor:



Honnibrook Craft Meadery. Rated the very best winery in Colorado! Visit our state-of-the-art meadery and tasting room south of downtown Castle Rock, Colorado, in a converted man cave. Mention the Got Mead Podcast this month for a free draft taster!  Google H-O-N-N-I Brook for hours and directions. They love visitors!  www.honnibrook.com







If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @realGotMead and we'll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT

Join us on live chat during the show







Upcoming Shows

Show links and notes



* Let There Be Melomels by Rob Ratliff

* The Big Book of Mead Recipes by Rob Ratliff

* Let There Be Session Meads by Rob Ratliff

* Monin liqeuer concentrates



Upcoming Events



* April 10 - Green Mountain Mashers, Essex Junction, VT - Mead Class - Specialty Meads taught by Kyle Ducharme

* April 12 - Grimsby Hollow Meadery, Middleville, MI - Dungeons and Dragons Meadup

* April 13 - Mead Judging Programme Level 1 and Level 2 in Olsztyn, Poland by Mate Blasczyk and the Mead Judging Programme

* April 13 - Grimsby Hollow Meadery, Middleville, MI - Drink Mead, Learn Things: Hearth Broom Making Workshop

* April 13 - a href="https://fb.

3-26-21 Tonight we're talking with Bray Denard, creator of the BOMM, Bray's One Month Mead.

Bray Denard, PhD is the inventor of Bray’s One Month Mead (aka “the BOMM”), one of the more popular mead styles among home mead makers. Bray has continued to refine his methods over the years to create a never fail nutrient protocol that works with any yeast!

In addition, Bray continues to provide mead making knowledge through consulting and OmniMead. OmniMead provides a free Mead Making Course as well as recipes and calculators for mead makers. Check it out: https://www.omnimead.com

Constantly aspiring for better mead, he eternally experiments with new nutrients, spices, fruits and wood types. As a result, he is in the process of writing a world inspired mead making book complete with food pairings!

Join us tonight at 9PM EDT to talk mead shop with Bray!



This player will show the most recent show, and when we're live, will play the live feed. If you are calling in, please turn off the player sound, so we don't get feedback.[break]







Sponsor:



Honnibrook Craft Meadery. Rated the very best winery in Colorado! Visit our state-of-the-art meadery and tasting room south of downtown Castle Rock, Colorado, in a converted man cave. Mention the Got Mead Podcast this month for a free draft taster!  Google H-O-N-N-I Brook for hours and directions. They love visitors!  www.honnibrook.com







If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @realGotMead and we'll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT

Join us on live chat during the show







Upcoming Shows

Show links and notes



* Let There Be Melomels by Rob Ratliff

* The Big Book of Mead Recipes by Rob Ratliff

* Let There Be Session Meads by Rob Ratliff

* Monin liqeuer concentrates

* Omnimead - https://www.omnimead.com



Upcoming Events



* Mar 28 - Kingview Mead, Lebanon, PA - Live music with the Mingo Creek Trio

* Mar 30 - Four Brothers Mead, Festus, MO - Emma Nobbe Live Music

* April 5 - Kingview Mead, Lebanon, PA - Live Music with Jim and Scott

* April 10 - Green Mountain Mashers, Essex Junction, VT - Mead Class - Specialty Meads taught by Kyle Ducharme

* April 13 - Mead Judging Programme Level 1 and Level 2 in Olsztyn, Poland by Mate Blasczyk and the Mead Judging Programme

* April 13 - Grimsby Hollow Meadery, Middleville, MI - Drink Mead, Learn Things: Hearth Broom Making Workshop

* April 14 - ARTifice Ales and Mead, Manheim, PA - Terrarium Workshop with Cottage and Vine

* April 21 - Oppegaard Meadery, Seattle, WA - A Great Shenanigan of Mead, Violence, Music, Art and Feast!

3-12-24 Tonight we're getting together with Laura Angotti, who has written books on mead in history and delved deeply into the writings and recipes of people going back thousands of years to provide information on how mead was made and imbibed in various cultures and at differing levels of society. Laura's most current book, "Wellcome Mead" is available on Amazon, and her new book, "Gold and Sweet, Ensnaring" will be out soon. She has also done a book on cider, "Cider and Perry in Britain to 1700: A Collection of Material from Primary and Selected Secondary Sources - Historical Brewing Sourcebook".

Laura Angotti has been making mead for over 30 years. Her focus is on uncovering, understanding, and writing about the history of mead - specifically historical mead recipes and the meads that can be re-created from these recipes. She has cataloged over 4000 mead recipes dating from before 1750 CE and has made and tasted over 100 of these. To better understand the recipes and their context, her research includes broader topics such as genetics of yeast and other microorganisms, the density of hen eggs, and day to day operations of Medieval Abbeys, proving that context is everything and all things are interconnected. Laura uses her training in Engineering and Biology from MIT and Northeastern University, as well as professional experience in techno-economic analysis/modeling, industrial fermentation, and water treatment to weave together the threads of history and connect the past with the present. Laura writes about her work at www.mysteryofmead.com and Mystery of Mead on Facebook. Her books on historical mead and cider are available on Amazon, including the soon to be published “Gold and Sweet, Ensnaring: Mead in Great Britain Prehistory to Elizabeth I”.

Laura started making mead because it sounded different, easy, and tasty, and she knew several people who made meads she had enjoyed, including her soon-to-be fiance. She kept doing it initially because it was nice to have something to share, and it was a fun hobby to do with her husband. Their shared interests in history led them to researching the history of mead through Early English Books - now online but then hundreds of reels of microfilm. The hobby lay fallow for a number of years while they raised kids and had careers, then a chance inquiry after the information she had written up years before led her to review it, look for more, and then dive right back into a world of digitized texts and manuscripts.

Her books are available on Amazon, under her name, Laura Angotti, Gold and Sweet, Ensnaring will be published very soon, and she's already working on the next two books in what she's calling her Historical Brewing Sourcebook series. For those with either a serious aversion or an inability to access Amazon she can often work out other ways of getting books to them.

Join us to dive into history with Laura!



This player will show the most recent show, and when we're live, will play the live feed. If you are calling in, please turn off the player sound, so we don't get feedback.[break]







Sponsor:



Honnibrook Craft Meadery. Rated the very best winery in Colorado! Visit our state-of-the-art meadery and tasting room south of downtown Castle Rock, Colorado, in a converted man cave. Mention the Got Mead Podcast this month for a free draft taster!  Google H-O-N-N-I Brook for hours and directions. They love visitors!  www.honnibrook.com







If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email,

Tonight at 9PM ET, we're hanging out with Bob Slanzi, beekeeper, meadmaker, industry influencer and general all around pretty cool guy.



Bob Slanzi has been keeping bees and making award winning meads for years. He is very active in the meadmaking, homebrew and beekeeping communities, having held offices in both his clubs in NY in the past. he is the past president of the Home Governing Committee of the American Mead Makers Association, and very active in helping bring the word of mead to everyone. He was the person who set up and maintained the monthly deals the American Mead Makers Association has for members. Bob was a speaker at the 2022 European Mead Makers Association Conference and judged at their Mead Madness Cup mead competition. He went to the Mead Madness Cup again in 2024 and judged there. He was awarded Mead Personality of the Year at the EMMA as well.



He is known for his meads, and isn’t afraid to try new flavors, like seaweed or toasted walnuts. Bob likes to experiment, and talks about layering flavors in meads to get the result you want.



Join us as we talk with and chat about what he's making, and what he's seen and learned.



This player will show the most recent show, and when we're live, will play the live feed. If you are calling in, please turn off the player sound, so we don't get feedback.[break]







Sponsor:



Honnibrook Craft Meadery. Rated the very best winery in Colorado! Visit our state-of-the-art meadery and tasting room south of downtown Castle Rock, Colorado, in a converted man cave. Mention the Got Mead Podcast this month for a free draft taster!  Google H-O-N-N-I Brook for hours and directions. They love visitors!  www.honnibrook.com







If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @realGotMead and we'll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT

Join us on live chat during the show







Upcoming Shows



* March 12 - Laura Angotti - Historical Mead

* March 26 - Bray Denard - Mead Experimenting, One Month Mead



Show links and notes



* Let There Be Melomels by Rob Ratliff

* The Big Book of Mead Recipes by Rob Ratliff

* Let There Be Session Meads by Rob Ratliff

* Monin liqeuer concentrates



Upcoming Events



* Feb 29 - Patriot Homebrew Supply, Elkhorn, NE - Mead Making Seminar

* Mar 1 - Mar 3 - NC Mead Alliance Beekeepers and Meadmakers, Wilkesboro, NC - 2024 Conference

* Mar 6 - Green Mountain Mashers, Essex, VT - Spiced Mead Making Class offered by Kyle Ducharme

* Mar 14 - Apis Mead and Winery, Carnegie, PA - Thursday South Hills Group Run on PI Day!

* Mar 14 - What's Brewing? Supply - Palatine, IL - Mead Making Class

* Mar 16 - The Bee Shop, Toronto, ON, Canada - Mead Making Workshop

* Mar 16 - a href="https://fb.