Mead for Each Other
Seven fun mead-and-food pairings to try at home.
Mead is made for more than just the dessert course! talked to a handful of the country’s best mead makers to get their favorite mead and food pairings you can try yourself.
“I’M A MEAD AMBASSADOR,”
says Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor, the owner at Kookoolan World Meadery and Tasting Room in Yamhill, Oregon. “I want people to get seduced by mead.”
According to Zaerpoor, part of that seduction is experiencing mead alongside food, a topic in which she’s well-versed—she has contributed multiple food pairing articles to the American Mead Maker journal, and she’s currently writing and self-publishing a book about mead and food.
Romanced by mead herself, Zaerpoor discovered the existence of honey wine in high school. After years of searching for that transcendent mead-drinking experience she’d built up in her head, she decided that if she wanted good mead in the United States, she might have to make it herself. The year was 1996 when she started home mead making—before most of the country’s craft meaderies existed.
Almost a decade later, Zaerpoor and her husband opened a beef, pork, lamb, and chicken farm in Yamhill, Oregon, called Kookoolan Farms. She went on to get a wine license and launch Kookoolan World Meadery & Tasting Room, where guests can sample through one of the world’s largest mead selections. The tasting room has
more than 150 meads available and thirty to forty open bottles on any given day.
“I realized I’ve got more access to different meads and food-pairing opportunities than any other person on the planet,” Zaerpoor explains. With the tasting room steps away from her home, she found herself pouring multiple samples of different meads at each meal and compelled to start writing about it because, as she says, “it had to be done.”
David Myers at Redstone Meadery in Boulder, Colorado, couldn’t agree more. “We do want to talk a lot about mead and food because people immediately assume dessert when they think mead,” he says. “But mead is much more of a wide-ranging beverage,” which makes for a wide range of savory pairing possibilities, too.
With input from Myers and the mead makers at Michigan’s B. Nektar Meadery, California’s Golden Coast Mead, and Colorado’s Hunter’s Moon Meadery, Zaerpoor suggested these flavor combinations.
Heidirun Meadery Oregon Radish Blossom Mead + Vegetable Crudités
Oregon Radish Blossom Mead has hints of jasmine that will brighten the earthy flavors in a crudités plate of raw vege-