Redstone Black Raspberry Reserve

This medium-sweet mead has black raspberry puree added when fermentation begins to slow. It needs to bottle-age for several years.

OG: FG: ABV:

1.165 1.055 (or as low as you can manage)

14%

HONEY & FRUIT 6.5 lb (2.9 kg) honey (orange blossom,

clover, and alfalfa) per gallon of water 0.6 lb (272 g) black raspberry puree (Oregon Fruit Products) per gallon of water

DIRECTIONS Heat the water to 170°F (77°C) and remove from the heat. Add preheated honey. Stir in the honey so it doesn’t burn on the bottom. This will bring the temperature down to about 145–150°F (63–66°C). Let the mixture sit for 20 minutes to pasteurize.

Liquefy the yeast with water and yeast nutrient when you add the honey to the kettle so as to have it nice and lively when you’re ready to add it to the must.

After pasteurization is complete, cool the must to 75°F (24°C) and add oxygen. Add the yeast and start fermentation.

As the fermentation begins to slow (2–6 weeks), rack off to a second carboy and add the fruit puree. Continue fermenting until fermentation stops. Rack off after fermentation stops. (If need be, you can add more yeast for further fermentation.)

Once fermentation is complete, plan to rack off another 2–3 times, depending on how the mead is clearing.

Bottle and age for 4–6 years.

YEAST 0.34 oz (9.5 g) Montracet Yeast per gallon of water Yeast nutrient

(dry)

MEAD MAKER’S NOTES To preheat the honey, I like to soak the honey containers in a hot-water bath. When I combine the honey and fruit puree, I like to have the puree already in the carboy before racking the must into it. ness,” 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. “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.”