Daily Camera

International Mead Festival, new trade association hope to promote glories of honey wine

A guy walks into a bar.

He says to the bartender: "I'd like a glass of off-dry mead. What do you recommend?"

OK, so there's no punchline here, but mead makers locally and nationally are hoping mead becomes a part of the cultural vernacular at least as well-known as this classic opening line to a joke.

To that end, mead makers will be participating in the third International Mead Festival to be held in Boulder Friday and Saturday, and also are setting up an International Mead Association, in hopes of making mead a household word and a sought-out beverage.

With five meaderies in Colorado and two in Boulder County out of about 60 nationwide, the state is becoming something of a hotbed in what producers hope will become a mead revolution of sorts.

"We're throwing around the term (that Colorado) could be the Napa Valley of meaderies," says Julia Herz, owner of www.honeywine.com and one of the organizers of the new association. Other important areas of ferment, so to speak, are California and the Pacific Northwest, she says.

The association will be modeled after the Boulder-based Association of Brewers, which coined the term microbrewery and helped educate the public about the desirability of craft beers.

Herz believes mead could follow a similar path.

"The Association of Brewers through over 20 years of holding the Great American Beer Festival has shown the world that America makes some of the highest quality beer in the world." The festival's awards system has been instrumental in improving that quality as well, she says.

With mead, education will be an important component. For the uninitiated, mead is honey wine. It may be made simply with honey, wine and yeast or also may incorporate fruit or herbs. Ethiopian honey wine, which is believed to have been made for 3,000 years or longer, is known as tej and made with added herbs called gesho. Tej is made using spontaneous fermentation, much like sourdough bread depends on wild yeast in the air to create the bread's starter. Another well-known style of mead is Polish, which is sweet and similar to a dessert wine. However, American meaderies are creating their own style of mead, Herz says.

"They're resurrecting the world's oldest beverage with a modern twist. (The meads are) not sometimes as heavy and dense," she says. "They're more modeled after a balanced sweetness and acidity, which you get in grape wines."

Changing the perception that mead is always sweet may be one of the association's toughest tasks. In fact, mead may be sweet, semi-sweet, off dry or dry. It depends on how much fermentation is allowed, Herz says. The higher the alcohol content, the less sugar the mead will have.

Roberta Backlund, one of the wine managers at Liquor Mart, says customers usually expect mead to be sweet.

"I'm not sure where that comes from," she says. "Honey connotes sweetness to a lot of people. I show them the alcohol content to debunk the myth. It's not a sweet libation at all."

Backlund, who served as a judge at the mead festival last year, recommends mead for people who want to try something different and who are allergic to sulfites.

INFORMATION • www.meadfest.com

Backlund has seen a growing interest in meads, mostly she says because of the efforts of mead makers, especially local ones.

Redstone Meadery, the first meadery in Boulder County, has seen a big jump in its business, according to David Myers, chairman of the mead.

The meadery was started in 2000, and the first product came into the marketplace in 2001. The company produced 8,000 liters in 2002, its first full year, 14,000 in 2003 and expects 20,000 for 2004. The mead is sold in 10 states.

"It's reflective of what's happening in the mead world," he says, as meaderies grow in size and number.

A few years in the future, Herz and Myers hope mead will be a common beverage in bars and restaurants. They hope the new association will promote that growth.

"We need more meaderies to get a mass consciousness going on, so people start to look for mead more regularly," Myers says.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Cindy Sutter at (303) 473-1335 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .