Blog - Got Mead? The Largest Mead Resource on the Web

2-13-18 Tonight we're continuing our AMMA Conference Speaker Showcase and have Greg Heller-LaBelle, owner of The Colony Meadery and Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor, author of The Art of Mead and Food Pairing. Greg Heller-LaBelle is the CEO and co-founder of The Colony Meadery in Allentown, PA. Prior to that, he drove the success and growth of startup ventures in industries ranging from community banking...

2-6-18 We’re continuing showcasing speakers for the AMMA Conference next month with Carvin Wilson. Carvin will be speaking on different fruit addtion techniques for making melomels. He wil be doing a side-by-side comparison of difference meads made with all fruit in the primary, all fruit in the secondary, half primary/secondary, and one late fruit addition in primary. All meads will be made with...

1/30/18 We're continuing the run up to the AMMA Conference and Mazer Cup Competitions and talking with Diane Currier, owner of HoneyGirl Meadery here in Durham, NC. Diane started homebrewing beer shortly after moving back to Durham in the early 1990s. She experienced her first mead at Ring of Fire Meadery in Homer Alaska in 2004. After hiking through a field of local fireweed wildflowers, she was...

1-23-18 We're continuing talking with AMMA speakers, and tonight we have Jeff Herbert, meadmaker and owner at Superstition Meadery, who is stepping in for Carlos Bassetti, who can't make it tonight.  Carlos is speaking at the conference about Superstition's leap from 60 gallon batches to 1000 gallon batches. He's also an amazing meadmaker, with some very unique ideas. We're going to get an overvie...

1-16-18 We're continuing featuring some of the AMMA speakers in this run up to the AMMA Conference March 14-15 and the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition and Mead Mixer March 16-17. Today we're featuring Matt Weide, VP of the Minnesota Homebrewers Association. Matt is going to be presenting at the AMMA Conference on how to bochet honey. In his talk at the conference, he will discuss the meth...

1-9-18 We're starting to feature the speakers from the AMMA Conference, coming up March 14-15, 2018. You can learn more at the website, 2 days of both home and professional tracks, all about mead. Sergio is owner of Melovino Meadery, and will be speaking on his experiment with nutrients, doing a triangle test to determine which methods of meadmaking are perceived to make the best mead, according t...

1-2-18 Happy New Year! To start the new year off, we're visiting with Andrew Lumberto and Bob Slanzi. You all know Bobby, he's been on the show several times, and usually hangs out in the chat. Bobby is going to talk about flavor profiles in mead, and creating flavor groupings. But you might not know Andrew. Andrew is a Certified Cicerone and a Grandmaster Beer Judge I with a mead certification. H...

 11-28-17 This is our last show of 2017! We go on our December break after this, and will return in January with new, fantastic shows! To finish 2017, we will be talking with Steve Fletty, two time Meadmaker of the Year at the National Homebrew Competition, and a member of the St. Paul Homebrew Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fletty has also won two Minnesota State Fair Best of Show awards (for a Rus...

11-21-17 We will have a mead celebrity on with this tonight! Peter Bakulic will be coming on the show to talk mead with us. Pete was introduced to winemaking at an early age as part of his family's Croatian roots in winemaking. He traveled to Lodi, California to visit family friends who were Zinfandel winegrowers and became familiar with the winemaking process. He became interested in making mead...

7-14-17 So now that we have a good idea on how to employ modern science to make the best mead possible in very short order. I thought it might be a good time to explore how to massage our meads on the other end of the spectrum, once the science piece is finished, so they can become the best they can be. Almost never is a mead finished straight out of the fermentation process. Anyone can read a rec...

11-7-17 We're back with another edition of Making Modern Mead. And we're headed back to Australia, to talk with Steve Kirby, owner of Stone Dog Meadery  in Yarra, New South Wales, Australia. Steve is a braggot monster, and makes a lot of them. Steve started brewing in 1990, and his first attempt at fermenting was a plum wine made in his parents’ laundry and he's been brewing ever since. Along the...

10-31-17 Hoppy Mead-o-Ween! We are back tonight to continue our series in Making Modern Mead. We've been talking about styles, and tonight we're talking session meads with Eric Lowe, co-owner of Meridian Hive Meadery in Austin, Texas. Even though session meads, i.e. lower alcohol meads between 4 and 8%, are a sack mead and can be in any style, we are pulling it out in an episode to focus on how to...

  10-24-17 We're baaaaccckkkk! We took a 2 week break, and are back talking mead, this week with Jason Todd Phelps, owner of Ancient Fire Mead and Cider, and award winning mead maker. Jason has been around the block for many many years and has won countless awards with all things fermented. It seems fitting that tonight we should talk about cysers since it's apple season in many parts of the US. C...

10-3-17 We're back for another episode of Modern Meadmaking, featuring Ryan Carlson. We have covered the most current protocol for making great mead, from the very beginning all the way to stabilization. Now for a while we will be looking at specific categories, and how make these specific meads. Although not in any specific order. Tonight we have a very special guest, David Thiebault. David is on...

Photo by Jaden Birchmore 9-26-17 We are continuing with Making Modern Mead, hosted by Ryan Carlson. I'm proud to announce that we have a very special guest speaker this evening. Tom Repas will be joining us this evening to speak about the proper use of sulfites. Also known as sulfur dioxide, k-meta and SO2. As we all know the web is full of misinformation about everything. And probably nothing mor...

Photo courtesy Petar Bakulic - his Paso Extreme Zin 9-19-17 We're continuing our series on Making Modern Mead. We talked yeast for the last two weeks, and had lots of great info from Ryan, and lots of great questions from the listeners. Now we're moving on to staggered nutrient additions, racking, stabilization and aging. There is a ton of info here, and we're going to dig into it and see what we...

Meads created by Bob Slanzi 9-12-17 We are continuing our 'Making Modern Mead' series on Gotmead Live, led by Ryan Carlson. Tonight we're doing Yeast, Part 2. So as most everybody realizes at some point in learning the process of making mead. The yeast do the work and we are relegated to being their caretakers. I jokingly call myself from time to time a yeast cowboy. In essence, what we are learni...

9-5-17 We're continuing with a series on Modern Mead Making, lead by Ryan Carlson. So  with so many newcomers joining our forum. And with conflicting information on the interweb. I have decided to do a short series where we will work from front to back of the process of making good meads using today most modern techniques. I would never declare that I know it all, or that my way is the only way. T...

8-29-17 Tonight we're talking with Ryan Carlson (known as Squatchy on the Gotmead Forums). Ryan has been making mead for quite a while now. And along the way, he's learned quite a bit as well. And one of the things he's been talking about a lot lately is oaking mead. Oak in mead can add a ton of complexity and depth, and the methods, time and type of oak make a difference. This is an often-discuss...

8-1-17 We're having fun tonight! We are being joined by Mary Izett! Mary is a passionate homebrewer specializing in fast and alternatively fermented beverages. She is author of "Speed Brewing", and she co-hosts Fuhmentaboudit!, a live weekly show on all things fermentable, on Heritage Radio Network and is a BJCP National ranked beer judge. She has been the president of both the New York City Homeb...

Tonight we're thrilled to be talking with Steve Piatz, author of the top-selling mead book, "The Complete Guide to Making Mead". The first meads Steve made were when he was training with his brewclub to become a BJCP judge, back in the 90's. They weren't the best meads, but they worked at it. Then he attended a session taught by Ken Schramm and Dan McConnell, and he found what good mead tasted lik...

7-18-17 Tonight we're talking with Scott Schaar, 2017 NHC Meadmaker of the Year. Scott and his wife Karen were watching a viking movie in about 2000, and they were drinking mead in the movie. Scott and Karen were intrigued, so they hunted down a commercial mead to try. They decided that it was pretty interesting, but thought they could make a better mead themselves. The result was raspberry mead o...

7-11-17 UPDATE: Steve had a last minute medical thing, he'll be fine, but couldn't be on the show tonight. We will have him back later. We were lucky to have Sergio Moutela, Bob Slanz *and* Tom Repas, all at once, and the show was awesome! Tonight we're thrilled to be talking with Steve Piatz, author of the top-selling mead book, "The Complete Guide to Making Mead". The first meads Steve made were...

6-20-17 Bobby Slanz is back on Gotmead Live! In our continuing conversation with amazing mead makers, we're bringing him back to talk shop about making awesome mead. Along the way we're going to dig into what he's been working on, and talk some more about the seaweed mead he makes that is becoming the talk of the mead world, and creating a splash whenever it turns up. At some point, I really want...

6-13-17 We're stepping out of our series featuring amazing home mead makers to take an evening with Bill Oliver, of Oliver Winery. Bill’s father Professor William Oliver started winemaking as a hobby back in the 1960's, and Bill grew that hobby winery into a high quality winery. Oliver happens to make one of the older professional meads in the United States, Camelot Mead. Professor Oliver was inst...