Episodes

2-14-17 We're headed to New Mexico tonight, to visit with Greg Menke, the chef owner of The Beestro Group of Businesses: The Beestro and The Hive Market located in downtown Santa Fe New Mexico as well as The Root Cellar Mead Taproom & Gastropub and Falcon Meadery both coming online in fall/winter 2016. These businesses encompass Greg’s passion for community, high quality local and sustainable food, and a celebration of honey bees. Inspired by the hive community of bees, each of these businesses ...

2-7-17 We're having way too much fun with this! Tonight we're talking with Billy Beltz, winner of 32 medals over last 2 years, including 2 Mazer Cup medals, for meads under 6 months old. Most were even younger than that! He's also won a number of medals for his capsicumels, coffee meads and traditionals. He definitely knows his stuff! Billy has been homebrewing for over 10 years, and has a lot of interesting ideas, and has gotten a lot of his ideas and techniques from Charlie Papazian, Petar Bak...

1-31-17 Tonight we're going to talk about making session meads with Jason Scott Phelps from Ancient Fire Meadery. If the mead gods are good, we'll also have Chris Herr from Golden Coast Mead as well What, might you ask, is a session mead? A session mead is a lower alcohol mead, often carbonated, that is gaining popularity. It's an easy drinker, and not terribly hard to make, once you know how. Often, session meads tend to be thin, and without body. We're going to dig into how to do that with Jas...

1-24-17 We've a new meadery tonight, in Delaware! Joining us will be Jeff and Terri Cheskin, owners of Liquid Alchemy Beverages, a new meadery open in Delaware. Jeff and Terri fell in love with mead a while back, They found mead on a trip to Maine to visit family, and fell in love with a lavender lemonade mead from Maine Meadworks. That was when they realized that people love mead as much as they do. That sparked an intense study of New England meads and honeys, and has resulted in the opening o...

1-17-17 Today's GotMead Live takes us to the New England states. Connecticut to be exact. Gary Ellis, owner of Mad Moose Mead, will be joining us. Gary fell in love with mead several years ago, and after seeing that you don't have to start big to make a splash in the mead world, he took the plunge (enough metaphors for you?) Mad Moose will be opening in summer of 2017, and they've hooked up with a brewer and a distiller, so they will have a pretty good offering to open with. If you are a meadery...

1-10-17 Tonight we're back from our holiday vacation!! We hope you all had a great holiday, and a fun New Year! We'll be talking with Rob Ratliff. Those of you who listen to the show might remember we had him on earlier in the year on Back to Basics. Rob is an intuitive mead recipe designer, and his meads are top notch. (He's also a good friend!). Rob decided to put his recipes, and his skills, into a book, The Big Book of Mead Recipes. It comes out on Kindle this month, followed by a trade pape...

We are meeting with Bob Slanz - NY Home meadmaker and beekeeper, and winner of a BoS for his ghost pepper mead. We'll talk bees, honey and mead

11-22-16 - Today I'm tickled to have a 'home-boy' on the show, Kirk Jones, beekeeper and, owner of St. Ambrose Cellars in Beulah, MI, just 30 miles from my family home in Onekama, MI. I visit them every time I go home. Kirk and his wife Sharon, also an experienced beekeeper, are 'back to earthers' who met when Kirk moved to Northern Michigan to live a simpler life. They ended up making mead in their business via a happy accident, and have since added some excellent wines to their portfolio. They...

11-15-16 - Tonight we're talking with Jason Phelps, an aspiring meadery owner in the process of opening Ancient Fire Meadery in Southern, NH. Jason hopes to be open sometime in 2017, and is currently wending his way through the mire of federal paperwork and local licensing. Jason has a few medals for mead under his belt (108 at last count!) and hopes his mead will be as well liked by consumers as it has been by judges. Join us to talk with Jason about his meadmaking, how his commercial meadmakin...

POSTPONED TO THURSDAY NOV 10 DUE TO EQUIPMENT ISSUES (THE COMPUTER DIED) - PLEASE COME LISTEN THEN!! 11-8-16 - We are tickled to be talking with Michael Jordan, the Bee Whisperer tonight on GotMead Live. Michael has traveled the world to learn beekeeping, from Turkey and India, From Poland to Ireland. He was also asked to join a team to teach orphans around the world beekeeping and to do classes at the University of Wyoming's Bee College. He has 173 hives that he manages now, and is getting arou...

11-1-16 - Our show tonight gets us together with Erik Newquist of Aesir Meadery in Everett, WA. Aesir is all about creating small batch meads using sustainably produced ingredients from the local area, and they're distributed all over Washington. Erik is himself a microbiologist and chemist, and has experience in engineering, so we're looking forward to hearing more about his outlook and process. Join us as we chat with Erik about the meadery, his interesting techniques, and what he sees happeni...

Tonight we're talking with Ash Fishbein of Sap House Meadery in New Hampshire. Sap House has been around since 2011, and makes a lot of award-winning meads. Ash is also something of a mead nerd, digging deep into mead making as a science, and has some interesting insight to offer fellow mead makers.

9-27-16 - Our guest tonight is Amy Hasle with HoneyRun Winery in Chico, California. HoneyRun has been around for a while, since 1992. We also check in with David Webb on the Texas Mead Fest.

Today we’re talking with Jeremy Kyncl, owner of Hierophant Meadery in Mead, WA. Jeremy and his wife Michelle have a background in herbs and are focused on local-sourcing their mead ingredients and creating a uniquely local product. On Back to Basics, Jeremy will be staying on to talk with AJ, Manny, Hamish and I about metheglins. Adding spices and plants to meads is a tradition that goes back as far as mead has been recorded, and the options are limitless. We’ll be talking about what works, tech...

9-13-16 - Tonight we're talking with John Harris, owner of Harris Meadery in Orange Park Florida, near Jacksonville. John runs the meadery with his wife Melissa and their daughters Amelia and Amanda. Harris Meadery is just getting going, and have two flagship meads they are offering - a Key Lime Pie honey wine and and a soon-to-be-release Cherry Raspberry Currant honey wine. Florida is slowly getting more and more meaderies, Harris looks to be a great addition! We're looking forward to hearing w...

9-6-16 Tonight Sergio Moutela from Melovino Mead is back with us, through the luck of me having a scheduling snafu. Sergio is coming up on 2 years in business, and all along, he's been publishing blog posts about what he's learned in his journey so far. We're going to talk with him about that journey, and see what we can learn! He'll be sticking around to talk with us about braggots in Back to Basics, with myself, AJ, Manny and Hamish. Come join us to talk mead! Join us 9PM ET tonight! (8PM CT/7...

8-30-16 Tonight we're visiting with one of the meaderies I had the opportunity to visit when I was in Michigan last month. Cellarmen's, in Hazel Park, MI is the brainchild of four metal-loving, hard charging guys who started with a passion for creating award-winning meads that will get people talking. And they charged off to create some pretty damn amazing meads. Those of you that know me are aware that I often don't care for dry traditionals. But these guys have nailed it. In spades. I was blow...

8-23-16 Buzzed Bee Meadery in Iowa Buzzed Bee Meadery got started as a decision between bees and chickens. Thank goodness the bees won! Years ago, Wayne Spohnheimer and his wife Michelle got interested in bees and honey. And Wayne got interested in mead. Fast forward several years, and Buzzed Bee Meadery is opening in September of this year, near Melbourne, Iowa, just 30 minutes from Des Moines. They are coming out of the gate with seven meads, including their best seller, Sweet Bee Lemon Melome...

8-16-16 Today we're talking with Deborah Lee, owner of Queen Bee Brews in Denver, CO, which is opening THIS WEEKEND on August 20!! Started by Deborah Lee, a homebrewer since 2003, she got tired of the 40 odd carboys in residence and needed to re-gain some elbow room. She had been encouraged by many folks for several years to make the leap to pro and she finally listened. Deborah worked part-time at her local homebrew shop for 5 years and started keeping bees in 2009. She has presented mead makin...

8-9-16 Meridian Hive Meadery in Austin has been making mead since 2012, and winning awards all the way. The guys do a lot of session meads and kick but while doing it! Eric and Mike make amazing mead! Eric also runs the Texas Mead Fest and competition which is coming up in September as well. Meridian Hive is big on balance in their meads, and does mostly session meads, the majority of them on draft, but some are bottled. They are currently hard at work turning on all of Texas to their interestin...

7-19-16 Mead - the fastest growing segment of the craft alcoholic beverage industry, yet most people know so little about it. Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor, mead lover, AMMA board member and legislative committee member, and owner, with her husband of Kookoolan Farms in Oregon, aims to change that. She has written and is in the process of editing and self-publishing her book, 'The Art of Mead Tasting and Food Pairing'. The book is a grand tour of the worlds' meads, coupled with innovative and tasty r...

7-12-16 – Today we’re talking with David and Maciej, owners of Arktos Meadery in Grand Rapids, MI. They have 7 meads right now, including a pumpkin mead (that one caught my eye!! On Back to Basics, we’re talking about ‘When Your Mead Goes Wrong’. If you’ve ever had a mead go weird, turn into vinegar, burn dry when it was supposed to be sweet, turn up tasting like gasoline or anything else, then we’ll be talking about it.