Episodes

3-29-22 Tonight we're talking with Pierre Rodrigue, home meadmaker in Alberta, Canada. Pierre has been with us before, he's an award winning meadmaker who likes to work with juice, and like us, is a flavor maven. Pierre has been fermenting wine since 1985. Early batches consisted of kits, and fruits and berries. As there weren’t a lot of publications then and zero internet, he learned a lot by trial and error. Pierre began mead making in the fall of 2016, and has won several medals and Best of S...

3-15-22 Tonight at 9PM ET, we're talking with Ian, Adam and Isaac Rushing, owners of Honey and Hops Brew Works in Front Royal, VA. Honey and Hops Brew Works is a meadery started on a shoestring, and the Rushing brothers have gotten it to a thriving business. It started in 2019, with a Kickstarter that raised 11K in funds. Then the brothers went on to find a location, and secure that, and get the licensing started. Then along came 2020 (queue ominous music) and the pandemic (more ominous music). ...

2-15-22 Tonight we're hanging out with TJ Cline, past President of the Savannah Brewers League and Organizer of the Domras Cup Mead Competition, which was held two weekends ago. TJ describes himself as a 'novice mead maker', with 18 batches under his belt over the last six years. He says he's always learning, and his current favorite styles are braggots, bochets and black currant fruit meads. He has been involved with the Domras Cup for the last six years, and worked his way up, starting with st...

2-1-22 Tonight we're hanging with Ty Wheeler, mead maker, and host of the 'TK and Drinks' video podcast. Ty is a denizen of Arizona, and is a dad of two boys and purchasing agent in his day life. By night, he's a podcaster and is working on mead distribution. At the beginning of COVID, he got laid off and decided to make a career in the mead industry. Ty got into mead a few years back after re-connecting with a high school friend and former roommate, Jon Oppegaard of Oppegaard Meadery in Washing...

1-18-22 Tonight we're talking with Mike and Cathy Rape, owners of The Ferm Meadery in Conroe, TX. They're making great mead and having a good time spreading mead, music and food around to their customers. Cathy and Mike are native Texans, and grew up in Conroe, TX. They've been married 26yrs and have 3 grown kids and a grandchild. They also own and operate a company that provides temporary power and temperature control mostly for live events. Around the time their kids became teenagers (Because ...

11-23-21 Tonight we’re venturing back into the world of mead sensory analysis. Stephen from experimeads.com will be joining us again to talk about the latest mead experiments he's been conducting. Stephen is a home mead maker, three time Canadian mead maker of the year, and BJCP certified beer and mead judge. In the process of honing his craft, he has been testing the parameters of mead fermentation and conducts formal sensory analysis to compare methods. Given the lack of scientific evaluation ...

11-9-21 Tonight we're headed to Texas to talk with Wendy Rohan and Rosie Haines at Rohan Wines and Meads in La Grange, situated between La Grange, Round Top and Fayetteville in south central Texas. Rohan Meadery is at Blissful Folly Farm. The farm is home to Rohan Wines and Meads, Blissful Folly hard ciders and La Grange Brewing Co. All the beer, wine, mead & cider is made on site and served at the tap room on the farm. Wendy & John Rohan started with the meadery first in 2009, then slowly built...

10-26-21 Tonight we're headed to Gaithersburg, MD to talk with Yancy Bodenstein, Manish Eigner and Jacob Latour at Clear Skies Meadery. Clear Skies got started over a mead fueled Christmas discussion in 2018. It wasn't long before they filed and got a lease and started construction on their location, in 2019. They managed to get through all the paperwork and permits in less than a year, and pitched their first batch in January 2020, and had planned to open fully in April, but COVID raised it's u...

10-12-21 We're headed to Baltimore, where we'll catch up with James Boicourt, founder and owner of Charm City Meadworks. James began making mead back in college (NC State) around 2004, after taking a great class on introductory beekeeping. He was already trying out homebrewing, and got so interested in beekeeping and entomology that he ended up taking a graduate level bee class. What else was a college kid going to do with a bunch of surplus honey anyhow? Of course he fermented it. It seemed lik...

9-27-21 Tonight we're changing up a bit, Charm City had to reschedule into October. We're tickled to have Bob Slanzi step in to talk with us tonight. He's going to work with Vicky to rescue a mead of hers that went a bit sideways, and we're going to talk about making mead (of course), as Bob is a no-measure meadmaker, he's all about the flavor profile and the palate. There may be a special guest or two! And we'll be talking about the awful damage done to meaderies during Hurricane Ida, and what ...

9-14-21 Tonight we're celebrating National Honey Month with Alison Conklin at the National Honey Board. The NHB has a bunch of really interesting events and campaigns going on during September.

8-31-21 Tonight we're doing a pre-recorded session with Tom Gosnell, owner of Gosnell's of London. Tom got interested in meadmaking in 2013 after a visit to the US and going to Maine Meadworks. He liked it so much, he decided to try meadmaking at home. After three years of increasing meadmaking in his kitchen, he decided it was time to go commercial, and took the plunge. Tom got hooked up with a commercial brewery in London, and when it closed down, they decided to get their own space. Tom is re...

8-19-21 Tonight we're 'across the pond' visiting with Ann Farrell and Gordon Baron at Lancashire Mead in Horwich, Lancashire, Great Britain. They make meads in a natural fashion, without stabilizers or finings. Gordon is a Druid and uses mead in ritual. He wanted a pure mead for this purpose (and didn’t want to put chemicals into the earth) so in 2009, he decided ‘how hard can it be?’, emptied his local supermarket of honey, dumped it in a bucket with some yeast…… the rest is history! Three year...

7-27-21 Tonight we're back across the pond and hanging out with Danique Staal, owner of De Noordelijke Mederij (The Northern Meadery). Danique makes some very interesting meads, including a Stroopwafel mead that took gold and Best in Show at the European Mead Makers Kings of Mead Competition Mead Madness Cup in 2020, the largest mead competition in Europe. Danique got interested in mead at an early age, he was always interested in the old sagas, myths and legends. There was a lot about mead in t...

7-13-21 Tonight we're getting together with Frank Golbeck from Golden Coast Mead and Alyson Schramm Naeger from Schramm's Mead to talk about the Mead institute, a non-profit they have founded to establish Mead as an industry with a more than 1000 year future. The Mead Institute was co-foounded by Alyson and Frank to provide resources to mead professionals to enrich the mead experience from production through consumption. They have a detailed view of what they'd like to create with this venture: ...

6-24-21 Tonight we're continuing our travels in Europe with Gert Smet and the Blacksmith's Meadery in Antwerp, Belgium. Gert is a reenactor - a living history nerd. His living history group, Ortus Phoenix, portrays the late 15th century, just after the death of Charles the Bold. Gert drank his first mead on one of the medieval festivals in 2011. Needless to say it was 'high quality' rotgut (some cheap German swill) that made his stomach dissolve. He was sure that he could make something more pal...

6-15-21 Tonight we're staying in North American and headed for the Great White North, Manitoba, Canada, to be precise. Kon and Julie Paseschnikoff own Bee Boyzz Honey and Mead in Oak Bluff, Manitoba. Theirs is a multi-generation business, starting out with Kon Sr. keeping bees many years ago in Venezuela, then Kon getting involved in his dad's market gardening business, and being pulled into bees when his dad started as a hobby beekeeper. Just before his dad passed, he suggested Kon continue wit...

6-8-21 Tonight at 9PM ET/3AM Norway time, we're continuing our journeys around Europe and talking with Anders Riseng, co-owner of Askheimer Meadery in Askim, Norway. Askheimer Meadery is one of just a few meaderies so far in Norway, but that is changing, as mead awareness grows in Europe. Anders and his partner Jarl-Magnus teamed up with the idea of starting a meadery during a tasting session at the local beer club – Askim Beerclub, back in 2017. Both guys had then been homebrewers for several y...

5-11-21 This episode, we're headed off to the Netherlands, and hanging out with Jeroen Krikke, owner of Kollectiv Mead in Den Haag (The Hague). Jeroen is a long time mead maker, and has taken his love of mead commercial, with his small, but growing meadery. Jeroen used a sabbatical to start Kollektiv Mead in 2018, following his ambition to introduce The Netherlands to "Dutch Craft Mead". At Kollektiv he makes small batch Dessert style meads, often very fruit heavy, made with modern mead practice...

4-27-21 This week on Gotmead Live we're going international! Our guest is Stian Krog, owner of Mjøderiet in Norway, the first meadery to bring back mead in that country. This episode is not live, we got together with Stian yesterday so he wouldn't be up at 3 am! Stian started brewing beer in 2011 and got curious about mead around the same time. He and Erlend Johnsen (now one of the Mjøderiet partners) made their first traditional in 2012 and increasingly made more and more batches during the nex...

4-13-21 Tonight we're chatting with Pierre Rodrigue, a prolific wine and meadmaker living in Alberta, Canada. Pierre has been fermenting wine since 1985. His early batches consisted of kits, and fruits and berries. As there weren’t a lot of publications then and zero internet, he learned a lot by trial and error. Pierre began mead making in the fall of 2016, and has won several medals and Best of Show at Canada’s Mellarius Cup. His penchant for all juice meads is fairly well known on social medi...

3-30-21 Tonight we're talking Polish mead, and all other things mead with Kris Plizga and Scot Schaar. Both of these gentlemen are accomplished mead makers, and both are pretty darn good Polish mead makers. Kris' mead adventure started many years ago while he was still living in his home country. At that time Poland was probably the only place on earth where mead was still produced by several companies and was available almost in every better supplied liquor store. After tasting many of them and...

3-2-21 Tonight we're back on our regular schedule, and are happy to be talking with Clint Walker and Chase Cohagan, of Walker Honey Farm and Dancing Bee Winery. Clint Walker III is a third-generation beekeeper and the owner of Walker Honey Farm in Rogers, TX. In 2011, Walker Honey Farm opened Dancing Bee Winery as the mead making arm of the business. Walker Honey Farm was founded in 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, when Clint Walker Sr. started with 150 hives. Over the years, the busi...

Tonight at 9PM ET, we'll be talking with Dustin Deisher and Jeff Anderson, award winning home meadmakers. The topic at hand is bench trials. In making mead, we do our fermentation, feed our yeast, and do our racking and stabilization. But once that's all done, the mead needs to be finished. And as anyone with more than a couple batches under their belt can tell you, yeast don't read the alcohol range info on the packets, and fermentations often end where you want to make adjustments after it fin...