December 19, 2014
Every once in a while, someone will ask me, “where do you guys come up with all the ideas for your meads?” The truth is, we just don’t know. They just pop into our heads sometimes. This is true of our latest Frankenstein creation, codenamed: The Darkness. So as some of you already know, we did our first collaboration mead with a local coffee roaster, Chazzano Coffee based here in Ferndale, MI. The coffee mead, named Ethiopian Harrar Mead was a smash hit with coffee drinkers, beer drinkers, wine drinkers, mead drinkers, and foodies. Rex Halfpenny of the Michigan Beer Guide said at a recent beer festival that it was one of his favorite three beverages at the event. We just love Frank, owner, founder, and coffee nut, at Chazzano so we just HAD to make another coffee mead. But this time, we pulled out all the stops
We had recently acquired a couple of bourbon barrels and were wondering what to put in them. We all are big fans of bourbon barrel aged imperial stouts, and we thought that doing a coffee mead (because of the coffee and chocolate flavors in imperial stouts) in the barrel would be a super nifty idea. So… we all piled into the B. Nektar mobile and drove the 2 whole blocks to Chazzano Coffee to taste honeys and coffees with our good friend, Frank. We brought with us three different honeys, all from Michigan. First was a light colored and flavored star thistle from Sleeping Bear Farms. The next was a earthy and floral wildflower honey from Windmill Hill farms. And last, but certainly not least was a deep, funky and earthy buckwheat honey from T.M. Klein. Frank brought out the largest selection of coffees I ever thought possible. We sat there for over 2 hours contemplating the honey, coffee, and combination upon combination of both.
