"A MEAD-ing of the Minds" with Drinking Horn Meadcast

This is a crossover episode you MEAD to hear! Our Foodlosopher Anna Van Valin and Chef-Creator Lia Ballentine have joined forces with Evan Anderson and Nick Irvine of the Drinking Horn Meadcast to discuss (and DRINK) mead! Evan and Nick tell us all about the world of making and drinking this ancient fermented honey drink at their Meadery in Flagstaff, AZ, the care and feeding of bees, mead’s better-for-you buzz and why it’s good for the planet. Then Anna tells us how every culture has a version of “honey wine” - from the Celts, to Ethiopia to the Ancient Mayan empire! - which meant that bees, honey and mead made some exceptional cameos in their myths. Then Lia tells us about festivals and holidays, like National Mead Day. Listen to find out why we're all abuzz about mead in this special crossover episode! Be sure to subscribe to Every Day is a Food Day and the Drinking Horn Meadcast, and don't forget to follow us on social media @fooddaypod and @drinkinghornmeadery.

Explore from the show:
- Listen to Every Day is a Food Day's episode "Honey: 2 Queens, 1 Hive" to hear how it all began - plus bee and honey crimes, surprising celebrity beekeepers, and why you should never wear Ugg boots to check on your hives.
- Check out Guy Fieri's visit to the Drinking Horn Meadery on Guy's Family Road Trip.
- Want to try the 3 meads we drink in this episode? Order your mead from the Drinking Horn Meadery website.

Connect with us!
- Want to support our women and BIPOC-created independent podcast? Buy us a coffee!
- For more great content about the stories & foods we talk about on the show (plus a peek BTS) follow us at @FoodDayPod on Instagram, Twitter & Facebook or check out our webpage.
- Join our mailing list for extra content and to keep up with all the exciting things we have planned for this season.

Transcript

0:00:00.0 AVV: Honey and mead were actually part of the after life, so in Celtic heaven, which is called the other lands or Avalon was believed to have rivers of Mead running through Paradise.

0:00:11.4 EA: You think one bottle is dangerous.

0:00:13.2 AVV: Right? I'm just imagining a Willy Wonka situation with...

0:00:19.4 NI: Augustus. Augustus.

0:00:20.0 AVV: Augustus.

0:00:21.9 LB: Drinking it from the river.

0:00:23.5 AVV: He just gets sucked in the tube.

0:00:24.7 NI: Evan, you're getting too far, oh there goes Evan.

0:00:28.7 EA: I had no chance.

0:00:30.3 NI: He's got a smile on his face.

0:00:32.2 EA: Went down happy.

0:00:32.4 NI: Yeah.

[music]

0:00:45.3 LB: Welcome to a very special episode of Every Day is a Food Day.

0:00:48.9 EA: And a very special episode of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

[vocalization]

0:00:54.4 NI: We love each other's shows and think you will too, so we decided to brew up this crossover episode, all about what else mead.

0:01:02.1 AVV: You could say it's a meading of the minds.

0:01:04.8 EA: Since we've just swarmed you with all these voices let's officially introduce ourselves. I'm Evan Anderson, king bee of the Drinking Horn Meadery in Flagstaff, Arizona, and co-host of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

0:01:16.0 LB: I'm Lia Ballentine, a chef creator in Austin, Texas. And host of the podcast, Every Day is a Food Day.

0:01:21.0 NI: And I'm Nick Irvine, ambassador of buzz at the Drinking Horn Meadery and co-host of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

0:01:26.5 AVV: And I'm Anna Van Valin in Los Angeles, California. The other host of every day is a food day and your resident Foodlosopher, you guys got all that? 

0:01:35.0 NI: Today, the ladies from every day is a food day are gonna tell us about mead's many, many cameos in ancient mythology from around the world, plus some mead holidays and celebrations where you can get your buzz on.

0:01:47.2 LB: And the guys from the Mead Cast are going to tell us all about their devotion to the potion, adventures with bees and brewing and how mead might just save the planet and save you that hang over.

0:02:00.2 AVV: Be sure to follow both Every Day is a Food Day and the Drinking Horn Mead Cast wherever you get your podcasts.

[music]

0:02:12.4 AVV: First things first, Food Day listeners, what's the requirement for Lia and I when we do an episode about alcohol, that's right, we have to be drinking it, Evan and Nick very generously has sent us a few bottles from their Meadery and we're gonna crack one open, so guys, What are we drinking first? 

0:02:28.3 EA: I think we're gonna start today off with a little bit of pomegranate Mead if Nick, if you wanna get that poured up, and I'll start talking about it.

0:02:36.1 LB: I'm showing it off.

0:02:37.4 EA: Oh, it's beautiful.

0:02:40.0 AVV: Oh sexy.

0:02:40.1 EA: It's a nice, deep red color, almost a violet, if I could tell the difference between those, and it's got a little bit of carbonation to it and kinda just start off with mead in general, it's fermented honey, so that's where all the good stuff... All the alcohol comes from fermented honey outta there.

0:02:56.0 LB: I just popped the cap off and it smells so good.

0:03:00.9 EA: It's kind of dangerous stuff, this one's about 13% alcohol, and it goes down like a fruit juice, so you just think you're drinking juice and then all of a sudden your couch is on fire, you don't know where your pants are. It's crazy.

0:03:11.5 LB: This sounds fun.

0:03:12.3 AVV: That happens when I drink Kool-Aid anyway, so.

0:03:16.0 EA: So a little bit of carbonation in this one, we use a forced carbonation method, we don't do any sort of like letting the yeast do their natural carbonation, it's really hard in brewing to get that carbonation right. If you just let the yeast do their thing, you usually end up with explosive bottles, so we just force carbonate that guy in there, and it's a nice juicy pomegranate flavor. A lot of the pomegranates come right out of Arizona. We try to use as much in the way of local fruit as we can, all the honey comes locally from about just a few miles south of where our production studio is here.

0:03:44.9 LB: Wow, that is so cool. To be hyper-local with how you make your mead. That's amazing.

0:03:50.7 EA: We're trying to support our local beekeepers as much as possible, and we're going through 3000 pounds plus of honey every month right now, so we're doing a good job trying to support those local beekeepers.

0:04:00.9 LB: Whoa, 3000 pounds.

0:04:02.0 EA: Yeah, yeah. Fair amount of honey.

0:04:03.3 LB: That's a lot of honey. How much honey would you say goes into making your 500 ml bottle? 

0:04:09.2 EA: It'll have about a quarter to a half a pound of honey depending on just how sweet we want it to end up being. Finishing sugar on this one, is sitting... We use sg, which is like standard gravity as a measurement for it, and then it's sitting about 10.14, 10.12, but if you put a soda like a Coke on to standard gravity, you'd be at like 10.45 or something like that. So it's not as sweet as people think it is, I think a lot of times people think it's more sweet than it is because of honey, we're just associating with the smells and the flavor, we associate with that sweetness, but most of the sugar has been fermented out into delicious, delicious alcohol.

0:04:46.9 LB: Yeah, this tastes so lovely, I think, just like you were saying, Evan, when I first heard about mead and I thought, it's just gonna be thick and sweet, I don't know if I'm gonna like that, and the first bottle of mead I had, it was like it was nothing like what I had envisioned at all. To me, this pomegranate, it's amazing.

0:05:04.3 EA: I'm glad to hear you say that, that's a huge component of what we wanted to get across to people was that... 'cause a lot of the commercial meads that are out there are thick, syrupy you could eat them with a spoon, and we wanted something that after you had a little tiny taster of, you're like, Oh, can I get an adult-sized glass of that? Do you have it in pints? 

0:05:21.8 LB: So how big of bottles can we really get? 

0:05:26.0 AVV: Before I drink this, I just have to confess that this is my first ever mead. Oh my God, it's so good.

0:05:33.7 LB: It is, isn't it? 

0:05:33.8 AVV: You guys, I was really worried.

0:05:37.3 LB: What were you thinking Anna, before you tried it? 

0:05:40.5 AVV: No, I was just worried I was gonna hate it, and then I gotta drink three of these and I act like I love it 'cause I don't. No, it's really good. Oh my gosh, I think I was imagining maybe like a flavored beer, 'cause sometimes you get a fruity beer or something that's flavored in that way, but this is its own thing.

0:05:58.1 NI: That's a big part of what we wanna, again, show people through Drinking Horn is that it is its own thing, people call it honey wine or like you said, maybe they think it's gonna be flavored like beer, but... Yeah, mead is a category all to itself. For sure.

0:06:10.6 LB: Cool. Y'all, this is dangerous. I'm like looking at the other two bottles and then this one, I'm scared.

0:06:18.2 AVV: Yeah. My immediate thought was, I'm in trouble. It's only 2:42 in Los Angeles right now, guys. So this might be what I'm doing for the rest of the day.

0:06:28.1 NI: How many times that's happened? Yes.

0:06:30.6 EA: You're gonna get to experience some of those better qualities of mead where you get done with this, you'll probably be feeling pretty good after three different meads, and you just drink a little water and you sober like you never even drank. It's fantastic.

0:06:42.1 LB: Amazing.

0:06:43.7 AVV: Well, before we dive into talking deep about mead, why don't you guys tell our listeners a little bit about your show.

0:06:49.8 NI: One of the main components that we kinda just discussed was trying to get the word out there about mead and what mead can be, and so a platform like a podcast, I feel like can be a great avenue to not only just reaching people, but maintaining their interest and telling new fans even more and deeper things about it. What I love about the Mead Cast is it's not just about one subject, not just about mead, but we can also dive into bees and honey, the ingredients, there is so much to talk about, as you guys already know about bees and honey, and then we've got our other component, since we have the Mead Hall and we are drinking Horn.

0:07:26.4 NI: We pull from the Norse part of the culture of mead, and so we get to talk about awesome Viking stuff as well, like the mythology, and you guys talked about the mead of poetry, that's just one story that kinda gives you a taste, a taste of the mead culture that's enveloped in those stories. Yeah, so the Mead Cast is not only just an avenue to educate people, but to be completely honest, it's a way that me and Evan can chill out from work, and even though it is still work and drink a couple of glasses of mead and hang out and talk about some cool stuff. And so, yeah, that's our mead cast in a nutshell or in a hive, if you will, it's bees, honey, mead and cool Viking stuff.

0:08:10.8 LB: Love it.

0:08:10.8 AVV: Love it, we are going to wear out the pun bell today, guys, it got a work out in our honey episode, but today, the poor thing's gonna be begging for breaking.

0:08:21.9 LB: That was awesome, Nick. So thanks for telling us and our listeners all about the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, and for the folks in your hive, just a little bit about Every Day is a Food Day, Anna and I love to talk about stories, scandals, holidays and heroes, all behind our favorite foods, everything from French fries to popcorn to apple pie and to honey, which is how we got here today, and Anna actually has a fun story of how we connected with you all.

0:08:47.7 AVV: Yeah, so if you're a long-time Food Day listener and you listened to the honey episode. I gave a shout out to these guys. So one of the things that we love to talk about, Lia mentioned food scandals is food scandals and food crimes and people, there are so many of them. You would not believe we've talked about things like in our fruit cake episode, there was an accountant at a fruit cake company in Texas that embezzled $13 million in fruit cake money.

0:09:15.5 EA: I didn't even know people bought that much fruit cake.

0:09:18.3 LB: Oh, they buy a lot of fruit cake.

0:09:21.0 AVV: People buy a lot of fruit cake. We also did an episode about poisonous foods and talked about famous poisonings throughout history, again, there are so many, and then kind of the mac daddy of all food crimes is the great maple syrup heist, which we talked about the maple syrup episode, which if you don't know, some sketchy people over the course of a year, stole hundreds of thousands of gallons of maple syrup from the Canadian strategic maple reserve warehouses in Montreal, all of which is a real thing. So I had heard a story about the hive heists, about people stealing other people's hives, Beekeeper on beekeeper crime, and I went to look a little deeper into that for researching the episode to come up with the topic, and there were so many bee and honey crimes, I couldn't believe it. There's the honey laundering. Again, respect whoever came up with that term, respect.

0:10:13.2 LB: A government worker come up with that.

0:10:15.9 AVV: A government worker earned their pension, that's what our tax dollars are being used for. Brainstorming epic food puns, and smuggling, the hive heists, all kinds of things. And so I was doing research for that, I listen to a whole bunch of podcasts and I just loved the Mead Cast, I thought you guys were the most well-researched, you're super sincere because your hearts are so much in this, and it was entertaining. So I went to your website and the first thing I see was it said, "Pleased to mead you," and I was like, "Oh. Oh, these are our people."

0:10:49.4 EA: Puns of steel.

0:10:52.8 LB: Oh yes, love it.

0:10:52.8 AVV: So reached out to you guys and you checked us out, and we connected, so I gotta ask, what did you guys think of our honey episode? 

0:11:00.6 NI: Embarrassingly, you guys did way more research and in-depth education than we did, so I was actually on a run while I was listening to that and I just kept rewinding and being like, "I didn't know that." There was definitely a lot of... You guys dig in deep, and that's what I'm... I'm glad we connected because I found you guys' podcast and it's... I don't know, it's awesome. I can sit here and talk about how genuine you guys are and how much research you do, and it's a joy to listen to and you're entertaining, and not all podcasts... Everyone does a podcast. Right, not all of them are that good. And you guys' it just, I don't know, I love it, it's great. I know there was a lot about the heists and those crimes that we didn't look into a lot of the details that you went into there. And so that was one of the things they caught my attention was that there is even more than me and Evan discovered, you guys dug even deeper into there and found more of these big numbers and money or honey laundering rather, things that are going on.

0:11:55.4 NI: And so it's just, it's amazing. It is really kind of mind-blowing how lucrative crimes with honey can be and bees, crimes with bees, not just the honey but stealing the bees, and some of the things you were talking about with the bee keeper on beekeeper crime was really interesting, and when you talked about not being able to tell whether it's a bee keeper's bees or not, 'cause they're in a bee suit so you can't identify them, you're like, Oh, that must be Charlie over there with his bees, and meanwhile it's like John instead of Charlie and he's heisting them, so I thought that was really...

0:12:28.7 AVV: Beekeeper John again.

0:12:31.6 NI: Right, man, old John.

0:12:33.9 EA: It's not that big of a community either, as Nick was saying like, you guys did a lot of research into just figuring out how much of that stuff is going on, and there's not that many beekeepers, so it's a good chance that it really is somebody that they know each other and they're like, Oh yeah, your hives are over in the southern almond field right now, are they? Okay, thank you. You're not gonna be there for a week. Excellent.

0:12:55.8 LB: You're going out of town? 

0:12:57.5 AVV: It almost feels like an Agatha Christie, like the thief is in the room. You have beekeeper convention, beekeeper meetings. It's one of these people, who's it gonna be? 

0:13:10.9 NI: If you're in a convention and you look around, there's a whatever percentage chance that someone in there is a thief. I never thought about that. Man, you really gotta bee careful out there.

0:13:21.3 LB: Now, I feel like we're just giving you guys nightmares.

0:13:24.5 EA: Yeah, I'm gonna be picking up honey tomorrow, I'm gonna be like eyeballing the beekeeper, "Are these all really your bees? Are they though?"

0:13:34.8 AVV: So in the episode, I predicted that your Ren Faire costumes are on point. Are your Ren Faire costumes in fact, on point? Because I may or may not have seen a YouTube video that involved costumes.

0:13:47.7 EA: I wouldn't say they're fully on point, to be honest with you, just because we thought they were on point until we started doing some of these festivals and things like that, and you get to really see some of these people that build their own chain mail and all this stuff, and sitting there knitting all of the metal pieces together into full suits and...

0:14:06.5 AVV: Forging their own weapons and...

0:14:08.8 EA: Yeah, so we have a decent set up for sure, mostly 'cause Nick likes to do all those videos and it's good for advertising and it's fun too. Our Killing Them with Kindness series, we're always trying to promote people just being nice to each other, there's a lot of mean folk in the world, we wanna promote niceness and mead.

0:14:26.2 LB: That's awesome.

0:14:26.4 AVV: No room for mean with mead.

0:14:30.7 LB: You're not officially in that society of creative anachronists? 

0:14:34.3 EA: No, no, they do take over the Mead Hall periodically especially...

0:14:38.6 LB: Do they? 

0:14:39.3 EA: Yeah, now that the weather is getting warmer out there, they come every Sunday and they pretty much take up the whole long table, which fits like 25-30 people, and they're all dressed up in garb, and it's a pretty fun time. People come in the front door and they like bang on the table and go, and it startles the crap out of people, and it's... It's pretty fun. But then if somebody's leaving I'll go and they turn around and they buy another bottle before they leave, so it helps us out too. It's good.

0:15:06.3 LB: That's wonderful.

0:15:06.6 AVV: You've got your very own LARPers.

0:15:10.6 EA: Yeah, pretty much.

[music]

0:15:16.2 AVV: Alright well now that we're warmed up and we've got some mead in us, why don't, Evan, you tell us all about your journey to a meadery.

0:15:22.9 EA: Yeah, so I started as a... Well. I guess started out... Started out as a baby, but I was a fish biologist before I started the meadery, I kind of was looking for a different job, I've got two kids, and at the time they were pretty young, and I got really tired of hearing the, Oh, do you remember when... No, you weren't there. Do you remember when... You weren't there. 'Cause my job as a fish biologist kept me away in the field for months at a time sometimes, and you literally start ending up feeling more comfortable sleeping on the sand than you do in a bed, and it starts to get a little weird. So I was looking for a change in career, and when my wife and I got married, I wanted to be a little romantic and bust out a whole bunch of mead because the word honeymoon is tied in with mead, you're supposed to have enough honey wine to last a moon cycle.

0:16:06.6 EA: Yeah, there's a lot of history, as you guys have found, there's a ton of history of mead sort of sprinkled throughout our culture, and I wanted to just sort of express my romantic side, it's not my best side, I'm working on it. And we made a whole bunch of mead for the wedding, and when folks came out, they drank all the mead and didn't touch any of the beer, we had three kegs of beer from one of the local breweries and nobody drank any of it, and they were coming back the next day after the wedding, and they're like, You got any more that mead stuff, and so I was like, Well maybe this something.

0:16:32.9 AVV: Were you and your wife like, "We're busy."

0:16:34.5 EA: Yeah, seriously, yeah.

0:16:36.7 AVV: Come back in a week, God.

0:16:38.5 EA: Why are you knocking, this is the day after I got married, I'm not supposed to have to wear pants today, get away from here. We started making mead. I never had any sort of design to really do anything besides just make mead and sell it at wholesale, and that changed the first time around when Guy Fieri came into our place and did his show here.

CLIP:

0:16:58.1 Guy Fiere: This Guy's Family Road Trip. It's gonna be a wild ride. While the boys are hanging out with their new friends. Lori and I are gonna go check out Drinking Horn Meadery. I don't have any clue what a meadery is. All I know is that they're making some kind of booze, it's something different and something funky, and we're all gonna figure out what this is at the same time. Turns out, mead is honey wine. Evan and Kelly Anderson make seven different kinds.

0:17:29.8 EA: He came in here, we're like the last five minutes, we were only supposed to be a 30-second piece on there, and when he started trying the mead, he kinda had the same initial reaction that you guys did, where it was like, I've heard of it, I heard about it in Game of Thrones, maybe or Vikings or one of those things, but I had never actually tasted it. And once he started drinking it, he really enjoyed it, and he's like, Well, when this goes live, you gotta have a taproom where people can drink this stuff, and you gotta have online sales and you gotta have all this other stuff, so we initially started setting things up and building it, and it's just kinda... At first you have to push the business and push, push, push, push, and now it's like I'm grabbing the tiger by the tail and just trying to hold on.

0:18:09.1 LB: That's awesome, but I think it just goes to show, people enjoyed the mead from the first sip and they wanted more, and you were kind enough to deliver and create your meadery and build this.

0:18:21.7 EA: Yeah, it was fun. Nick actually was a huge part in helping me get started with stuff, like I said, I originally, I had no idea what I was doing, and I thought I would have a... You guys can see the production here behind me, but I thought I would have just a library of carboys, which is the big glass fermenting vessel that most people use, people even making kombucha and stuff use it, it's just a big fermenting glass vessel. And I thought I would have a library of those and just be making it on a much smaller scale. Nick Irvine there, talked me into getting a conical steel fermenter, and then the guy we bought fermenters from, got me to buy a four barrel and so it just kind of same thing, I just sort of kept growing and growing and growing.

0:18:58.7 EA: We opened up the Mead Hall in September 2019, thinking that 2020 was just gonna be awesome, and 2020 was what 2020 was. And we made our way through that though, and got it all built out and it gave us a lot of extra time with the shut down and everything to be able to kinda put some of our own fine tuning touches on it, the whole facade on the bar is all bee hives on it, it's really fun, made all the bar top myself and a bunch of the tables and stuff, and so it was a lot of fun building everything out.

0:19:28.9 AVV: Whoa, and I have read that part of what started the engine revving on mead in the last decade or so, was shows like Game of Thrones or Viking. Have you noticed a correlation between that kind of pop culture aspect of it? 

0:19:42.9 EA: Oh, absolutely, there's been meaderies around for nearly 20, 30 years or something like that, and it's just never been very popular at all, but it's kind of... It's in the zeitgeist right now, people are thinking about it, and so it definitely helps sort of push things forward, and we've just been trying to kinda be in front of that wave and ride it and not let it plow us over.

0:20:01.1 AVV: And so we're drinking a pomegranate mead, and we've got a couple more options. How do you make a pomegranate mead or a mango mead or an any kind of mead? 

0:20:09.1 EA: Very slowly. So beer is made in about two weeks, you can go from an idea to actually being able to drink it, and with mead, when I was making it at home, it was a year, year and a half that it would take to make something to actually get it all the way through to the point that you wanted somebody to drink it, 'cause there's definitely a bit of aging that needs to happen with it, when it's really fresh, it can kinda taste like something you might use to power your vehicle. It takes a good bit of time. So with the commercial equipment, we've been able to refine that and get it down a whole lot further, but we're still sitting... Shortest time is probably three months or so, and it all starts with just mixing honey, water and yeast together, we definitely try to make a product that doesn't have all kinds of extra junk in it.

0:20:48.5 EA: So we didn't wanna use sulfites, we didn't wanna use sorbates, we didn't wanna use any of those chemical preservatives to make a shelf-stable product, and so we came up with a filter system to allow us to bring it down to shelf stability and get all the yeast out without having to deal with any of the chemicals that go into it. So you just basically mix up honey, water and yeast, you stick it into one of these big shiny steel tanks and you let it sit there for about three weeks, it takes to ferment, and then all the rest of the work after that is kinda back end work, but you have to try to cold crash them, which just gets the density to sort of work itself out so that all of the solids become the most dense thing within the container and they settle out to the bottom and then you end up moving it from one container to another, to get it off of that sediment, otherwise you'll end up with a mead that tastes a lot like bread, which everybody's got their own palette, I'm not here to yuck any yums.

0:21:35.2 LB: Is that bad? I mean I love bread.

0:21:37.7 EA: Some of them are great when they taste like bread, we have a super dry plum mead that has a very yeasty component to it, and people love the taste of it.

0:21:44.8 AVV: Gotta be careful about those barrels though guys.

[music]

0:21:47.8 S?: That's a call back.

0:21:50.8 NI: That's a call back.

0:21:52.4 AVV: We need you guys to come up with your version of the call back.

0:21:55.8 NI: That's a call back. Sorry.

0:21:58.5 LB: I think that that's perfect. So Evan, it sounds like making mead requires a lot of patience, that wait seems pretty long, do you taste throughout as you're waiting to get your final product, are you tasting it? 

0:22:12.0 EA: Every day, continuous tasting. Yeah, it's something that you never really know exactly what you're gonna end up with, especially when you're making something that's brand new, like that, the mango reaper that we're gonna be having later is something that was a brand new mead to make on a big scale like that. And you just... It's always hard because we'll make little batches of things, but when you scale up from five gallons to nearly 200, it's hard to know exactly how all those flavors are gonna play together, 'cause just like cooking like none of the flavors are linear as you increase it in size. So it's a little bit of work sometimes to try to re-arrange and get those things, but you're always tasting it throughout, and you have to be able to taste it and envision not just what it tastes like, but what is it gonna taste like, and so you get good at picking out the sort of flavors of a clean fermentation and a healthy fermentation, 'cause you wanna minimally stress out your yeast, making alcohol is all about point stresses for the yeast, you want them to only be lacking oxygen and have everything else they need.

0:23:09.7 AVV: What flavors have you tried to make that just did not work? That you had to abandon halfway through like, there's no way this is gonna be quaffable at the end of this process.

0:23:19.6 EA: I tried to make a yellow watermelon mead, I'm never gonna make it again. People are probably gonna hear it on this cast and they're be like, "Oh yeah, that sounds delicious." I'm like, No, it's not. It wasn't very good because the yellow watermelons don't... Like I was looking for that juicy red, it's summer time, I'm biting into a slice of watermelon taste, but I thought using the yellow ones would just be kind of unique and different from what else was out there, yellow watermelons tastes like cantaloupe. It was a cantaloupe mead.

0:23:47.4 LB: What a bummer.

0:23:49.3 AVV: You should have used honeydew.

0:23:53.5 EA: Honey has such like a gentle characteristics to it, it goes on so many things, it goes on everything from sweets to barbecue, to everything else, the fermentation process doesn't end up providing much in the way of tannins or bitterness, and so it's really... You can make just about anything into a mead. I was contemplating a tomato mead just yesterday, I don't know if we'll actually do it, but.

0:24:16.1 LB: Well, that was something I'm curious about too. When you're sourcing your honey, are you looking for specific ones where people have their hives and what sorts of fields their hives are in? 

0:24:24.7 EA: Yeah, absolutely. Varietals of honey are extremely important and really kind of big in the mead world for sure, as well as in the culinary world too, here in the south west, we have mesquite honey, which is pretty unique to the area and it just is from the blossoms out from a mesquite tree, and it kind of... We actually have a whole bunch of it in barrels that I'm actually hanging out right next to right now, but it gives it like a very kind of smoky almost flavor to it. We use a lot of orange blossom honey, so that's like kind of our main go-to is the orange blossom honey, and it all comes out of what's called Black Canyon, it's just North of Phoenix down there where they have a bunch of orange orchards, and orange blossom honey is one of the few honeys that actually tastes like its name sake.

0:25:03.0 EA: So lavender honey doesn't taste like lavender, Clover honey doesn't really taste like Clover, but at the same time, just like with the honey laundering and everything else people put whatever label they want on things, 'cause honey isn't a highly regulated industry at this point. You have to take everything that somebody calls a honey with a bit of grain of salt, if somebody tries to sell you organic honey, you should probably be a little skeptical about it, because a normal beehive, the bees that are coming in and out and working, the worker girls there. That sounds terrible. The worker bees.

0:25:35.9 LB: Those working girls.

0:25:36.9 EA: Those working girls.

0:25:39.9 AVV: We're keeping it, leave it in.

0:25:40.3 EA: They have a five-mile radius around the hive, so they can be traveling a huge range, and unless you have your bees in a warehouse, you wouldn't be able to tell what the bees are actually going after, and it takes some two million visits to a flower to make a pound of honey, so it's really hard to be able to tell what exactly your bees are going for. So we've had some orange blossom that ends up tasting a little minty 'cause there was a bunch of mint that was flowering near it, and they were going after that. Sometimes it can be a little spicy or peppery, but it's one of the things that's great about this size of batch that we're currently making, once you get much above this, you're using so many different honeys that it starts to homogenize that flavor and you're not necessarily getting some of the small nuances that you do with smaller batches.

0:26:23.4 LB: That's cool.

0:26:24.6 AVV: And have you ever kept your own bees, raised your own bees, created your own honey? 

0:26:28.5 EA: We sure do.

0:26:30.1 AVV: I guess they create the honey, you just steal it.

0:26:30.2 EA: Yeah, we're just honey thieves. We're just honey thieves. But yeah we do. We have a few hives down in Camp Verde that we use mostly for educational purposes for stuff, just like we were talking about with the Mead Cast. We do a bunch of YouTube videos and stuff too and just try to educate people about bees, and so we use those hives for that, we tried to keep bees up here in Flagstaff and it really just didn't work and people are like... Because of the cold winters, and it was actually no, because we get so many warm days in between our cold days up here, as soon as it gets above 45 degrees, your bees are gonna start hopping out flying around looking for food. We can get days in January where it's negative six, we can also get days in January where it's nearly 60, and as soon as it gets warm, bees come out and start flying around, there's nothing for them to eat, and so we would end up having to feed them a bunch of sugar water up here, which... Yeah, exactly. You don't wanna make mead with sugar water, then I might as well just be like fermenting the canned sugar. It's gross.

0:27:28.0 AVV: Well this pomegranate is great. But what else do you got? Let's crack open mead number two.

0:27:35.0 NI: Let's crack open mead number two. Number two is gonna be our lemon ginger, which just came out recently, and it is another just kind of representative of a different style of what you can get through mead, and Evan is running over right now. Thank you, sir. Oh, I gotta finish this one first.

0:28:00.0 EA: Drink up.

0:28:00.5 NI: There we go. And lemon ginger used to be my favorite.

0:28:02.8 LB: Oh, used to be.

0:28:04.2 NI: Used to be, yes, and we will be drinking my favorite after this one.

0:28:07.2 AVV: Spoilers. I love a lemon ginger kombucha, so I'm really excited about this.

0:28:14.9 NI: Nice, now I'm nervous.

0:28:17.0 LB: Again, I'm just hit with the smell and already... It's so bright.

0:28:22.3 EA: We kicked up the ginger in this batch, so some of our seasonals only come out once.

0:28:26.8 AVV: This'll wake you up.

0:28:27.9 LB: I love this.

0:28:29.4 AVV: This feels like a breakfast mead.

0:28:29.5 NI: With lemon and ginger, it's practically a health drink. And honey.

0:28:34.1 AVV: Right, got a sore throat, hello.

0:28:36.5 LB: I feel so good right now.

0:28:38.6 NI: You were talking about the sore throat right now, one of the great things I like to do, it's warming up around us right now, but in the winter time, a great thing about mead is that you can also have it heated up, so we will take our apple mead or we've got one called Metheglin, which is orange peel, black tea and cinnamon and heat that up on the stove, and then you could throw in a little whiskey or bourbon in there, a little shot if you want to also, but it is such a great beverage, depending on the style, I wouldn't necessarily warm up pomegranate, but yeah, apple, lemon ginger, even the traditional... Oh, the mango reaper maybe, and mix it with some kind of tea as well, is a great way to drink it. I feel like it is, and we have a lot of customers. We always have two cocktails or mead mixers at the mead Hall, and one is hot and one is cold at least through the spring, through the fall season, and people love those hot mead mixers.

0:29:31.2 LB: Yeah, I saw on the label that it said, This is delicious with hot tea too, so I am definitely going to try that.

0:29:38.2 AVV: I think I know what I'm leaving out for Santa to this year.

0:29:44.0 LB: Santa's so lucky.

0:29:44.1 AVV: Warm apple cinnamon mead.

0:29:47.9 NI: So what do you guys think about that lemon ginger.

0:29:49.7 AVV: God, it's so good. It's got a real kick.

0:29:51.8 LB: This is awesome. I am a ginger fan. Well I love lemon, I love ginger, I love alcohol. So it's perfect.

0:30:00.7 NI: The trifecta has been hit.

0:30:01.5 AVV: These are a few of her favorite things.

0:30:04.8 NI: These are a few of my favorite things.

0:30:06.8 AVV: I've got lemon in my ice water over here, so I'm like already primed. Oh man, I need to slow down though, guys, 'cause I'm gonna be three sheets to the wind by the time we get to my section and I'm gonna be like, Gods and stuff.

0:30:23.8 LB: I remember, Nick, you were telling us at one point that you could have a bunch of mead one night, but still be able to get up early the next morning and go for a run and not feel like, Oh, this is gonna be tough.

0:30:32.9 NI: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah talking about some of the health benefits, or not claims, you can't claim health benefits, but some of the better things that I've experienced and a lot of people have experienced with mead, one of those, Yes, is that there is a thing called congeners, which are basically... It's a fancy word for saying stuff in your drink, and so there are very limited... We talked about it's just water, yeast and honey, and then obviously whatever, like fruits and stuff like that they put in it. And so there is very limited things for your body to deal with, number one, and so the processing of it is a lot tamer on your body and then also, we've evolved as a species with honey for a lot of that time, bees were around a long time, agriculture with grains and grapes and large quantities, that wasn't around, and so our bodies may just be kinder to this.

0:31:20.1 NI: And so I've definitely found anecdotally, I get a certain level of buzz on, having a good time and I start worrying 'cause I'm supposed to get up and do something, but that alarm goes off and as long as I've had a couple of glasses of water, it's crazy almost to the point of like, did I actually drink that much mead the night before, whereas I can do that with beer or whiskey, and I'm just kinda like, Oh man. Snooze button, Snooze button. So anyway, I think it is just kinder to the body. We've evolved with it. It's a simple drink. One of our mottos is live simply drink simply. And so we really take that to heart with this product, and that goes into not adding sulfites and sulfates as well. I know that can have an effect on people, and so by Evan creating this production protocol that takes that out of the equation, man, it not only tastes better, but I know my body is happier having that.

0:32:13.2 NI: And then just... I mean, the honey, we all have heard the benefits of honey as an anti-inflammatory kind of thing, I wanna get this out to all you people out there, all you people out there, all the party people, actually, not the party people, all the people out there running long distances, mountain biking, climbing, doing big hikes, backpacking, that kind of thing. I wanna put it out to you guys that the anti-inflammatory properties in honey come through in this mead, and it is a great recovery beverage. People talk about beer as a great recovery beverage and yeah, it's got this carbohydrate kind of balance, but oh my gosh, mead as a recovery beverage for athletes, at least those who might have a drink after a big push, big thumbs up for me, I wanna get that word out there.

0:32:52.9 LB: You gotta start doing some mead runs then, I always... I have friends who always do beer runs where they're doing some kind of like half marathon or 5K, and then it always ends up at a brewery and it sounds like we need to have more mead runs, I might start running.

[laughter]

0:33:07.4 AVV: This sounds like a great way to incentivize people to start running, 'cause I know personally, I have a rule that I only run if something's chasing me.

0:33:13.5 NI: Me too.

0:33:15.0 AVV: But if I knew that it ended in one of these meads, I'd think about it. I'd think about it.

0:33:21.0 EA: I'm with you, I run for fear and fear alone.

0:33:25.2 NI: It doesn't have to be running.

0:33:27.3 LB: Well, I love seeing too. Like mead it's gluten-free. Right, that's something that I have been seeing a lot of with my snack company Yumday, is the desire and the want for more gluten-free snack products, gluten-free foods. And so, I love this, this is such a great alternative for folks who are trying to have gluten-free diets.

0:33:44.6 NI: Yep, absolutely 100% gluten-free through the whole process, there is a way that beers can become gluten reduced, but this is 100% gluten free all the way through, yeah, you don't have the inflammation potentially from the grains, so. Yeah, it's awesome.

0:33:55.8 EA: Unless we barrel age it, a lot of times, if we're barrel aging, we're putting it into a barrel that's had whiskey or whatever in it beforehand, and so then you can pick up some gluten in the barrel aged stuff, but the majority of our mead isn't barrel aged, and so it's just naturally gluten-free, easy drinking.

0:34:11.8 AVV: I'm telling you the barrels, they're nothing but trouble, between all the food crimes and all the true crime and Breaking Bad where people are just getting dissolved in barrels, I'm just like barrels equal shady shit. That's it.

0:34:29.3 NI: Which episode of you guys' is that that people and listeners can go right to, if all of a sudden they wanna hear about this shady barrel stuff.

0:34:36.5 AVV: The maple syrup episode is where the barrel paranoia started.

0:34:40.7 NI: Barrel paranoia. I love it.

0:34:42.5 AVV: Yeah, and then it just keeps creeping up.

0:34:48.1 LB: It's weird. It's always barrels now.

0:34:48.6 AVV: Always barrels. And then, of course, the honey episode barrels play a big part.

0:34:53.2 EA: It's making me nervous now. I keep looking over my shoulder at these barrels. I'm worried that they're creeping up on me.

0:34:57.9 LB: You gotta install some more cameras.

0:35:01.9 EA: That barrel's closer to me, what the heck happened.

[music]

0:35:08.7 AVV: In our honey episode, we talked a lot about how there are several crops that are actually kinda hurtful for bees, lack of biodiversity, monoculture, things like almonds, and so that is hurting the bees and therefore creating bigger climate crises or bigger environmental crises. How do you find mead affects the environment as opposed to beer or something else? 

0:35:30.7 EA: Minimal effect, I mean, compared to some of the other beverages, and one of the biggest components of that, and I think one of the bigger components moving forward that people are gonna start thinking more and more about, is water consumption and beer is the least of some of the other ones, but if for a liter of beer, you're looking at close to 300 liters of water to make that liter of beer, and that includes both all of the production, the brewing, all of that stuff as well as the upstream costs of actually growing that grain and that's where that huge number comes in, wine's even worse. I think wine is sitting somewhere between 7 and 8 hundred liters of water for a liter of wine, with mead, we don't have to water our bees. You're mostly trying to protect them from other bee thieves, that's your biggest component there.

0:36:13.4 AVV: They prefer you don't water them I bet.

0:36:16.8 EA: They do prefer it. They tend to just drown. So it's... You definitely don't wanna water them. Definitely don't wanna... I learned that, I learned it. No, our bees are fine. They're good and dry. Don't worry. So for mead, you're looking at somewhere between three and four liters of water to make a liter of mead. And if you drink a liter of mead, you have probably... At least of our mead, you have drank too much mead.

0:36:41.0 LB: That's incredible, that gap in water use for mead versus beer and then wine and distilled. Oh my gosh, that's crazy.

0:36:48.5 EA: It's huge.

0:36:49.6 AVV: Yeah, it makes sense if you don't have to grow grain in order to make it, but I wouldn't have thought about it unless you pointed it out.

0:36:54.5 EA: Bees are used very commonly for a whole lot of pollination factor, where they're just like you guys talked about, but you don't need that for them, you can just have bees out in the middle of the desert and they collect plenty of honey. It just makes life a whole lot more environmentally sound when you don't have to worry about that water component, especially in the year like it is right here where we're... Arizona is going into deeper and deeper water restrictions with Lake Powell and Lake Mead hitting all-time record lows on stuff, so it's gonna become more important as things move forward. And I'm hoping people start to think about that, 'cause if you decide to drink mead instead of drinking beer, that means you can have a 30-minute shower and still feel good about yourself. It's beautiful.

0:37:33.0 LB: I like it.

0:37:34.5 AVV: Drink mead, smell better.

0:37:36.0 LB: Sip sustainably.

0:37:39.4 EA: We definitely play off the Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy sort of thing, and we have a Save Water, Drink Mead.

0:37:45.8 AVV: Love it.

0:37:47.3 LB: Beautiful.

0:37:48.4 EA: We made T-shirts.

0:37:50.5 NI: We made T-shirts. Yeah.

0:37:50.6 AVV: Alright, that was great, guys. I feel good from the buzz of the mead, and I feel good about myself for drinking this mead.

0:37:56.8 EA: Bees do make the best buzz.

0:37:56.9 AVV: Well played.

[music]

0:38:17.9 NI: So on me and Evan's Drinking Horn Mead Cast, we definitely talk a lot about the Vikings and the Norse culture and some of that stuff. But bees are all over the world. And so there are stories that abound through all cultures, and I know that's y'all's specialty is looking at that, so are there any cool stories about bees around the world or mead mythology around the world? 

0:38:39.4 AVV: So many. In fact, the bar was set pretty high for mead since I had spent all this time researching that it was the nectar of the gods, that there was rivers of it running through heaven, that it was... The bar was set pretty high, you guys, so I appreciate you meading it, meeting it with your mead, but yes, on Food Day, we talk a lot about foods that are... They're kind of in the "Everybody's got a version," category. So again, fruit cake, every culture has some version of cake with fruit in it, or like a dessert bread with fruit in it. Another is hand pies. We talked about this in the take-out episode, I believe.

0:39:16.0 LB: Yeah, I mean, it's a container...

0:39:18.2 AVV: Exactly.

0:39:18.3 LB: Made of food.

0:39:20.6 AVV: Whether it's an empanada or a pierogi or a turnover, every culture has some version of a hand pie, and mead, some kind of fermented honey drink, totally falls into that category of everybody has a version of mead, there's evidence of honey in ancient cultures in China, India, Greece, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Wales, you name it. We're familiar with the Northern European version, which is kind of what we've been talking about. So I was gonna tell you about a couple of others that I thought were really interesting. So one is an East African version called Tej. Have you guys ever had Tej? 

0:39:53.6 EA: Absolutely, with a little bit of gesho root in there.

0:39:56.2 AVV: Yes, exactly.

0:39:58.4 LB: What? Tell me more.

0:40:01.0 AVV: It's from Ethiopia and also drunk in Eritrea, which is just north of Ethiopia, and it's honey, water and gesho, a medicinal herb that gives it a funk, makes it a little funky. It has the look and consistency of orange juice, so it must be a little less filtered than what you guys are making.

0:40:18.4 EA: A little pulpy.

0:40:19.4 AVV: A little puppy, but it's also ancient, so the oldest evidence of mead comes from places like India and China, from something insane like 40,000 years ago, which I have no reference point for. I'm American, 100 years is a really long time. So let's just say it's super old, and researchers have found evidence of Tej being drunk and used in rituals during excavations in a city called Aksum, which was the capital of the ancient Aksumite empire that existed from 80 BC to 825 AD. That's not quite 40,000 years ago. But pretty freaking old. Right.

0:40:56.4 NI: Very.

0:40:57.8 EA: That's cool.

0:40:57.9 AVV: Now, prior to the 1900s, Tej was only consumed by the King and anyone who was in his physical presence.

0:41:06.4 LB: Oh, so it was very special.

0:41:06.5 AVV: You wanted to get on his calendar so that you could have some Tej. And it was only produced in the houses of the ruling classes, and honey was actually so valuable in Ethiopia that at one point it was used to pay taxes and rent, it was actually currency, they relaxed a little bit, so it's now made and drunk by pretty much everyone and has become officially the country's national drink. As I was reading about it, it reminded me of Ginjinha, which is something we talked about in our Portuguese food episode. So Ginjinha is a liquer made from fermented sour cherries, and it's kind of like their official drink and you can both get fancy versions in the gift shops, and everybody's got a jug of hooch Ginjinha under a windowsill somewhere, and the Tej sounded like that a lot too, like you could buy the fancy stuff in the hotel bars, but what you really want is like grandma's jug of Tej, that's like in the back room, right? 

0:42:02.8 NI: That's awesome.

0:42:04.5 AVV: Fermented honey drinks, they're also in the Americas because there's an ancient Mayan version as well. The Mayan civilization dates back to 2000 BC, and Mayan cultural influence still thrives in Mexico, especially in the Yucatan region and beekeeping was very popular, bees were considered sacred and also kind of like part of the family, which is something I also saw in Celtic lore as well, which we'll talk about it in a second. So there was two meadish, mead-adjacent beverages that I discovered. One is called Xtabentún. Sorry, I don't speak Mayan, I speak Spanish, but not Mayan. Xtabentún. Why am I pronouncing it like it's German. Tún. What is happening? 

0:42:46.7 LB: It's in your blood Anna.

0:42:47.6 AVV: It is in my blood.

0:42:50.8 NI: It's got that ish in it.

0:42:53.4 AVV: It's got the Xtabentún. I just put an umlaut over it, I can't help it. So that's a honey drink in the Yucatan and then Balché is a honey fermented with water and the bark of a Balché tree, and sometimes they add psychedelics like mescaline, peyote or mushrooms mixed into it, I'm assuming to just give it a vibe.

0:43:14.6 EA: Gives it that extra little kick to it.

0:43:15.0 AVV: Have a deeper experience.

0:43:19.4 NI: So this is one of the only times I'm actually taking notes for some reason was on that one right there. So okay so Balche... Alright, I got it. Continue.

0:43:29.1 AVV: And valuable consumables, foods, crops that were really, really integral to society there, were considered to be controlled by gods. That's how important they were. So there actually is a Mayan God of bees and honey called Ah Muzen Cab. The images of it are really interesting, it's like a bee with its arms and legs spread out upside down, it looks very, very cool. That's a good segue, that it has a sort of mystical element to it, because mead is so old, fermented honey drinks are so old and they're part of all these ancient civilizations that it ended up in a bunch of their myths. And we actually talked about the Norse myth of the blood of poetry in our honey episode. Lia gave us a great concise and a tilting version, there was a dwarf murder, there was all kinds of just blood drinking. And I know you guys have talked about it a lot on the Mead Cast, so instead of going back over the Norse stuff, we're gonna talk about a few other places in their myths. So the first one is Greek Mythology. We've probably heard the phrase, nectar of the gods.

0:44:33.7 EA: Oh yeah, absolutely.

0:44:34.8 AVV: Yeah, we're talking about mead y'all. Nectar of the gods, mead was thought to be drunk on Mount Olympus by the gods, it was rumored that Aphrodite served it to her lovers.

0:44:47.4 NI: Smart.

0:44:48.7 AVV: Her gentleman callers or whatever she was into that day, I don't know. And because it was the nectar of the gods, it was thought to give you sort of godly attributes, like long life, strength, verily, intelligence, fertility, things like that.

0:45:01.9 LB: Is mead an aphrodisiac? 

0:45:03.4 AVV: Guys? 

0:45:05.3 EA: Yeah, that's part of that whole honeymoon thing, part of the reason it was used in the honeymoon is that mead is supposed to... And this is, I think this was mostly maybe Greek or Norse cultures where I'm pulling this from, but that mead was supposed to help increase virility and fertility, and so that's why you were supposed to drink mead for an entire moon cycle. It helps make the babies.

0:45:27.6 LB: Okay. It's all coming together.

0:45:30.3 AVV: Interesting.

0:45:30.4 NI: That makes me a little skeptical because I'm listening to you guys' deep dive into aphrodisiacs, which I listened to, your episode on that, which is super interesting to hear about how many there are, and I don't know, did you guys say, honey or mead in that whole list, you guys listed something like, it was like 50 different items that were aphrodisiacs, like Pez candy and some stuff like that, I don't know, but.

0:45:52.3 AVV: Yeah, I don't remember if honey or mead was on there, but we might as well tack it on.

0:45:54.0 LB: There we go. Guys, you heard it here first. From Every Day is a Food Day and the Mead Cast.

0:46:02.9 AVV: It's liquid, bubbly Viagra.

0:46:03.8 LB: That's right.

0:46:05.4 AVV: Get in on it.

0:46:05.5 EA: Number 51.

0:46:06.6 NI: There we go. Oh, Evan. Yup, we need to use that. Mead is liquid Viagra, there we go, boom.

0:46:12.1 AVV: You just need to make a blue one.

0:46:13.5 EA: I'm already picturing the most terrible advertisement for it ever, we're definitely gonna get in trouble for it.

0:46:18.4 AVV: But sales will be through the roof. Love it. I mean, if somebody can claim that arugula is an aphrodisiac, I feel like there's carte blanche too to claim mead and honey is as well.

0:46:33.2 NI: There'd be conceptions all over Whole Foods all the time if that was the case.

0:46:38.9 AVV: But this is something I thought was really cool, was they believed that mead sort of descended from Heaven and gathered on the plants, and that's what dew is. And then the bees would gather up the dew, the nectar to be collected and prepared for the humans. So the bees were kind of doing God's work.

0:46:58.9 LB: Dewing God's work.

0:47:00.9 AVV: Yes, Lia, they were dewing God's work.

0:47:04.0 NI: Yes, that was awesome. I love it.

0:47:06.9 AVV: And then once grapes were introduced to Southern Europe, wine became more of a thing, became more of a preferred drink, but mead was so revered and people truly believed that it would bring all of those attributes that even after it was not the most popular drink out there, it stayed part of Greek ceremonies for a very, very long time 'cause it was so revered.

0:47:27.8 EA: Which is kind of interesting because it really just sort of dropped out of our historical reference, there's a ton of old stuff, there's a ton of myths, there's a ton of history, and then at a certain point, whatever Dark Ages-ish somewhere in that realm, it just sort of drops out of history and it's like people just... And I don't know if it was just because grapes were cheaper or grapes were more available. I've heard people say that it's because the wax all of a sudden started becoming more valuable than the honey, and so people were less interested in trying to save the honey and they were more interested in using the wax for candles with the rise of the Catholic Church and that sort of thing, and so we started shifting over to a grape-based beverage instead of the mead.

0:48:05.4 AVV: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think that the place where it stayed more prominent, more popular, more part of the culture, were the places that grapes didn't grow, so like Scandinavia.

0:48:14.7 EA: Absolutely.

[music]

0:48:20.4 NI: And you guys, you talked about the mead of poetry and that kind of Norse myth, but hearing about that mead's got me thirsty for possibly some more of any kind of Northern Europe or Norse culture. Do you have anything else to give us with that? 

0:48:34.8 AVV: Oh yeah, the Celts, the Celts were all about the mead, bees in Celtic culture were seen as being very intelligent and sensitive, and even having souls, they were kind of sentient beings, this is super interesting to me because their myths about bees were very much tied to death, the presence of bee after a death, signified the soul being carried away from the body. In their mythology, honey and mead were actually part of the afterlife, so in Celtic heaven, which is called the other lands or Avalon was believed to have rivers of mead running through Paradise.

0:49:11.4 EA: You think one bottle is dangerous.

0:49:13.2 AVV: Right. I'm just imagining a Willy Wonka situation.

0:49:18.7 NI: Augustus! Augustus! 

0:49:18.8 AVV: With Augustus.

0:49:22.2 LB: Drinking it from the river.

0:49:23.2 AVV: Gets sucked into a tube.

0:49:24.6 NI: Evan, you're getting too far in... Oh, there goes Evan, okay.

0:49:29.0 EA: I had no chance.

0:49:29.9 NI: He's got a smile on his face.

0:49:31.9 EA: Went down happy.

0:49:33.2 AVV: And there was this super fascinating tradition called the telling of the bees. Have you guys ever heard of this? 

0:49:40.2 LB: No.

0:49:40.3 EA: No, I haven't.

0:49:40.4 LB: I've never heard of that.

0:49:41.0 AVV: Okay, so beekeeping, having hives at homes or family farms was very common, and since they were considered sentient and part of the family, it meant that the people who owned them needed to show them respect by telling them news about the family. So any changes, weddings, births, departures, and especially deaths, it was thought that bees were so intelligent and sensitive that they actually mourned, people would actually... I saw etchings and things of people putting black sashes over the hives to indicate that the bees also were in mourning.

0:50:12.8 EA: Do you just tell one bee, or do you try to find the Queen and tell her? Do you whisper it into the front of the hive? Sister died.

0:50:20.0 AVV: They have a PA system.

0:50:22.4 LB: Yeah, tell the one and the one goes back and does their waggle dance to tell the other bees.

0:50:29.2 AVV: Oh no, the saddest waggle dance.

0:50:29.9 LB: The saddest dance. The saddest waggle dance ever.

0:50:34.0 AVV: And if you didn't tell them this, but they found out, they could feel disrespected, they could get angry, and they could either leave, abandon you, there would be colony collapse, or they'd stop producing the honey for you or they'd swarm, they'd attack you, like you went out there in UGG boots.

0:51:00.7 S?: That's a call back.

0:51:02.1 LB: Oh no.

0:51:02.9 EA: That might be why my bees are so angry is I don't tell them enough about what's going on.

0:51:06.1 LB: Evan, you're not telling them? 

0:51:09.3 EA: No, I just go down there and I'm like, What's up bees, and slap them on top of the hive, How you doing? 

0:51:14.3 LB: Maybe it's the hive slapping.

0:51:14.4 AVV: Also maybe it's the slapping they don't like.

0:51:18.3 EA: You might be onto something.

0:51:20.7 NI: Man, I wasn't telling them 'cause I thought you were telling him the family news. And the UGG boots, you're saying UGG boots are not good to have around a hive? 

0:51:29.6 AVV: That was a bit of a call back to the honey episode, you're gonna have to listen for that.

0:51:33.6 EA: Just wear white, don't look like a bear.

0:51:35.2 AVV: White, shiny. You'll be fine. And that practice of the telling of the bees actually continued into the 19th century in Western Europe and in North America.

0:51:45.1 LB: Oh, really? 

0:51:47.1 AVV: Ruh-roh Evan's finished his second one.

0:51:47.4 LB: Oh my.

0:51:49.9 AVV: Okay, there's another Celtic, Celtic-adjacent legend that I thought was interesting of King Llud, so speaking of a river of mead being dangerous.

0:51:58.3 LB: Llud like...

0:52:00.0 AVV: No, it's L-L-U-D, so maybe it's Llud, but now...

0:52:05.8 LB: I like Llud.

0:52:06.7 AVV: I understand that that's the immediate thought. So you know what, let's go with it. Whatever the first image was in your head, I want you to go with it.

0:52:13.8 EA: King no pants.

0:52:15.6 AVV: King inappropriate jokes. So His kingdom was being attacked by dragons, and so what he did is he commanded his armies to dig ditches and fill them with mead, and then the Dragons were attracted to the mead, they landed in the ditches, they drank the mead, they got so inebriated that they fell asleep, and they slept so well that they slept through being bound with fabric and buried in a ditch.

0:52:42.5 EA: That's a true story.

0:52:42.8 LB: I mean, that's where the saying comes from, you can catch more dragons with mead.

0:52:50.1 AVV: Than with plain dirt.

0:52:52.3 NI: That is awesome.

0:52:52.4 AVV: I don't know what it says about me or that my age that I'm getting older or whatever, but my first thought was, God, I would love to sleep that well.

0:53:04.6 LB: Well just keep drinking. Lemon ginger and you're on your way.

0:53:05.8 NI: Yeah you've got a whole another bottle.

0:53:08.2 EA: There's still one more mead to go, you'll see how you sleep, you'll see, you'll see.

0:53:12.5 AVV: Well I'm gonna get through this last myth, this is actually a superstition, and then we'll crack open that last one, so this one comes courtesy of my dad.

0:53:21.7 LB: Dr. Van Valin.

0:53:23.3 AVV: Dr. Van Valin. So I come from an entire family of academics and professors, and my father's love language is random facts.

0:53:33.0 EA: Hey I got an engineer for a dad. I know how that works.

0:53:34.1 AVV: There you go. So I know when he's listened to an episode because all of a sudden I'll get a text of 800 random facts about whatever the subject food was complete with links to source material and a viewing or reading list.

0:53:47.8 LB: I love the study guides that he shares, it's so sweet.

0:53:50.0 EA: Did you know...

0:53:51.7 AVV: Dr. Van sends all kinds of supplemental materials, but he's a linguist, so this is a kind of a language superstition, so med... The root med means honey. So a lot of versions of mead and honey have the word med in them, or the root med, including in Russian or Slavic languages, medvedits means bear. So the med means honey and vedits means eats, So the literal translation of bear is honey eater. And there's even a region and a river in the Volga area, Volgostad, Volgograd... One of those, it's either a stad or a grad, called the medveditsa which is literally translates she-bear, and the reason why the word for bear is not worse urso or ursa or one of those is because they had sort of a... I don't know Beetle Juice superstition that if you said the actual name, you would conjure it.

0:54:48.7 AVV: This area is a very, very rich river Valley, the river itself is full of tons of kinds of fish, and the forest around it is super lush, so it's basically bear heaven. So the people who lived in this valley were very afraid of the bears, the bears were a menace, they were going to hurt them or at least eat all of the fish that they needed, so they stopped saying a direct word of bear, and started referring to them as honey eaters so that they would not conjure the presence of the bears.

0:55:21.1 EA: That's kind of common in a lot of cultures, like avoid saying the direct name of things for fear of calling it back, whether out of respect or fear either one.

0:55:29.9 AVV: So I thought that was very cool. Thanks, dad. Thanks, Dr. Van for that, and if you guys are interested, I have lots of supplemental reading materials and sources on that one.

0:55:40.6 NI: Absolutely.

[music]

0:55:45.6 AVV: So now we know all about mead, but before Lia tells us all the excuses we have to drink it with our holidays and our celebrations. I got a need. A need for more mead.

0:55:55.6 LB: A need for mead.

0:55:56.0 EA: For a third mead.

0:55:56.8 AVV: What's our last mead, guys? 

0:55:58.1 EA: This next one, I'm gonna...

0:56:00.0 LB: I'm so pumped about this one.

0:56:00.4 EA: Are you excited? So this mead kind of originated because we started letting all the guys in the back have a little bit of say in how things were done and how things were fermented and what we were trying to make, 'cause a lot of them are home brewers as well, we would make them in small, like five gallon batches, and we would just serve them on tap, basically as like a cocktail. And we came out with this one and it was the mango reaper. And so being in the Southwest, once again, I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, like Chipotle mango candy that's super common out this way, and I grew up on that stuff growing up in Albuquerque, and when one of the brewers decided to make this one we wanted to make it so that it wasn't so spicy as to scare people off, but spicy enough for the spicy people, the spicy people.

0:56:43.3 AVV: The spicy middle ground.

0:56:44.7 EA: The spicy middle ground, and we made the five-gallon batch, it was delicious, and then we were trying to make the big one, and we ended up using something like almost 20 pounds of Carolina Reaper and ghost pepper in there, and it was... Yeah, it was a lot. So we finished fermenting and I come in the back and the guys are filtering it through and finishing up some of the last steps. I come into the back and they've got this whole five-gallon bucket full of all these Carolina Reaper and ghost peppers that are sitting there and I was like, hey, have you guys tried any of these? 'Cause I was really curious how much of the capsicum would actually be pulled out of the pepper, especially with alcohol, like... Oh. Storing water in plastic. Not great, but it's not bad either. Storing alcohol in plastic, that's bad news, it starts to pull out terrible chemicals and so on and so forth.

0:57:29.6 EA: And so I was kind of curious how that worked with the capsicum, and the peppers, how much of it would actually get pulled out and I kind of thought I would be tasting like a bell pepper sort of thing by the time they were done soaking. Nope, I come back and I was cautious, I just gave it a little tiny lick, lick, just like licked the tip of it, and it was like, "Oh my goodness, that is still super spicy," and of course, it quickly became like a Who can eat the most pepper contest in the back, and these guys are just chowing down on them and pretty much everybody called in sick the next day, but I've now probably terrified you from trying to drink it, but it actually is... It's a nice balance, it brings up the heat, you feel it in the back of the throat, you feel it in the front of your mouth, it definitely brings some heat, but it doesn't go past where like that first sip gets you to, which I think a lot of that is the honey component to it, it just kinda smooths things out a little bit.

0:58:19.0 AVV: Yeah.

0:58:19.1 LB: Can I ask what's the capsicum? 

0:58:21.8 EA: Capsicum is just the actual chemical component that's in those peppers that provides the heat, it's where you get your Scoville from, yeah, it's got a...

0:58:32.0 LB: It's good for your heart.

0:58:34.3 EA: It'll make it back. But it won't go above that. Where you're at right now, Anna, it's not gonna take you too far.

0:58:38.9 AVV: I see why you do this one last 'cause it woke me up.

0:58:42.3 EA: Totally. And it would make all the other ones taste weird for sure. If you look on the bottle, it's got a Grim Reaper kind of overlaid into the back of it. Now you see that guy.

0:58:52.4 LB: That's perfect.

0:58:52.5 AVV: I couldn't see it until I had a sip and then he appeared. He materialized.

0:58:58.2 EA: Did you say his name three times in the mirror? 

0:59:00.3 LB: Yup. This is so good.

0:59:04.5 NI: Yeah, yeah, it definitely has a little bit of a kick. But I like to say, don't fear the Reaper and then I whip out my cowbell and start banging it, but... Because it is... It is a perfect balance, and they hit that in the back in production for me so perfectly, I've probably drank half of the batch that we made, I love this mead and it's the one that I give to everyone who has any bit of keenness to spice at all, and I think this one could put our name on the map, if you will, it's... Yeah, anyway, I like it. I like it a lot.

0:59:37.4 LB: Yeah, no, that's really good.

0:59:37.6 AVV: I don't know that I'm gonna get through it, but it is good. In one sitting.

0:59:42.1 NI: I've marinated chicken in it as well, that honey and that spice. That's another great... Here's another great thing about mead, is it pairs with food, you can pair wines and stuff like that, and beers and stuff, but mead is just another great food pairing and with that honey, and then now with this spice it is a beautiful little marinade but don't over do it 'cause you gotta drink most of it.

1:00:07.5 AVV: Well, now that we're awake and I can feel the back of my eyeballs.

1:00:10.9 EA: Yeah, tingling.

1:00:14.5 AVV: Lia.

1:00:15.4 LB: Oh man.

1:00:16.7 AVV: I don't think that we need an excuse to drink mead anymore Lia, but I still wanna hear what you got.

1:00:21.0 LB: If you are looking for an excuse to drink mead, there is national mead day, which happens on the first Saturday of August. So this year, it's August 6th, and I'm sure Evan and Nick already had that highlighted on the calendar, big hearts all around it. Ready to celebrate National Mead Day. And this day was actually created by the American Home Brewers Association, and they organized this mead day to increase awareness of this sweet fermented beverage, and to bring mead lovers, mead drinkers together, and to really just get folks to learn more about mead, which is what we got to do today with you guys, which is awesome, but if you do wanna celebrate mead on other days, I'm sure you can find festivals.

1:01:00.1 LB: I'm starting to see them pop up around me, we had a Texas mead Festival in February with some meaderies from Texas, Central Texas. And then I read that one of the largest mead festivals is called the Sugar Belt Mead Festival in Crown Point, Indiana. So I don't know if you've heard of this or if they're just claiming to be the largest mead festival, you know how people can be on the internet, but that's actually coming up in a couple of weeks later in May, and it has... I think this festival is boasting that they've got over 20 different meaderies around and they're also saying they are mead only because I think there are some other mead festivals that invite beer, wine, and so, I know. So they can't really call it a mead fest.

1:01:41.4 AVV: I just got the West Side Story theme in my head, that's a recipe for a rumble.

1:01:45.1 LB: It is, I can see it right now.

1:01:45.2 NI: Yeah, always a good excuse for a knife fight. But I'd throw bees at you, and you lose.

[laughter]

1:01:54.6 EA: That kind of goes to show where mead at, where mead at.

[laughter]

1:01:57.8 AVV: Let me see that bottle again, Evan, where's the bottle again.

1:02:03.3 LB: Empty bottle.

1:02:04.3 AVV: Listeners, it empty, she empty.

1:02:08.6 EA: So that kind of goes to show where mead is at right now currently as a beverage is you can have 20 meaderies all together and it's the biggest mead fest in the entire world.

1:02:17.0 LB: That's true, yeah.

1:02:19.6 EA: Yeah, right, right. And that's a huge part of what we like about it is as far as business-wise goes, it's an open playing field, so we here actually host our own, it's the Arizona Mead and Cider Festival, so maybe we kick ourselves out by also inviting cider.

1:02:32.8 LB: But you're just friendly like that.

1:02:35.4 EA: Well, and it's part of the licensing. So federally, most cidery... Most... Fuck you, mead. So federally, most...

1:02:44.7 AVV: It's turned on you.

1:02:45.7 EA: It has, it's totally turned on me, it's fighting me now, it's fighting me. Meaderies are classified federally as wineries technically, and a lot of cideries are also classified as the same because we ferment things that are other than grain or grape, so when we do our big Arizona Mead and Cider Festival, which is the biggest in our state, and probably the biggest in the south west, 'cause we end up with, I think we had 15 meaderies the last time we did it, so like six more and we'll be the biggest in world.

1:03:11.4 LB: Yeah, watch out Sugar Belt.

1:03:15.3 EA: But it is fun, like we talked about earlier, like mead being a slightly different feeling than say, whiskey or beer or whatever, and being that we are mead, we would go and do all kinds of different festivals, and a lot of them are whiskey, a lot of them are beer. We would do cocktail festivals and you get different vibes out of the people that are there, not so much at the beginning of the festival, but maybe more towards the end, you start to kinda feel out what they all feel like, and you could say it's a one-off but when you do these festivals year after year after year, it's just kind of different, and the Mead Festival's like, it's amazing, and there's not nearly enough of them, there's a couple in California. There's actually one that's called Meading in the Gardens, of course, with the pun, pun tied in there.

1:03:53.3 LB: I like that.

1:03:53.6 AVV: There must be something about mead that it either attracts pun people or pun people are attracted to mead, I don't know, but we've all found each other.

1:04:02.8 EA: Right, that's all the matters is that we all found each other. They're pretty fun and just you get a whole different vibe of people, you're never gonna end up with a whole bunch of dudes dressed up in full armor at a beer festival.

1:04:15.5 AVV: Right. Just the lederhosen. It's not as cool. It's not as cool.

1:04:19.4 EA: Maybe a kilt or two but, you know.

1:04:22.3 LB: What I think is cool though, and you were explaining this at the beginning of the show, is you kind of have your own festivals all the time in your Mead Hall, and having a Mead Hall is really an important part of culture, because back in the day, that's really where the society building was happening, that's where the meetings, the meadings were happening between people who are decision makers in the communities that they lived in, that's where kings would talk poorly about other people and send them off, or that's where you know who was who, and so in a sense, it's like mead has always been sort of the center of celebrations, part of weddings, birthdays to celebrate really exciting milestones, and you guys seem to have mead festivals all the time in your own drinking hall.

1:05:06.0 NI: I love that, I love that you say we have a festival every day, it is a gathering spot. It was the gathering spot, and we want it to continue to be the gathering spot, Evan and Kelly, they didn't create a bar, they created a hall, and that's what I kinda tell people all the time, it is a community meeting space, we've had weddings, we've had people come in and teach leather classes and chain... Like metal working classes, we've had film festival panels on important topics, we just had the Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival in there, and people came together and talked about Glen Canyon and Lake Powell and water issues.

1:05:38.0 EA: Baby showers.

1:05:41.6 NI: Yeah, yeah. Baby showers. Exactly. It's a hall, when you think of the word hall, it's that community gathering space, and it does take a little bit of want and effort to create that, you could just sit back and be like, "Let's just get people drunk," but to invite everyone to come in now, it's to the point where word's kinda getting around to where people think of us and that's so awesome, they think of the Mead Hall to have whatever the celebration or ceremony is, and so yeah, having a festival pretty much every day... Evan talked about when people come in, people say like, Hoorah, or Hey. Or not hoorah that's military, but Hwah.

1:06:18.2 NI: And pound on the tables and imagine coming into a place and having that kind of, again, celebration of you coming in to the community gathering, and one of the biggest things we've heard about our Mead Hall, or one of the best things and the most heart-warming things we hear about the mead hall is, it is a place where people feel 100% safe, not necessarily even physically, but emotionally, we have people coming in in witch hats and dressed up and playing board games and Magic the Gathering, we have a couple of Dungeons and Dragons nights. Yeah, it's a great celebration space, and we'd love to see it grow for sure.

1:06:51.2 LB: I love that.

1:06:52.8 EA: It's what the Mead Hall was supposed to be right, Like you were saying, Lia, it was a place where you not only conducted business, but you also officiated everything they needed to be officiated, if you need somebody to basically sign off on you selling your house to somebody else, you came into the Mead Hall and so the guy running the Mead Hall would be like, "Yep, I saw it happen."

1:07:09.9 AVV: So it was like also City Hall? 

1:07:12.6 NI: Yeah, it was, it was city hall, it was the Church, it was the school, it was all of those things kind of tied to each other.

1:07:17.7 EA: The notary.

1:07:18.6 NI: The notary.

1:07:18.8 LB: The notary.

1:07:20.1 AVV: I love it.

1:07:20.2 LB: The center of life is at the Mead Hall.

1:07:23.3 NI: Yeah, and we have a whole episode, I talked to a guy who basically wrote the book on mead halls, the whole building itself is kind of an extension where the hall was the main thing and there were little rooms on the side, and now we've kind of culturized, bigger rooms and just a little hall, but I wanna go back to the big hall, we have a long table. We wanna bring everyone and be like, Guess what, you're gonna talk to these people, and if you feel uncomfortable talking to them right now, have a glass of mead, you guys are gonna end up being best friends or you're gonna find out this guy can rent you a boat to go fishing or whatever.

1:07:54.8 LB: That's awesome.

1:07:56.0 AVV: More of an open-floor plan.

1:07:58.1 NI: Yes, absolutely. And a fire, you always have to have a fire.

1:08:01.6 AVV: Gotta have a fire.

1:08:02.5 EA: An open-mind plan.

1:08:05.6 AVV: I like that.

1:08:06.1 LB: I like that. So good.

1:08:09.0 AVV: This has been awesome. You guys, thank you so much for sending us your mead to sample, thank you so much for telling us all about it, we hope that you've enjoyed listening to some of our historical tidbits as well.

1:08:20.2 NI: It's delightful listening to you guys talk about these things and taking your deep dives has been great, and so everyone listening to the Mead Cast go over because I know we've got a lot of foodies in there who are just gonna get their minds blown by everything that you guys give on your episodes. It's awesome.

1:08:34.2 EA: Absolutely. It's a pleasure being on with you guy and like, I didn't even know about the Mayan mead before today, so I've actually got some research that I'm actually kinda kinda itching to go do now, I'm excited to learn some more. You guys got my brain juices flowing.

1:08:48.0 LB: So we're gonna start seeing some of this on your menu right? Nice.

1:08:51.9 EA: We're actually, we've been working on a Tej, actually.

1:08:57.7 LB: Very cool.

1:08:58.8 AVV: Can something be named after us, can there be the Call Back Tej, the Pun Bell Tej? .

1:09:03.4 EA: It's just gonna be the Anna-Lia Tej, or Lia-Anna. Of course it's gonna be named after you guys.

1:09:07.4 LB: That's so sweet.

1:09:08.7 AVV: We love that. Well, yes, everybody go follow both shows, Every Day is a Food Day and the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, search for us, or we'll put links in the show notes to both shows, and if you already follow both shows, you win.

1:09:23.2 LB: Yeah, winners.

1:09:23.4 AVV: You win podcasts.

1:09:24.6 LB: You are best friends.

1:09:26.9 AVV: You are best friends. For Food Day, you can find us anywhere you get your podcasts, you can check out our website at yumday.co/podcasts. We are very active on social media, especially Instagram at @FoodDayPod, where we post a lots of behind the same stuff and super fun visuals and background info on all of our stories and foods, we do Instagram lives every month, which you guys joined us yesterday.

1:09:46.6 LB: Yay, thanks for hopping it.

1:09:49.6 AVV: Yeah, that was so fun.

1:09:50.7 NI: And for the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, if you're interested in listening to a slightly less professional production with two goofballs who will entertain at the least about bees, mead and Viking... Cool Viking shit, then you can find us anywhere that you catch your podcasts as well. We've got Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all that good stuff going on as well. We're happy to be your entertainment and yeah, it was fun to jump onto your Instagram Live, a great time there, so... Yeah, follow them, following us, like they said and then we're best friends, and you're stuck with us.

1:10:24.4 EA: And you can follow us at Drinking Horn Meadery on anything.

1:10:29.3 AVV: Literally anything.

1:10:30.5 LB: All the places.

1:10:31.2 AVV: All the places.

1:10:31.5 EA: All of them.

1:10:32.3 AVV: Gmail, Friendster.

1:10:36.0 NI: Bumble.

1:10:37.7 LB: Friendster.

1:10:38.8 AVV: All.

1:10:38.9 EA: We're always looking for a match.

1:10:41.4 AVV: Pour one our for Friendster. Should we mention that you ship your mead world-wide? 

1:10:48.8 NI: No, not worldwide.

1:10:49.4 AVV: Or is worldwide or national? 

1:10:51.1 EA: I wish it was worldwide, that would be fantastic.

1:10:53.0 AVV: Should we mention that you ship your mead outside of Arizona? 

1:10:54.4 EA: Absolutely. You can find it on www.drinkinghornmeadery.com. And you can ship it... We ship to 38 states at this point. So, I'm sorry, if you're listening from one of those states that has weird laws that we don't ship it into yet, but we're always working on more licensing, and so if you're in a state where we don't ship to get a friend in a state that we do.

1:11:18.0 LB: Cross state lines, open a PO Box.

1:11:20.9 NI: We're looking at you, Oklahoma.

1:11:23.3 EA: Arkansas, come on.

1:11:27.4 AVV: Alright, well, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.

1:11:31.2 LB: Thanks.

1:11:31.2 NI: Yeah, well, all you mead is love.

[music]

1:11:39.7 AVV: Thank you for joining Lia Ballentine, Nick Irvine, Evan Anderson, and me, Anna Van Valin, for this special episode from Every Day is a Food Day and of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast. Be sure to follow both shows wherever you get your podcasts. The clip you heard today was from Guy Fieri's Family Road Trip. This episode was edited and sound designed by Anna Van Valin and Lia Ballentine. See you next time.
 

 

 

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304.Mead_Crossover_FINAL CUT

avv@vanvalin.llc

https://scribie.com/files/48d3cbb53bf44bd89c2a11e3a8e24492f1a072f1
 

0:00:00.0 AVV: Honey and mead were actually part of the after life, so in Celtic heaven, which is called the other lands or Avalon was believed to have rivers of Mead running through Paradise.

0:00:11.4 EA: You think one bottle is dangerous.

0:00:13.2 AVV: Right? I'm just imagining a Willy Wonka situation with...

0:00:19.4 NI: Augustus. Augustus.

0:00:20.0 AVV: Augustus.

0:00:21.9 LB: Drinking it from the river.

0:00:23.5 AVV: He just gets sucked in the tube.

0:00:24.7 NI: Evan, you're getting too far, oh there goes Evan.

0:00:28.7 EA: I had no chance.

0:00:30.3 NI: He's got a smile on his face.

0:00:32.2 EA: Went down happy.

0:00:32.4 NI: Yeah.

[music]

0:00:45.3 LB: Welcome to a very special episode of Every Day is a Food Day.

0:00:48.9 EA: And a very special episode of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

[vocalization]

0:00:54.4 NI: We love each other's shows and think you will too, so we decided to brew up this crossover episode, all about what else mead.

0:01:02.1 AVV: You could say it's a meading of the minds.

0:01:04.8 EA: Since we've just swarmed you with all these voices let's officially introduce ourselves. I'm Evan Anderson, king bee of the Drinking Horn Meadery in Flagstaff, Arizona, and co-host of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

0:01:16.0 LB: I'm Lia Ballentine, a chef creator in Austin, Texas. And host of the podcast, Every Day is a Food Day.

0:01:21.0 NI: And I'm Nick Irvine, ambassador of buzz at the Drinking Horn Meadery and co-host of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

0:01:26.5 AVV: And I'm Anna Van Valin in Los Angeles, California. The other host of every day is a food day and your resident Foodlosopher, you guys got all that? 

0:01:35.0 NI: Today, the ladies from every day is a food day are gonna tell us about mead's many, many cameos in ancient mythology from around the world, plus some mead holidays and celebrations where you can get your buzz on.

0:01:47.2 LB: And the guys from the Mead Cast are going to tell us all about their devotion to the potion, adventures with bees and brewing and how mead might just save the planet and save you that hang over.

0:02:00.2 AVV: Be sure to follow both Every Day is a Food Day and the Drinking Horn Mead Cast wherever you get your podcasts.

[music]

0:02:12.4 AVV: First things first, Food Day listeners, what's the requirement for Lia and I when we do an episode about alcohol, that's right, we have to be drinking it, Evan and Nick very generously has sent us a few bottles from their Meadery and we're gonna crack one open, so guys, What are we drinking first? 

0:02:28.3 EA: I think we're gonna start today off with a little bit of pomegranate Mead if Nick, if you wanna get that poured up, and I'll start talking about it.

0:02:36.1 LB: I'm showing it off.

0:02:37.4 EA: Oh, it's beautiful.

0:02:40.0 AVV: Oh sexy.

0:02:40.1 EA: It's a nice, deep red color, almost a violet, if I could tell the difference between those, and it's got a little bit of carbonation to it and kinda just start off with mead in general, it's fermented honey, so that's where all the good stuff... All the alcohol comes from fermented honey outta there.

0:02:56.0 LB: I just popped the cap off and it smells so good.

0:03:00.9 EA: It's kind of dangerous stuff, this one's about 13% alcohol, and it goes down like a fruit juice, so you just think you're drinking juice and then all of a sudden your couch is on fire, you don't know where your pants are. It's crazy.

0:03:11.5 LB: This sounds fun.

0:03:12.3 AVV: That happens when I drink Kool-Aid anyway, so.

0:03:16.0 EA: So a little bit of carbonation in this one, we use a forced carbonation method, we don't do any sort of like letting the yeast do their natural carbonation, it's really hard in brewing to get that carbonation right. If you just let the yeast do their thing, you usually end up with explosive bottles, so we just force carbonate that guy in there, and it's a nice juicy pomegranate flavor. A lot of the pomegranates come right out of Arizona. We try to use as much in the way of local fruit as we can, all the honey comes locally from about just a few miles south of where our production studio is here.

0:03:44.9 LB: Wow, that is so cool. To be hyper-local with how you make your mead. That's amazing.

0:03:50.7 EA: We're trying to support our local beekeepers as much as possible, and we're going through 3000 pounds plus of honey every month right now, so we're doing a good job trying to support those local beekeepers.

0:04:00.9 LB: Whoa, 3000 pounds.

0:04:02.0 EA: Yeah, yeah. Fair amount of honey.

0:04:03.3 LB: That's a lot of honey. How much honey would you say goes into making your 500 ml bottle? 

0:04:09.2 EA: It'll have about a quarter to a half a pound of honey depending on just how sweet we want it to end up being. Finishing sugar on this one, is sitting... We use sg, which is like standard gravity as a measurement for it, and then it's sitting about 10.14, 10.12, but if you put a soda like a Coke on to standard gravity, you'd be at like 10.45 or something like that. So it's not as sweet as people think it is, I think a lot of times people think it's more sweet than it is because of honey, we're just associating with the smells and the flavor, we associate with that sweetness, but most of the sugar has been fermented out into delicious, delicious alcohol.

0:04:46.9 LB: Yeah, this tastes so lovely, I think, just like you were saying, Evan, when I first heard about mead and I thought, it's just gonna be thick and sweet, I don't know if I'm gonna like that, and the first bottle of mead I had, it was like it was nothing like what I had envisioned at all. To me, this pomegranate, it's amazing.

0:05:04.3 EA: I'm glad to hear you say that, that's a huge component of what we wanted to get across to people was that... 'cause a lot of the commercial meads that are out there are thick, syrupy you could eat them with a spoon, and we wanted something that after you had a little tiny taster of, you're like, Oh, can I get an adult-sized glass of that? Do you have it in pints? 

0:05:21.8 LB: So how big of bottles can we really get? 

0:05:26.0 AVV: Before I drink this, I just have to confess that this is my first ever mead. Oh my God, it's so good.

0:05:33.7 LB: It is, isn't it? 

0:05:33.8 AVV: You guys, I was really worried.

0:05:37.3 LB: What were you thinking Anna, before you tried it? 

0:05:40.5 AVV: No, I was just worried I was gonna hate it, and then I gotta drink three of these and I act like I love it 'cause I don't. No, it's really good. Oh my gosh, I think I was imagining maybe like a flavored beer, 'cause sometimes you get a fruity beer or something that's flavored in that way, but this is its own thing.

0:05:58.1 NI: That's a big part of what we wanna, again, show people through Drinking Horn is that it is its own thing, people call it honey wine or like you said, maybe they think it's gonna be flavored like beer, but... Yeah, mead is a category all to itself. For sure.

0:06:10.6 LB: Cool. Y'all, this is dangerous. I'm like looking at the other two bottles and then this one, I'm scared.

0:06:18.2 AVV: Yeah. My immediate thought was, I'm in trouble. It's only 2:42 in Los Angeles right now, guys. So this might be what I'm doing for the rest of the day.

0:06:28.1 NI: How many times that's happened? Yes.

0:06:30.6 EA: You're gonna get to experience some of those better qualities of mead where you get done with this, you'll probably be feeling pretty good after three different meads, and you just drink a little water and you sober like you never even drank. It's fantastic.

0:06:42.1 LB: Amazing.

0:06:43.7 AVV: Well, before we dive into talking deep about mead, why don't you guys tell our listeners a little bit about your show.

0:06:49.8 NI: One of the main components that we kinda just discussed was trying to get the word out there about mead and what mead can be, and so a platform like a podcast, I feel like can be a great avenue to not only just reaching people, but maintaining their interest and telling new fans even more and deeper things about it. What I love about the Mead Cast is it's not just about one subject, not just about mead, but we can also dive into bees and honey, the ingredients, there is so much to talk about, as you guys already know about bees and honey, and then we've got our other component, since we have the Mead Hall and we are drinking Horn.

0:07:26.4 NI: We pull from the Norse part of the culture of mead, and so we get to talk about awesome Viking stuff as well, like the mythology, and you guys talked about the mead of poetry, that's just one story that kinda gives you a taste, a taste of the mead culture that's enveloped in those stories. Yeah, so the Mead Cast is not only just an avenue to educate people, but to be completely honest, it's a way that me and Evan can chill out from work, and even though it is still work and drink a couple of glasses of mead and hang out and talk about some cool stuff. And so, yeah, that's our mead cast in a nutshell or in a hive, if you will, it's bees, honey, mead and cool Viking stuff.

0:08:10.8 LB: Love it.

0:08:10.8 AVV: Love it, we are going to wear out the pun bell today, guys, it got a work out in our honey episode, but today, the poor thing's gonna be begging for breaking.

0:08:21.9 LB: That was awesome, Nick. So thanks for telling us and our listeners all about the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, and for the folks in your hive, just a little bit about Every Day is a Food Day, Anna and I love to talk about stories, scandals, holidays and heroes, all behind our favorite foods, everything from French fries to popcorn to apple pie and to honey, which is how we got here today, and Anna actually has a fun story of how we connected with you all.

0:08:47.7 AVV: Yeah, so if you're a long-time Food Day listener and you listened to the honey episode. I gave a shout out to these guys. So one of the things that we love to talk about, Lia mentioned food scandals is food scandals and food crimes and people, there are so many of them. You would not believe we've talked about things like in our fruit cake episode, there was an accountant at a fruit cake company in Texas that embezzled $13 million in fruit cake money.

0:09:15.5 EA: I didn't even know people bought that much fruit cake.

0:09:18.3 LB: Oh, they buy a lot of fruit cake.

0:09:21.0 AVV: People buy a lot of fruit cake. We also did an episode about poisonous foods and talked about famous poisonings throughout history, again, there are so many, and then kind of the mac daddy of all food crimes is the great maple syrup heist, which we talked about the maple syrup episode, which if you don't know, some sketchy people over the course of a year, stole hundreds of thousands of gallons of maple syrup from the Canadian strategic maple reserve warehouses in Montreal, all of which is a real thing. So I had heard a story about the hive heists, about people stealing other people's hives, Beekeeper on beekeeper crime, and I went to look a little deeper into that for researching the episode to come up with the topic, and there were so many bee and honey crimes, I couldn't believe it. There's the honey laundering. Again, respect whoever came up with that term, respect.

0:10:13.2 LB: A government worker come up with that.

0:10:15.9 AVV: A government worker earned their pension, that's what our tax dollars are being used for. Brainstorming epic food puns, and smuggling, the hive heists, all kinds of things. And so I was doing research for that, I listen to a whole bunch of podcasts and I just loved the Mead Cast, I thought you guys were the most well-researched, you're super sincere because your hearts are so much in this, and it was entertaining. So I went to your website and the first thing I see was it said, "Pleased to mead you," and I was like, "Oh. Oh, these are our people."

0:10:49.4 EA: Puns of steel.

0:10:52.8 LB: Oh yes, love it.

0:10:52.8 AVV: So reached out to you guys and you checked us out, and we connected, so I gotta ask, what did you guys think of our honey episode? 

0:11:00.6 NI: Embarrassingly, you guys did way more research and in-depth education than we did, so I was actually on a run while I was listening to that and I just kept rewinding and being like, "I didn't know that." There was definitely a lot of... You guys dig in deep, and that's what I'm... I'm glad we connected because I found you guys' podcast and it's... I don't know, it's awesome. I can sit here and talk about how genuine you guys are and how much research you do, and it's a joy to listen to and you're entertaining, and not all podcasts... Everyone does a podcast. Right, not all of them are that good. And you guys' it just, I don't know, I love it, it's great. I know there was a lot about the heists and those crimes that we didn't look into a lot of the details that you went into there. And so that was one of the things they caught my attention was that there is even more than me and Evan discovered, you guys dug even deeper into there and found more of these big numbers and money or honey laundering rather, things that are going on.

0:11:55.4 NI: And so it's just, it's amazing. It is really kind of mind-blowing how lucrative crimes with honey can be and bees, crimes with bees, not just the honey but stealing the bees, and some of the things you were talking about with the bee keeper on beekeeper crime was really interesting, and when you talked about not being able to tell whether it's a bee keeper's bees or not, 'cause they're in a bee suit so you can't identify them, you're like, Oh, that must be Charlie over there with his bees, and meanwhile it's like John instead of Charlie and he's heisting them, so I thought that was really...

0:12:28.7 AVV: Beekeeper John again.

0:12:31.6 NI: Right, man, old John.

0:12:33.9 EA: It's not that big of a community either, as Nick was saying like, you guys did a lot of research into just figuring out how much of that stuff is going on, and there's not that many beekeepers, so it's a good chance that it really is somebody that they know each other and they're like, Oh yeah, your hives are over in the southern almond field right now, are they? Okay, thank you. You're not gonna be there for a week. Excellent.

0:12:55.8 LB: You're going out of town? 

0:12:57.5 AVV: It almost feels like an Agatha Christie, like the thief is in the room. You have beekeeper convention, beekeeper meetings. It's one of these people, who's it gonna be? 

0:13:10.9 NI: If you're in a convention and you look around, there's a whatever percentage chance that someone in there is a thief. I never thought about that. Man, you really gotta bee careful out there.

0:13:21.3 LB: Now, I feel like we're just giving you guys nightmares.

0:13:24.5 EA: Yeah, I'm gonna be picking up honey tomorrow, I'm gonna be like eyeballing the beekeeper, "Are these all really your bees? Are they though?"

0:13:34.8 AVV: So in the episode, I predicted that your Ren Faire costumes are on point. Are your Ren Faire costumes in fact, on point? Because I may or may not have seen a YouTube video that involved costumes.

0:13:47.7 EA: I wouldn't say they're fully on point, to be honest with you, just because we thought they were on point until we started doing some of these festivals and things like that, and you get to really see some of these people that build their own chain mail and all this stuff, and sitting there knitting all of the metal pieces together into full suits and...

0:14:06.5 AVV: Forging their own weapons and...

0:14:08.8 EA: Yeah, so we have a decent set up for sure, mostly 'cause Nick likes to do all those videos and it's good for advertising and it's fun too. Our Killing Them with Kindness series, we're always trying to promote people just being nice to each other, there's a lot of mean folk in the world, we wanna promote niceness and mead.

0:14:26.2 LB: That's awesome.

0:14:26.4 AVV: No room for mean with mead.

0:14:30.7 LB: You're not officially in that society of creative anachronists? 

0:14:34.3 EA: No, no, they do take over the Mead Hall periodically especially...

0:14:38.6 LB: Do they? 

0:14:39.3 EA: Yeah, now that the weather is getting warmer out there, they come every Sunday and they pretty much take up the whole long table, which fits like 25-30 people, and they're all dressed up in garb, and it's a pretty fun time. People come in the front door and they like bang on the table and go, and it startles the crap out of people, and it's... It's pretty fun. But then if somebody's leaving I'll go and they turn around and they buy another bottle before they leave, so it helps us out too. It's good.

0:15:06.3 LB: That's wonderful.

0:15:06.6 AVV: You've got your very own LARPers.

0:15:10.6 EA: Yeah, pretty much.

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0:15:16.2 AVV: Alright well now that we're warmed up and we've got some mead in us, why don't, Evan, you tell us all about your journey to a meadery.

0:15:22.9 EA: Yeah, so I started as a... Well. I guess started out... Started out as a baby, but I was a fish biologist before I started the meadery, I kind of was looking for a different job, I've got two kids, and at the time they were pretty young, and I got really tired of hearing the, Oh, do you remember when... No, you weren't there. Do you remember when... You weren't there. 'Cause my job as a fish biologist kept me away in the field for months at a time sometimes, and you literally start ending up feeling more comfortable sleeping on the sand than you do in a bed, and it starts to get a little weird. So I was looking for a change in career, and when my wife and I got married, I wanted to be a little romantic and bust out a whole bunch of mead because the word honeymoon is tied in with mead, you're supposed to have enough honey wine to last a moon cycle.

0:16:06.6 EA: Yeah, there's a lot of history, as you guys have found, there's a ton of history of mead sort of sprinkled throughout our culture, and I wanted to just sort of express my romantic side, it's not my best side, I'm working on it. And we made a whole bunch of mead for the wedding, and when folks came out, they drank all the mead and didn't touch any of the beer, we had three kegs of beer from one of the local breweries and nobody drank any of it, and they were coming back the next day after the wedding, and they're like, You got any more that mead stuff, and so I was like, Well maybe this something.

0:16:32.9 AVV: Were you and your wife like, "We're busy."

0:16:34.5 EA: Yeah, seriously, yeah.

0:16:36.7 AVV: Come back in a week, God.

0:16:38.5 EA: Why are you knocking, this is the day after I got married, I'm not supposed to have to wear pants today, get away from here. We started making mead. I never had any sort of design to really do anything besides just make mead and sell it at wholesale, and that changed the first time around when Guy Fieri came into our place and did his show here.

CLIP:

0:16:58.1 Guy Fiere: This Guy's Family Road Trip. It's gonna be a wild ride. While the boys are hanging out with their new friends. Lori and I are gonna go check out Drinking Horn Meadery. I don't have any clue what a meadery is. All I know is that they're making some kind of booze, it's something different and something funky, and we're all gonna figure out what this is at the same time. Turns out, mead is honey wine. Evan and Kelly Anderson make seven different kinds.

0:17:29.8 EA: He came in here, we're like the last five minutes, we were only supposed to be a 30-second piece on there, and when he started trying the mead, he kinda had the same initial reaction that you guys did, where it was like, I've heard of it, I heard about it in Game of Thrones, maybe or Vikings or one of those things, but I had never actually tasted it. And once he started drinking it, he really enjoyed it, and he's like, Well, when this goes live, you gotta have a taproom where people can drink this stuff, and you gotta have online sales and you gotta have all this other stuff, so we initially started setting things up and building it, and it's just kinda... At first you have to push the business and push, push, push, push, and now it's like I'm grabbing the tiger by the tail and just trying to hold on.

0:18:09.1 LB: That's awesome, but I think it just goes to show, people enjoyed the mead from the first sip and they wanted more, and you were kind enough to deliver and create your meadery and build this.

0:18:21.7 EA: Yeah, it was fun. Nick actually was a huge part in helping me get started with stuff, like I said, I originally, I had no idea what I was doing, and I thought I would have a... You guys can see the production here behind me, but I thought I would have just a library of carboys, which is the big glass fermenting vessel that most people use, people even making kombucha and stuff use it, it's just a big fermenting glass vessel. And I thought I would have a library of those and just be making it on a much smaller scale. Nick Irvine there, talked me into getting a conical steel fermenter, and then the guy we bought fermenters from, got me to buy a four barrel and so it just kind of same thing, I just sort of kept growing and growing and growing.

0:18:58.7 EA: We opened up the Mead Hall in September 2019, thinking that 2020 was just gonna be awesome, and 2020 was what 2020 was. And we made our way through that though, and got it all built out and it gave us a lot of extra time with the shut down and everything to be able to kinda put some of our own fine tuning touches on it, the whole facade on the bar is all bee hives on it, it's really fun, made all the bar top myself and a bunch of the tables and stuff, and so it was a lot of fun building everything out.

0:19:28.9 AVV: Whoa, and I have read that part of what started the engine revving on mead in the last decade or so, was shows like Game of Thrones or Viking. Have you noticed a correlation between that kind of pop culture aspect of it? 

0:19:42.9 EA: Oh, absolutely, there's been meaderies around for nearly 20, 30 years or something like that, and it's just never been very popular at all, but it's kind of... It's in the zeitgeist right now, people are thinking about it, and so it definitely helps sort of push things forward, and we've just been trying to kinda be in front of that wave and ride it and not let it plow us over.

0:20:01.1 AVV: And so we're drinking a pomegranate mead, and we've got a couple more options. How do you make a pomegranate mead or a mango mead or an any kind of mead? 

0:20:09.1 EA: Very slowly. So beer is made in about two weeks, you can go from an idea to actually being able to drink it, and with mead, when I was making it at home, it was a year, year and a half that it would take to make something to actually get it all the way through to the point that you wanted somebody to drink it, 'cause there's definitely a bit of aging that needs to happen with it, when it's really fresh, it can kinda taste like something you might use to power your vehicle. It takes a good bit of time. So with the commercial equipment, we've been able to refine that and get it down a whole lot further, but we're still sitting... Shortest time is probably three months or so, and it all starts with just mixing honey, water and yeast together, we definitely try to make a product that doesn't have all kinds of extra junk in it.

0:20:48.5 EA: So we didn't wanna use sulfites, we didn't wanna use sorbates, we didn't wanna use any of those chemical preservatives to make a shelf-stable product, and so we came up with a filter system to allow us to bring it down to shelf stability and get all the yeast out without having to deal with any of the chemicals that go into it. So you just basically mix up honey, water and yeast, you stick it into one of these big shiny steel tanks and you let it sit there for about three weeks, it takes to ferment, and then all the rest of the work after that is kinda back end work, but you have to try to cold crash them, which just gets the density to sort of work itself out so that all of the solids become the most dense thing within the container and they settle out to the bottom and then you end up moving it from one container to another, to get it off of that sediment, otherwise you'll end up with a mead that tastes a lot like bread, which everybody's got their own palette, I'm not here to yuck any yums.

0:21:35.2 LB: Is that bad? I mean I love bread.

0:21:37.7 EA: Some of them are great when they taste like bread, we have a super dry plum mead that has a very yeasty component to it, and people love the taste of it.

0:21:44.8 AVV: Gotta be careful about those barrels though guys.

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0:21:47.8 S?: That's a call back.

0:21:50.8 NI: That's a call back.

0:21:52.4 AVV: We need you guys to come up with your version of the call back.

0:21:55.8 NI: That's a call back. Sorry.

0:21:58.5 LB: I think that that's perfect. So Evan, it sounds like making mead requires a lot of patience, that wait seems pretty long, do you taste throughout as you're waiting to get your final product, are you tasting it? 

0:22:12.0 EA: Every day, continuous tasting. Yeah, it's something that you never really know exactly what you're gonna end up with, especially when you're making something that's brand new, like that, the mango reaper that we're gonna be having later is something that was a brand new mead to make on a big scale like that. And you just... It's always hard because we'll make little batches of things, but when you scale up from five gallons to nearly 200, it's hard to know exactly how all those flavors are gonna play together, 'cause just like cooking like none of the flavors are linear as you increase it in size. So it's a little bit of work sometimes to try to re-arrange and get those things, but you're always tasting it throughout, and you have to be able to taste it and envision not just what it tastes like, but what is it gonna taste like, and so you get good at picking out the sort of flavors of a clean fermentation and a healthy fermentation, 'cause you wanna minimally stress out your yeast, making alcohol is all about point stresses for the yeast, you want them to only be lacking oxygen and have everything else they need.

0:23:09.7 AVV: What flavors have you tried to make that just did not work? That you had to abandon halfway through like, there's no way this is gonna be quaffable at the end of this process.

0:23:19.6 EA: I tried to make a yellow watermelon mead, I'm never gonna make it again. People are probably gonna hear it on this cast and they're be like, "Oh yeah, that sounds delicious." I'm like, No, it's not. It wasn't very good because the yellow watermelons don't... Like I was looking for that juicy red, it's summer time, I'm biting into a slice of watermelon taste, but I thought using the yellow ones would just be kind of unique and different from what else was out there, yellow watermelons tastes like cantaloupe. It was a cantaloupe mead.

0:23:47.4 LB: What a bummer.

0:23:49.3 AVV: You should have used honeydew.

0:23:53.5 EA: Honey has such like a gentle characteristics to it, it goes on so many things, it goes on everything from sweets to barbecue, to everything else, the fermentation process doesn't end up providing much in the way of tannins or bitterness, and so it's really... You can make just about anything into a mead. I was contemplating a tomato mead just yesterday, I don't know if we'll actually do it, but.

0:24:16.1 LB: Well, that was something I'm curious about too. When you're sourcing your honey, are you looking for specific ones where people have their hives and what sorts of fields their hives are in? 

0:24:24.7 EA: Yeah, absolutely. Varietals of honey are extremely important and really kind of big in the mead world for sure, as well as in the culinary world too, here in the south west, we have mesquite honey, which is pretty unique to the area and it just is from the blossoms out from a mesquite tree, and it kind of... We actually have a whole bunch of it in barrels that I'm actually hanging out right next to right now, but it gives it like a very kind of smoky almost flavor to it. We use a lot of orange blossom honey, so that's like kind of our main go-to is the orange blossom honey, and it all comes out of what's called Black Canyon, it's just North of Phoenix down there where they have a bunch of orange orchards, and orange blossom honey is one of the few honeys that actually tastes like its name sake.

0:25:03.0 EA: So lavender honey doesn't taste like lavender, Clover honey doesn't really taste like Clover, but at the same time, just like with the honey laundering and everything else people put whatever label they want on things, 'cause honey isn't a highly regulated industry at this point. You have to take everything that somebody calls a honey with a bit of grain of salt, if somebody tries to sell you organic honey, you should probably be a little skeptical about it, because a normal beehive, the bees that are coming in and out and working, the worker girls there. That sounds terrible. The worker bees.

0:25:35.9 LB: Those working girls.

0:25:36.9 EA: Those working girls.

0:25:39.9 AVV: We're keeping it, leave it in.

0:25:40.3 EA: They have a five-mile radius around the hive, so they can be traveling a huge range, and unless you have your bees in a warehouse, you wouldn't be able to tell what the bees are actually going after, and it takes some two million visits to a flower to make a pound of honey, so it's really hard to be able to tell what exactly your bees are going for. So we've had some orange blossom that ends up tasting a little minty 'cause there was a bunch of mint that was flowering near it, and they were going after that. Sometimes it can be a little spicy or peppery, but it's one of the things that's great about this size of batch that we're currently making, once you get much above this, you're using so many different honeys that it starts to homogenize that flavor and you're not necessarily getting some of the small nuances that you do with smaller batches.

0:26:23.4 LB: That's cool.

0:26:24.6 AVV: And have you ever kept your own bees, raised your own bees, created your own honey? 

0:26:28.5 EA: We sure do.

0:26:30.1 AVV: I guess they create the honey, you just steal it.

0:26:30.2 EA: Yeah, we're just honey thieves. We're just honey thieves. But yeah we do. We have a few hives down in Camp Verde that we use mostly for educational purposes for stuff, just like we were talking about with the Mead Cast. We do a bunch of YouTube videos and stuff too and just try to educate people about bees, and so we use those hives for that, we tried to keep bees up here in Flagstaff and it really just didn't work and people are like... Because of the cold winters, and it was actually no, because we get so many warm days in between our cold days up here, as soon as it gets above 45 degrees, your bees are gonna start hopping out flying around looking for food. We can get days in January where it's negative six, we can also get days in January where it's nearly 60, and as soon as it gets warm, bees come out and start flying around, there's nothing for them to eat, and so we would end up having to feed them a bunch of sugar water up here, which... Yeah, exactly. You don't wanna make mead with sugar water, then I might as well just be like fermenting the canned sugar. It's gross.

0:27:28.0 AVV: Well this pomegranate is great. But what else do you got? Let's crack open mead number two.

0:27:35.0 NI: Let's crack open mead number two. Number two is gonna be our lemon ginger, which just came out recently, and it is another just kind of representative of a different style of what you can get through mead, and Evan is running over right now. Thank you, sir. Oh, I gotta finish this one first.

0:28:00.0 EA: Drink up.

0:28:00.5 NI: There we go. And lemon ginger used to be my favorite.

0:28:02.8 LB: Oh, used to be.

0:28:04.2 NI: Used to be, yes, and we will be drinking my favorite after this one.

0:28:07.2 AVV: Spoilers. I love a lemon ginger kombucha, so I'm really excited about this.

0:28:14.9 NI: Nice, now I'm nervous.

0:28:17.0 LB: Again, I'm just hit with the smell and already... It's so bright.

0:28:22.3 EA: We kicked up the ginger in this batch, so some of our seasonals only come out once.

0:28:26.8 AVV: This'll wake you up.

0:28:27.9 LB: I love this.

0:28:29.4 AVV: This feels like a breakfast mead.

0:28:29.5 NI: With lemon and ginger, it's practically a health drink. And honey.

0:28:34.1 AVV: Right, got a sore throat, hello.

0:28:36.5 LB: I feel so good right now.

0:28:38.6 NI: You were talking about the sore throat right now, one of the great things I like to do, it's warming up around us right now, but in the winter time, a great thing about mead is that you can also have it heated up, so we will take our apple mead or we've got one called Metheglin, which is orange peel, black tea and cinnamon and heat that up on the stove, and then you could throw in a little whiskey or bourbon in there, a little shot if you want to also, but it is such a great beverage, depending on the style, I wouldn't necessarily warm up pomegranate, but yeah, apple, lemon ginger, even the traditional... Oh, the mango reaper maybe, and mix it with some kind of tea as well, is a great way to drink it. I feel like it is, and we have a lot of customers. We always have two cocktails or mead mixers at the mead Hall, and one is hot and one is cold at least through the spring, through the fall season, and people love those hot mead mixers.

0:29:31.2 LB: Yeah, I saw on the label that it said, This is delicious with hot tea too, so I am definitely going to try that.

0:29:38.2 AVV: I think I know what I'm leaving out for Santa to this year.

0:29:44.0 LB: Santa's so lucky.

0:29:44.1 AVV: Warm apple cinnamon mead.

0:29:47.9 NI: So what do you guys think about that lemon ginger.

0:29:49.7 AVV: God, it's so good. It's got a real kick.

0:29:51.8 LB: This is awesome. I am a ginger fan. Well I love lemon, I love ginger, I love alcohol. So it's perfect.

0:30:00.7 NI: The trifecta has been hit.

0:30:01.5 AVV: These are a few of her favorite things.

0:30:04.8 NI: These are a few of my favorite things.

0:30:06.8 AVV: I've got lemon in my ice water over here, so I'm like already primed. Oh man, I need to slow down though, guys, 'cause I'm gonna be three sheets to the wind by the time we get to my section and I'm gonna be like, Gods and stuff.

0:30:23.8 LB: I remember, Nick, you were telling us at one point that you could have a bunch of mead one night, but still be able to get up early the next morning and go for a run and not feel like, Oh, this is gonna be tough.

0:30:32.9 NI: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah talking about some of the health benefits, or not claims, you can't claim health benefits, but some of the better things that I've experienced and a lot of people have experienced with mead, one of those, Yes, is that there is a thing called congeners, which are basically... It's a fancy word for saying stuff in your drink, and so there are very limited... We talked about it's just water, yeast and honey, and then obviously whatever, like fruits and stuff like that they put in it. And so there is very limited things for your body to deal with, number one, and so the processing of it is a lot tamer on your body and then also, we've evolved as a species with honey for a lot of that time, bees were around a long time, agriculture with grains and grapes and large quantities, that wasn't around, and so our bodies may just be kinder to this.

0:31:20.1 NI: And so I've definitely found anecdotally, I get a certain level of buzz on, having a good time and I start worrying 'cause I'm supposed to get up and do something, but that alarm goes off and as long as I've had a couple of glasses of water, it's crazy almost to the point of like, did I actually drink that much mead the night before, whereas I can do that with beer or whiskey, and I'm just kinda like, Oh man. Snooze button, Snooze button. So anyway, I think it is just kinder to the body. We've evolved with it. It's a simple drink. One of our mottos is live simply drink simply. And so we really take that to heart with this product, and that goes into not adding sulfites and sulfates as well. I know that can have an effect on people, and so by Evan creating this production protocol that takes that out of the equation, man, it not only tastes better, but I know my body is happier having that.

0:32:13.2 NI: And then just... I mean, the honey, we all have heard the benefits of honey as an anti-inflammatory kind of thing, I wanna get this out to all you people out there, all you people out there, all the party people, actually, not the party people, all the people out there running long distances, mountain biking, climbing, doing big hikes, backpacking, that kind of thing. I wanna put it out to you guys that the anti-inflammatory properties in honey come through in this mead, and it is a great recovery beverage. People talk about beer as a great recovery beverage and yeah, it's got this carbohydrate kind of balance, but oh my gosh, mead as a recovery beverage for athletes, at least those who might have a drink after a big push, big thumbs up for me, I wanna get that word out there.

0:32:52.9 LB: You gotta start doing some mead runs then, I always... I have friends who always do beer runs where they're doing some kind of like half marathon or 5K, and then it always ends up at a brewery and it sounds like we need to have more mead runs, I might start running.

[laughter]

0:33:07.4 AVV: This sounds like a great way to incentivize people to start running, 'cause I know personally, I have a rule that I only run if something's chasing me.

0:33:13.5 NI: Me too.

0:33:15.0 AVV: But if I knew that it ended in one of these meads, I'd think about it. I'd think about it.

0:33:21.0 EA: I'm with you, I run for fear and fear alone.

0:33:25.2 NI: It doesn't have to be running.

0:33:27.3 LB: Well, I love seeing too. Like mead it's gluten-free. Right, that's something that I have been seeing a lot of with my snack company Yumday, is the desire and the want for more gluten-free snack products, gluten-free foods. And so, I love this, this is such a great alternative for folks who are trying to have gluten-free diets.

0:33:44.6 NI: Yep, absolutely 100% gluten-free through the whole process, there is a way that beers can become gluten reduced, but this is 100% gluten free all the way through, yeah, you don't have the inflammation potentially from the grains, so. Yeah, it's awesome.

0:33:55.8 EA: Unless we barrel age it, a lot of times, if we're barrel aging, we're putting it into a barrel that's had whiskey or whatever in it beforehand, and so then you can pick up some gluten in the barrel aged stuff, but the majority of our mead isn't barrel aged, and so it's just naturally gluten-free, easy drinking.

0:34:11.8 AVV: I'm telling you the barrels, they're nothing but trouble, between all the food crimes and all the true crime and Breaking Bad where people are just getting dissolved in barrels, I'm just like barrels equal shady shit. That's it.

0:34:29.3 NI: Which episode of you guys' is that that people and listeners can go right to, if all of a sudden they wanna hear about this shady barrel stuff.

0:34:36.5 AVV: The maple syrup episode is where the barrel paranoia started.

0:34:40.7 NI: Barrel paranoia. I love it.

0:34:42.5 AVV: Yeah, and then it just keeps creeping up.

0:34:48.1 LB: It's weird. It's always barrels now.

0:34:48.6 AVV: Always barrels. And then, of course, the honey episode barrels play a big part.

0:34:53.2 EA: It's making me nervous now. I keep looking over my shoulder at these barrels. I'm worried that they're creeping up on me.

0:34:57.9 LB: You gotta install some more cameras.

0:35:01.9 EA: That barrel's closer to me, what the heck happened.

[music]

0:35:08.7 AVV: In our honey episode, we talked a lot about how there are several crops that are actually kinda hurtful for bees, lack of biodiversity, monoculture, things like almonds, and so that is hurting the bees and therefore creating bigger climate crises or bigger environmental crises. How do you find mead affects the environment as opposed to beer or something else? 

0:35:30.7 EA: Minimal effect, I mean, compared to some of the other beverages, and one of the biggest components of that, and I think one of the bigger components moving forward that people are gonna start thinking more and more about, is water consumption and beer is the least of some of the other ones, but if for a liter of beer, you're looking at close to 300 liters of water to make that liter of beer, and that includes both all of the production, the brewing, all of that stuff as well as the upstream costs of actually growing that grain and that's where that huge number comes in, wine's even worse. I think wine is sitting somewhere between 7 and 8 hundred liters of water for a liter of wine, with mead, we don't have to water our bees. You're mostly trying to protect them from other bee thieves, that's your biggest component there.

0:36:13.4 AVV: They prefer you don't water them I bet.

0:36:16.8 EA: They do prefer it. They tend to just drown. So it's... You definitely don't wanna water them. Definitely don't wanna... I learned that, I learned it. No, our bees are fine. They're good and dry. Don't worry. So for mead, you're looking at somewhere between three and four liters of water to make a liter of mead. And if you drink a liter of mead, you have probably... At least of our mead, you have drank too much mead.

0:36:41.0 LB: That's incredible, that gap in water use for mead versus beer and then wine and distilled. Oh my gosh, that's crazy.

0:36:48.5 EA: It's huge.

0:36:49.6 AVV: Yeah, it makes sense if you don't have to grow grain in order to make it, but I wouldn't have thought about it unless you pointed it out.

0:36:54.5 EA: Bees are used very commonly for a whole lot of pollination factor, where they're just like you guys talked about, but you don't need that for them, you can just have bees out in the middle of the desert and they collect plenty of honey. It just makes life a whole lot more environmentally sound when you don't have to worry about that water component, especially in the year like it is right here where we're... Arizona is going into deeper and deeper water restrictions with Lake Powell and Lake Mead hitting all-time record lows on stuff, so it's gonna become more important as things move forward. And I'm hoping people start to think about that, 'cause if you decide to drink mead instead of drinking beer, that means you can have a 30-minute shower and still feel good about yourself. It's beautiful.

0:37:33.0 LB: I like it.

0:37:34.5 AVV: Drink mead, smell better.

0:37:36.0 LB: Sip sustainably.

0:37:39.4 EA: We definitely play off the Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy sort of thing, and we have a Save Water, Drink Mead.

0:37:45.8 AVV: Love it.

0:37:47.3 LB: Beautiful.

0:37:48.4 EA: We made T-shirts.

0:37:50.5 NI: We made T-shirts. Yeah.

0:37:50.6 AVV: Alright, that was great, guys. I feel good from the buzz of the mead, and I feel good about myself for drinking this mead.

0:37:56.8 EA: Bees do make the best buzz.

0:37:56.9 AVV: Well played.

[music]

0:38:17.9 NI: So on me and Evan's Drinking Horn Mead Cast, we definitely talk a lot about the Vikings and the Norse culture and some of that stuff. But bees are all over the world. And so there are stories that abound through all cultures, and I know that's y'all's specialty is looking at that, so are there any cool stories about bees around the world or mead mythology around the world? 

0:38:39.4 AVV: So many. In fact, the bar was set pretty high for mead since I had spent all this time researching that it was the nectar of the gods, that there was rivers of it running through heaven, that it was... The bar was set pretty high, you guys, so I appreciate you meading it, meeting it with your mead, but yes, on Food Day, we talk a lot about foods that are... They're kind of in the "Everybody's got a version," category. So again, fruit cake, every culture has some version of cake with fruit in it, or like a dessert bread with fruit in it. Another is hand pies. We talked about this in the take-out episode, I believe.

0:39:16.0 LB: Yeah, I mean, it's a container...

0:39:18.2 AVV: Exactly.

0:39:18.3 LB: Made of food.

0:39:20.6 AVV: Whether it's an empanada or a pierogi or a turnover, every culture has some version of a hand pie, and mead, some kind of fermented honey drink, totally falls into that category of everybody has a version of mead, there's evidence of honey in ancient cultures in China, India, Greece, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Wales, you name it. We're familiar with the Northern European version, which is kind of what we've been talking about. So I was gonna tell you about a couple of others that I thought were really interesting. So one is an East African version called Tej. Have you guys ever had Tej? 

0:39:53.6 EA: Absolutely, with a little bit of gesho root in there.

0:39:56.2 AVV: Yes, exactly.

0:39:58.4 LB: What? Tell me more.

0:40:01.0 AVV: It's from Ethiopia and also drunk in Eritrea, which is just north of Ethiopia, and it's honey, water and gesho, a medicinal herb that gives it a funk, makes it a little funky. It has the look and consistency of orange juice, so it must be a little less filtered than what you guys are making.

0:40:18.4 EA: A little pulpy.

0:40:19.4 AVV: A little puppy, but it's also ancient, so the oldest evidence of mead comes from places like India and China, from something insane like 40,000 years ago, which I have no reference point for. I'm American, 100 years is a really long time. So let's just say it's super old, and researchers have found evidence of Tej being drunk and used in rituals during excavations in a city called Aksum, which was the capital of the ancient Aksumite empire that existed from 80 BC to 825 AD. That's not quite 40,000 years ago. But pretty freaking old. Right.

0:40:56.4 NI: Very.

0:40:57.8 EA: That's cool.

0:40:57.9 AVV: Now, prior to the 1900s, Tej was only consumed by the King and anyone who was in his physical presence.

0:41:06.4 LB: Oh, so it was very special.

0:41:06.5 AVV: You wanted to get on his calendar so that you could have some Tej. And it was only produced in the houses of the ruling classes, and honey was actually so valuable in Ethiopia that at one point it was used to pay taxes and rent, it was actually currency, they relaxed a little bit, so it's now made and drunk by pretty much everyone and has become officially the country's national drink. As I was reading about it, it reminded me of Ginjinha, which is something we talked about in our Portuguese food episode. So Ginjinha is a liquer made from fermented sour cherries, and it's kind of like their official drink and you can both get fancy versions in the gift shops, and everybody's got a jug of hooch Ginjinha under a windowsill somewhere, and the Tej sounded like that a lot too, like you could buy the fancy stuff in the hotel bars, but what you really want is like grandma's jug of Tej, that's like in the back room, right? 

0:42:02.8 NI: That's awesome.

0:42:04.5 AVV: Fermented honey drinks, they're also in the Americas because there's an ancient Mayan version as well. The Mayan civilization dates back to 2000 BC, and Mayan cultural influence still thrives in Mexico, especially in the Yucatan region and beekeeping was very popular, bees were considered sacred and also kind of like part of the family, which is something I also saw in Celtic lore as well, which we'll talk about it in a second. So there was two meadish, mead-adjacent beverages that I discovered. One is called Xtabentún. Sorry, I don't speak Mayan, I speak Spanish, but not Mayan. Xtabentún. Why am I pronouncing it like it's German. Tún. What is happening? 

0:42:46.7 LB: It's in your blood Anna.

0:42:47.6 AVV: It is in my blood.

0:42:50.8 NI: It's got that ish in it.

0:42:53.4 AVV: It's got the Xtabentún. I just put an umlaut over it, I can't help it. So that's a honey drink in the Yucatan and then Balché is a honey fermented with water and the bark of a Balché tree, and sometimes they add psychedelics like mescaline, peyote or mushrooms mixed into it, I'm assuming to just give it a vibe.

0:43:14.6 EA: Gives it that extra little kick to it.

0:43:15.0 AVV: Have a deeper experience.

0:43:19.4 NI: So this is one of the only times I'm actually taking notes for some reason was on that one right there. So okay so Balche... Alright, I got it. Continue.

0:43:29.1 AVV: And valuable consumables, foods, crops that were really, really integral to society there, were considered to be controlled by gods. That's how important they were. So there actually is a Mayan God of bees and honey called Ah Muzen Cab. The images of it are really interesting, it's like a bee with its arms and legs spread out upside down, it looks very, very cool. That's a good segue, that it has a sort of mystical element to it, because mead is so old, fermented honey drinks are so old and they're part of all these ancient civilizations that it ended up in a bunch of their myths. And we actually talked about the Norse myth of the blood of poetry in our honey episode. Lia gave us a great concise and a tilting version, there was a dwarf murder, there was all kinds of just blood drinking. And I know you guys have talked about it a lot on the Mead Cast, so instead of going back over the Norse stuff, we're gonna talk about a few other places in their myths. So the first one is Greek Mythology. We've probably heard the phrase, nectar of the gods.

0:44:33.7 EA: Oh yeah, absolutely.

0:44:34.8 AVV: Yeah, we're talking about mead y'all. Nectar of the gods, mead was thought to be drunk on Mount Olympus by the gods, it was rumored that Aphrodite served it to her lovers.

0:44:47.4 NI: Smart.

0:44:48.7 AVV: Her gentleman callers or whatever she was into that day, I don't know. And because it was the nectar of the gods, it was thought to give you sort of godly attributes, like long life, strength, verily, intelligence, fertility, things like that.

0:45:01.9 LB: Is mead an aphrodisiac? 

0:45:03.4 AVV: Guys? 

0:45:05.3 EA: Yeah, that's part of that whole honeymoon thing, part of the reason it was used in the honeymoon is that mead is supposed to... And this is, I think this was mostly maybe Greek or Norse cultures where I'm pulling this from, but that mead was supposed to help increase virility and fertility, and so that's why you were supposed to drink mead for an entire moon cycle. It helps make the babies.

0:45:27.6 LB: Okay. It's all coming together.

0:45:30.3 AVV: Interesting.

0:45:30.4 NI: That makes me a little skeptical because I'm listening to you guys' deep dive into aphrodisiacs, which I listened to, your episode on that, which is super interesting to hear about how many there are, and I don't know, did you guys say, honey or mead in that whole list, you guys listed something like, it was like 50 different items that were aphrodisiacs, like Pez candy and some stuff like that, I don't know, but.

0:45:52.3 AVV: Yeah, I don't remember if honey or mead was on there, but we might as well tack it on.

0:45:54.0 LB: There we go. Guys, you heard it here first. From Every Day is a Food Day and the Mead Cast.

0:46:02.9 AVV: It's liquid, bubbly Viagra.

0:46:03.8 LB: That's right.

0:46:05.4 AVV: Get in on it.

0:46:05.5 EA: Number 51.

0:46:06.6 NI: There we go. Oh, Evan. Yup, we need to use that. Mead is liquid Viagra, there we go, boom.

0:46:12.1 AVV: You just need to make a blue one.

0:46:13.5 EA: I'm already picturing the most terrible advertisement for it ever, we're definitely gonna get in trouble for it.

0:46:18.4 AVV: But sales will be through the roof. Love it. I mean, if somebody can claim that arugula is an aphrodisiac, I feel like there's carte blanche too to claim mead and honey is as well.

0:46:33.2 NI: There'd be conceptions all over Whole Foods all the time if that was the case.

0:46:38.9 AVV: But this is something I thought was really cool, was they believed that mead sort of descended from Heaven and gathered on the plants, and that's what dew is. And then the bees would gather up the dew, the nectar to be collected and prepared for the humans. So the bees were kind of doing God's work.

0:46:58.9 LB: Dewing God's work.

0:47:00.9 AVV: Yes, Lia, they were dewing God's work.

0:47:04.0 NI: Yes, that was awesome. I love it.

0:47:06.9 AVV: And then once grapes were introduced to Southern Europe, wine became more of a thing, became more of a preferred drink, but mead was so revered and people truly believed that it would bring all of those attributes that even after it was not the most popular drink out there, it stayed part of Greek ceremonies for a very, very long time 'cause it was so revered.

0:47:27.8 EA: Which is kind of interesting because it really just sort of dropped out of our historical reference, there's a ton of old stuff, there's a ton of myths, there's a ton of history, and then at a certain point, whatever Dark Ages-ish somewhere in that realm, it just sort of drops out of history and it's like people just... And I don't know if it was just because grapes were cheaper or grapes were more available. I've heard people say that it's because the wax all of a sudden started becoming more valuable than the honey, and so people were less interested in trying to save the honey and they were more interested in using the wax for candles with the rise of the Catholic Church and that sort of thing, and so we started shifting over to a grape-based beverage instead of the mead.

0:48:05.4 AVV: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think that the place where it stayed more prominent, more popular, more part of the culture, were the places that grapes didn't grow, so like Scandinavia.

0:48:14.7 EA: Absolutely.

[music]

0:48:20.4 NI: And you guys, you talked about the mead of poetry and that kind of Norse myth, but hearing about that mead's got me thirsty for possibly some more of any kind of Northern Europe or Norse culture. Do you have anything else to give us with that? 

0:48:34.8 AVV: Oh yeah, the Celts, the Celts were all about the mead, bees in Celtic culture were seen as being very intelligent and sensitive, and even having souls, they were kind of sentient beings, this is super interesting to me because their myths about bees were very much tied to death, the presence of bee after a death, signified the soul being carried away from the body. In their mythology, honey and mead were actually part of the afterlife, so in Celtic heaven, which is called the other lands or Avalon was believed to have rivers of mead running through Paradise.

0:49:11.4 EA: You think one bottle is dangerous.

0:49:13.2 AVV: Right. I'm just imagining a Willy Wonka situation.

0:49:18.7 NI: Augustus! Augustus! 

0:49:18.8 AVV: With Augustus.

0:49:22.2 LB: Drinking it from the river.

0:49:23.2 AVV: Gets sucked into a tube.

0:49:24.6 NI: Evan, you're getting too far in... Oh, there goes Evan, okay.

0:49:29.0 EA: I had no chance.

0:49:29.9 NI: He's got a smile on his face.

0:49:31.9 EA: Went down happy.

0:49:33.2 AVV: And there was this super fascinating tradition called the telling of the bees. Have you guys ever heard of this? 

0:49:40.2 LB: No.

0:49:40.3 EA: No, I haven't.

0:49:40.4 LB: I've never heard of that.

0:49:41.0 AVV: Okay, so beekeeping, having hives at homes or family farms was very common, and since they were considered sentient and part of the family, it meant that the people who owned them needed to show them respect by telling them news about the family. So any changes, weddings, births, departures, and especially deaths, it was thought that bees were so intelligent and sensitive that they actually mourned, people would actually... I saw etchings and things of people putting black sashes over the hives to indicate that the bees also were in mourning.

0:50:12.8 EA: Do you just tell one bee, or do you try to find the Queen and tell her? Do you whisper it into the front of the hive? Sister died.

0:50:20.0 AVV: They have a PA system.

0:50:22.4 LB: Yeah, tell the one and the one goes back and does their waggle dance to tell the other bees.

0:50:29.2 AVV: Oh no, the saddest waggle dance.

0:50:29.9 LB: The saddest dance. The saddest waggle dance ever.

0:50:34.0 AVV: And if you didn't tell them this, but they found out, they could feel disrespected, they could get angry, and they could either leave, abandon you, there would be colony collapse, or they'd stop producing the honey for you or they'd swarm, they'd attack you, like you went out there in UGG boots.

0:51:00.7 S?: That's a call back.

0:51:02.1 LB: Oh no.

0:51:02.9 EA: That might be why my bees are so angry is I don't tell them enough about what's going on.

0:51:06.1 LB: Evan, you're not telling them? 

0:51:09.3 EA: No, I just go down there and I'm like, What's up bees, and slap them on top of the hive, How you doing? 

0:51:14.3 LB: Maybe it's the hive slapping.

0:51:14.4 AVV: Also maybe it's the slapping they don't like.

0:51:18.3 EA: You might be onto something.

0:51:20.7 NI: Man, I wasn't telling them 'cause I thought you were telling him the family news. And the UGG boots, you're saying UGG boots are not good to have around a hive? 

0:51:29.6 AVV: That was a bit of a call back to the honey episode, you're gonna have to listen for that.

0:51:33.6 EA: Just wear white, don't look like a bear.

0:51:35.2 AVV: White, shiny. You'll be fine. And that practice of the telling of the bees actually continued into the 19th century in Western Europe and in North America.

0:51:45.1 LB: Oh, really? 

0:51:47.1 AVV: Ruh-roh Evan's finished his second one.

0:51:47.4 LB: Oh my.

0:51:49.9 AVV: Okay, there's another Celtic, Celtic-adjacent legend that I thought was interesting of King Llud, so speaking of a river of mead being dangerous.

0:51:58.3 LB: Llud like...

0:52:00.0 AVV: No, it's L-L-U-D, so maybe it's Llud, but now...

0:52:05.8 LB: I like Llud.

0:52:06.7 AVV: I understand that that's the immediate thought. So you know what, let's go with it. Whatever the first image was in your head, I want you to go with it.

0:52:13.8 EA: King no pants.

0:52:15.6 AVV: King inappropriate jokes. So His kingdom was being attacked by dragons, and so what he did is he commanded his armies to dig ditches and fill them with mead, and then the Dragons were attracted to the mead, they landed in the ditches, they drank the mead, they got so inebriated that they fell asleep, and they slept so well that they slept through being bound with fabric and buried in a ditch.

0:52:42.5 EA: That's a true story.

0:52:42.8 LB: I mean, that's where the saying comes from, you can catch more dragons with mead.

0:52:50.1 AVV: Than with plain dirt.

0:52:52.3 NI: That is awesome.

0:52:52.4 AVV: I don't know what it says about me or that my age that I'm getting older or whatever, but my first thought was, God, I would love to sleep that well.

0:53:04.6 LB: Well just keep drinking. Lemon ginger and you're on your way.

0:53:05.8 NI: Yeah you've got a whole another bottle.

0:53:08.2 EA: There's still one more mead to go, you'll see how you sleep, you'll see, you'll see.

0:53:12.5 AVV: Well I'm gonna get through this last myth, this is actually a superstition, and then we'll crack open that last one, so this one comes courtesy of my dad.

0:53:21.7 LB: Dr. Van Valin.

0:53:23.3 AVV: Dr. Van Valin. So I come from an entire family of academics and professors, and my father's love language is random facts.

0:53:33.0 EA: Hey I got an engineer for a dad. I know how that works.

0:53:34.1 AVV: There you go. So I know when he's listened to an episode because all of a sudden I'll get a text of 800 random facts about whatever the subject food was complete with links to source material and a viewing or reading list.

0:53:47.8 LB: I love the study guides that he shares, it's so sweet.

0:53:50.0 EA: Did you know...

0:53:51.7 AVV: Dr. Van sends all kinds of supplemental materials, but he's a linguist, so this is a kind of a language superstition, so med... The root med means honey. So a lot of versions of mead and honey have the word med in them, or the root med, including in Russian or Slavic languages, medvedits means bear. So the med means honey and vedits means eats, So the literal translation of bear is honey eater. And there's even a region and a river in the Volga area, Volgostad, Volgograd... One of those, it's either a stad or a grad, called the medveditsa which is literally translates she-bear, and the reason why the word for bear is not worse urso or ursa or one of those is because they had sort of a... I don't know Beetle Juice superstition that if you said the actual name, you would conjure it.

0:54:48.7 AVV: This area is a very, very rich river Valley, the river itself is full of tons of kinds of fish, and the forest around it is super lush, so it's basically bear heaven. So the people who lived in this valley were very afraid of the bears, the bears were a menace, they were going to hurt them or at least eat all of the fish that they needed, so they stopped saying a direct word of bear, and started referring to them as honey eaters so that they would not conjure the presence of the bears.

0:55:21.1 EA: That's kind of common in a lot of cultures, like avoid saying the direct name of things for fear of calling it back, whether out of respect or fear either one.

0:55:29.9 AVV: So I thought that was very cool. Thanks, dad. Thanks, Dr. Van for that, and if you guys are interested, I have lots of supplemental reading materials and sources on that one.

0:55:40.6 NI: Absolutely.

[music]

0:55:45.6 AVV: So now we know all about mead, but before Lia tells us all the excuses we have to drink it with our holidays and our celebrations. I got a need. A need for more mead.

0:55:55.6 LB: A need for mead.

0:55:56.0 EA: For a third mead.

0:55:56.8 AVV: What's our last mead, guys? 

0:55:58.1 EA: This next one, I'm gonna...

0:56:00.0 LB: I'm so pumped about this one.

0:56:00.4 EA: Are you excited? So this mead kind of originated because we started letting all the guys in the back have a little bit of say in how things were done and how things were fermented and what we were trying to make, 'cause a lot of them are home brewers as well, we would make them in small, like five gallon batches, and we would just serve them on tap, basically as like a cocktail. And we came out with this one and it was the mango reaper. And so being in the Southwest, once again, I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, like Chipotle mango candy that's super common out this way, and I grew up on that stuff growing up in Albuquerque, and when one of the brewers decided to make this one we wanted to make it so that it wasn't so spicy as to scare people off, but spicy enough for the spicy people, the spicy people.

0:56:43.3 AVV: The spicy middle ground.

0:56:44.7 EA: The spicy middle ground, and we made the five-gallon batch, it was delicious, and then we were trying to make the big one, and we ended up using something like almost 20 pounds of Carolina Reaper and ghost pepper in there, and it was... Yeah, it was a lot. So we finished fermenting and I come in the back and the guys are filtering it through and finishing up some of the last steps. I come into the back and they've got this whole five-gallon bucket full of all these Carolina Reaper and ghost peppers that are sitting there and I was like, hey, have you guys tried any of these? 'Cause I was really curious how much of the capsicum would actually be pulled out of the pepper, especially with alcohol, like... Oh. Storing water in plastic. Not great, but it's not bad either. Storing alcohol in plastic, that's bad news, it starts to pull out terrible chemicals and so on and so forth.

0:57:29.6 EA: And so I was kind of curious how that worked with the capsicum, and the peppers, how much of it would actually get pulled out and I kind of thought I would be tasting like a bell pepper sort of thing by the time they were done soaking. Nope, I come back and I was cautious, I just gave it a little tiny lick, lick, just like licked the tip of it, and it was like, "Oh my goodness, that is still super spicy," and of course, it quickly became like a Who can eat the most pepper contest in the back, and these guys are just chowing down on them and pretty much everybody called in sick the next day, but I've now probably terrified you from trying to drink it, but it actually is... It's a nice balance, it brings up the heat, you feel it in the back of the throat, you feel it in the front of your mouth, it definitely brings some heat, but it doesn't go past where like that first sip gets you to, which I think a lot of that is the honey component to it, it just kinda smooths things out a little bit.

0:58:19.0 AVV: Yeah.

0:58:19.1 LB: Can I ask what's the capsicum? 

0:58:21.8 EA: Capsicum is just the actual chemical component that's in those peppers that provides the heat, it's where you get your Scoville from, yeah, it's got a...

0:58:32.0 LB: It's good for your heart.

0:58:34.3 EA: It'll make it back. But it won't go above that. Where you're at right now, Anna, it's not gonna take you too far.

0:58:38.9 AVV: I see why you do this one last 'cause it woke me up.

0:58:42.3 EA: Totally. And it would make all the other ones taste weird for sure. If you look on the bottle, it's got a Grim Reaper kind of overlaid into the back of it. Now you see that guy.

0:58:52.4 LB: That's perfect.

0:58:52.5 AVV: I couldn't see it until I had a sip and then he appeared. He materialized.

0:58:58.2 EA: Did you say his name three times in the mirror? 

0:59:00.3 LB: Yup. This is so good.

0:59:04.5 NI: Yeah, yeah, it definitely has a little bit of a kick. But I like to say, don't fear the Reaper and then I whip out my cowbell and start banging it, but... Because it is... It is a perfect balance, and they hit that in the back in production for me so perfectly, I've probably drank half of the batch that we made, I love this mead and it's the one that I give to everyone who has any bit of keenness to spice at all, and I think this one could put our name on the map, if you will, it's... Yeah, anyway, I like it. I like it a lot.

0:59:37.4 LB: Yeah, no, that's really good.

0:59:37.6 AVV: I don't know that I'm gonna get through it, but it is good. In one sitting.

0:59:42.1 NI: I've marinated chicken in it as well, that honey and that spice. That's another great... Here's another great thing about mead, is it pairs with food, you can pair wines and stuff like that, and beers and stuff, but mead is just another great food pairing and with that honey, and then now with this spice it is a beautiful little marinade but don't over do it 'cause you gotta drink most of it.

1:00:07.5 AVV: Well, now that we're awake and I can feel the back of my eyeballs.

1:00:10.9 EA: Yeah, tingling.

1:00:14.5 AVV: Lia.

1:00:15.4 LB: Oh man.

1:00:16.7 AVV: I don't think that we need an excuse to drink mead anymore Lia, but I still wanna hear what you got.

1:00:21.0 LB: If you are looking for an excuse to drink mead, there is national mead day, which happens on the first Saturday of August. So this year, it's August 6th, and I'm sure Evan and Nick already had that highlighted on the calendar, big hearts all around it. Ready to celebrate National Mead Day. And this day was actually created by the American Home Brewers Association, and they organized this mead day to increase awareness of this sweet fermented beverage, and to bring mead lovers, mead drinkers together, and to really just get folks to learn more about mead, which is what we got to do today with you guys, which is awesome, but if you do wanna celebrate mead on other days, I'm sure you can find festivals.

1:01:00.1 LB: I'm starting to see them pop up around me, we had a Texas mead Festival in February with some meaderies from Texas, Central Texas. And then I read that one of the largest mead festivals is called the Sugar Belt Mead Festival in Crown Point, Indiana. So I don't know if you've heard of this or if they're just claiming to be the largest mead festival, you know how people can be on the internet, but that's actually coming up in a couple of weeks later in May, and it has... I think this festival is boasting that they've got over 20 different meaderies around and they're also saying they are mead only because I think there are some other mead festivals that invite beer, wine, and so, I know. So they can't really call it a mead fest.

1:01:41.4 AVV: I just got the West Side Story theme in my head, that's a recipe for a rumble.

1:01:45.1 LB: It is, I can see it right now.

1:01:45.2 NI: Yeah, always a good excuse for a knife fight. But I'd throw bees at you, and you lose.

[laughter]

1:01:54.6 EA: That kind of goes to show where mead at, where mead at.

[laughter]

1:01:57.8 AVV: Let me see that bottle again, Evan, where's the bottle again.

1:02:03.3 LB: Empty bottle.

1:02:04.3 AVV: Listeners, it empty, she empty.

1:02:08.6 EA: So that kind of goes to show where mead is at right now currently as a beverage is you can have 20 meaderies all together and it's the biggest mead fest in the entire world.

1:02:17.0 LB: That's true, yeah.

1:02:19.6 EA: Yeah, right, right. And that's a huge part of what we like about it is as far as business-wise goes, it's an open playing field, so we here actually host our own, it's the Arizona Mead and Cider Festival, so maybe we kick ourselves out by also inviting cider.

1:02:32.8 LB: But you're just friendly like that.

1:02:35.4 EA: Well, and it's part of the licensing. So federally, most cidery... Most... Fuck you, mead. So federally, most...

1:02:44.7 AVV: It's turned on you.

1:02:45.7 EA: It has, it's totally turned on me, it's fighting me now, it's fighting me. Meaderies are classified federally as wineries technically, and a lot of cideries are also classified as the same because we ferment things that are other than grain or grape, so when we do our big Arizona Mead and Cider Festival, which is the biggest in our state, and probably the biggest in the south west, 'cause we end up with, I think we had 15 meaderies the last time we did it, so like six more and we'll be the biggest in world.

1:03:11.4 LB: Yeah, watch out Sugar Belt.

1:03:15.3 EA: But it is fun, like we talked about earlier, like mead being a slightly different feeling than say, whiskey or beer or whatever, and being that we are mead, we would go and do all kinds of different festivals, and a lot of them are whiskey, a lot of them are beer. We would do cocktail festivals and you get different vibes out of the people that are there, not so much at the beginning of the festival, but maybe more towards the end, you start to kinda feel out what they all feel like, and you could say it's a one-off but when you do these festivals year after year after year, it's just kind of different, and the Mead Festival's like, it's amazing, and there's not nearly enough of them, there's a couple in California. There's actually one that's called Meading in the Gardens, of course, with the pun, pun tied in there.

1:03:53.3 LB: I like that.

1:03:53.6 AVV: There must be something about mead that it either attracts pun people or pun people are attracted to mead, I don't know, but we've all found each other.

1:04:02.8 EA: Right, that's all the matters is that we all found each other. They're pretty fun and just you get a whole different vibe of people, you're never gonna end up with a whole bunch of dudes dressed up in full armor at a beer festival.

1:04:15.5 AVV: Right. Just the lederhosen. It's not as cool. It's not as cool.

1:04:19.4 EA: Maybe a kilt or two but, you know.

1:04:22.3 LB: What I think is cool though, and you were explaining this at the beginning of the show, is you kind of have your own festivals all the time in your Mead Hall, and having a Mead Hall is really an important part of culture, because back in the day, that's really where the society building was happening, that's where the meetings, the meadings were happening between people who are decision makers in the communities that they lived in, that's where kings would talk poorly about other people and send them off, or that's where you know who was who, and so in a sense, it's like mead has always been sort of the center of celebrations, part of weddings, birthdays to celebrate really exciting milestones, and you guys seem to have mead festivals all the time in your own drinking hall.

1:05:06.0 NI: I love that, I love that you say we have a festival every day, it is a gathering spot. It was the gathering spot, and we want it to continue to be the gathering spot, Evan and Kelly, they didn't create a bar, they created a hall, and that's what I kinda tell people all the time, it is a community meeting space, we've had weddings, we've had people come in and teach leather classes and chain... Like metal working classes, we've had film festival panels on important topics, we just had the Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival in there, and people came together and talked about Glen Canyon and Lake Powell and water issues.

1:05:38.0 EA: Baby showers.

1:05:41.6 NI: Yeah, yeah. Baby showers. Exactly. It's a hall, when you think of the word hall, it's that community gathering space, and it does take a little bit of want and effort to create that, you could just sit back and be like, "Let's just get people drunk," but to invite everyone to come in now, it's to the point where word's kinda getting around to where people think of us and that's so awesome, they think of the Mead Hall to have whatever the celebration or ceremony is, and so yeah, having a festival pretty much every day... Evan talked about when people come in, people say like, Hoorah, or Hey. Or not hoorah that's military, but Hwah.

1:06:18.2 NI: And pound on the tables and imagine coming into a place and having that kind of, again, celebration of you coming in to the community gathering, and one of the biggest things we've heard about our Mead Hall, or one of the best things and the most heart-warming things we hear about the mead hall is, it is a place where people feel 100% safe, not necessarily even physically, but emotionally, we have people coming in in witch hats and dressed up and playing board games and Magic the Gathering, we have a couple of Dungeons and Dragons nights. Yeah, it's a great celebration space, and we'd love to see it grow for sure.

1:06:51.2 LB: I love that.

1:06:52.8 EA: It's what the Mead Hall was supposed to be right, Like you were saying, Lia, it was a place where you not only conducted business, but you also officiated everything they needed to be officiated, if you need somebody to basically sign off on you selling your house to somebody else, you came into the Mead Hall and so the guy running the Mead Hall would be like, "Yep, I saw it happen."

1:07:09.9 AVV: So it was like also City Hall? 

1:07:12.6 NI: Yeah, it was, it was city hall, it was the Church, it was the school, it was all of those things kind of tied to each other.

1:07:17.7 EA: The notary.

1:07:18.6 NI: The notary.

1:07:18.8 LB: The notary.

1:07:20.1 AVV: I love it.

1:07:20.2 LB: The center of life is at the Mead Hall.

1:07:23.3 NI: Yeah, and we have a whole episode, I talked to a guy who basically wrote the book on mead halls, the whole building itself is kind of an extension where the hall was the main thing and there were little rooms on the side, and now we've kind of culturized, bigger rooms and just a little hall, but I wanna go back to the big hall, we have a long table. We wanna bring everyone and be like, Guess what, you're gonna talk to these people, and if you feel uncomfortable talking to them right now, have a glass of mead, you guys are gonna end up being best friends or you're gonna find out this guy can rent you a boat to go fishing or whatever.

1:07:54.8 LB: That's awesome.

1:07:56.0 AVV: More of an open-floor plan.

1:07:58.1 NI: Yes, absolutely. And a fire, you always have to have a fire.

1:08:01.6 AVV: Gotta have a fire.

1:08:02.5 EA: An open-mind plan.

1:08:05.6 AVV: I like that.

1:08:06.1 LB: I like that. So good.

1:08:09.0 AVV: This has been awesome. You guys, thank you so much for sending us your mead to sample, thank you so much for telling us all about it, we hope that you've enjoyed listening to some of our historical tidbits as well.

1:08:20.2 NI: It's delightful listening to you guys talk about these things and taking your deep dives has been great, and so everyone listening to the Mead Cast go over because I know we've got a lot of foodies in there who are just gonna get their minds blown by everything that you guys give on your episodes. It's awesome.

1:08:34.2 EA: Absolutely. It's a pleasure being on with you guy and like, I didn't even know about the Mayan mead before today, so I've actually got some research that I'm actually kinda kinda itching to go do now, I'm excited to learn some more. You guys got my brain juices flowing.

1:08:48.0 LB: So we're gonna start seeing some of this on your menu right? Nice.

1:08:51.9 EA: We're actually, we've been working on a Tej, actually.

1:08:57.7 LB: Very cool.

1:08:58.8 AVV: Can something be named after us, can there be the Call Back Tej, the Pun Bell Tej? .

1:09:03.4 EA: It's just gonna be the Anna-Lia Tej, or Lia-Anna. Of course it's gonna be named after you guys.

1:09:07.4 LB: That's so sweet.

1:09:08.7 AVV: We love that. Well, yes, everybody go follow both shows, Every Day is a Food Day and the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, search for us, or we'll put links in the show notes to both shows, and if you already follow both shows, you win.

1:09:23.2 LB: Yeah, winners.

1:09:23.4 AVV: You win podcasts.

1:09:24.6 LB: You are best friends.

1:09:26.9 AVV: You are best friends. For Food Day, you can find us anywhere you get your podcasts, you can check out our website at yumday.co/podcasts. We are very active on social media, especially Instagram at @FoodDayPod, where we post a lots of behind the same stuff and super fun visuals and background info on all of our stories and foods, we do Instagram lives every month, which you guys joined us yesterday.

1:09:46.6 LB: Yay, thanks for hopping it.

1:09:49.6 AVV: Yeah, that was so fun.

1:09:50.7 NI: And for the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, if you're interested in listening to a slightly less professional production with two goofballs who will entertain at the least about bees, mead and Viking... Cool Viking shit, then you can find us anywhere that you catch your podcasts as well. We've got Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all that good stuff going on as well. We're happy to be your entertainment and yeah, it was fun to jump onto your Instagram Live, a great time there, so... Yeah, follow them, following us, like they said and then we're best friends, and you're stuck with us.

1:10:24.4 EA: And you can follow us at Drinking Horn Meadery on anything.

1:10:29.3 AVV: Literally anything.

1:10:30.5 LB: All the places.

1:10:31.2 AVV: All the places.

1:10:31.5 EA: All of them.

1:10:32.3 AVV: Gmail, Friendster.

1:10:36.0 NI: Bumble.

1:10:37.7 LB: Friendster.

1:10:38.8 AVV: All.

1:10:38.9 EA: We're always looking for a match.

1:10:41.4 AVV: Pour one our for Friendster. Should we mention that you ship your mead world-wide? 

1:10:48.8 NI: No, not worldwide.

1:10:49.4 AVV: Or is worldwide or national? 

1:10:51.1 EA: I wish it was worldwide, that would be fantastic.

1:10:53.0 AVV: Should we mention that you ship your mead outside of Arizona? 

1:10:54.4 EA: Absolutely. You can find it on www.drinkinghornmeadery.com. And you can ship it... We ship to 38 states at this point. So, I'm sorry, if you're listening from one of those states that has weird laws that we don't ship it into yet, but we're always working on more licensing, and so if you're in a state where we don't ship to get a friend in a state that we do.

1:11:18.0 LB: Cross state lines, open a PO Box.

1:11:20.9 NI: We're looking at you, Oklahoma.

1:11:23.3 EA: Arkansas, come on.

1:11:27.4 AVV: Alright, well, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.

1:11:31.2 LB: Thanks.

1:11:31.2 NI: Yeah, well, all you mead is love.

[music]

1:11:39.7 AVV: Thank you for joining Lia Ballentine, Nick Irvine, Evan Anderson, and me, Anna Van Valin, for this special episode from Every Day is a Food Day and of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast. Be sure to follow both shows wherever you get your podcasts. The clip you heard today was from Guy Fieri's Family Road Trip. This episode was edited and sound designed by Anna Van Valin and Lia Ballentine. See you next time.
 

 

 

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304.Mead_Crossover_FINAL CUT

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https://scribie.com/files/48d3cbb53bf44bd89c2a11e3a8e24492f1a072f1
 

0:00:00.0 AVV: Honey and mead were actually part of the after life, so in Celtic heaven, which is called the other lands or Avalon was believed to have rivers of Mead running through Paradise.

0:00:11.4 EA: You think one bottle is dangerous.

0:00:13.2 AVV: Right? I'm just imagining a Willy Wonka situation with...

0:00:19.4 NI: Augustus. Augustus.

0:00:20.0 AVV: Augustus.

0:00:21.9 LB: Drinking it from the river.

0:00:23.5 AVV: He just gets sucked in the tube.

0:00:24.7 NI: Evan, you're getting too far, oh there goes Evan.

0:00:28.7 EA: I had no chance.

0:00:30.3 NI: He's got a smile on his face.

0:00:32.2 EA: Went down happy.

0:00:32.4 NI: Yeah.

[music]

0:00:45.3 LB: Welcome to a very special episode of Every Day is a Food Day.

0:00:48.9 EA: And a very special episode of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

[vocalization]

0:00:54.4 NI: We love each other's shows and think you will too, so we decided to brew up this crossover episode, all about what else mead.

0:01:02.1 AVV: You could say it's a meading of the minds.

0:01:04.8 EA: Since we've just swarmed you with all these voices let's officially introduce ourselves. I'm Evan Anderson, king bee of the Drinking Horn Meadery in Flagstaff, Arizona, and co-host of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

0:01:16.0 LB: I'm Lia Ballentine, a chef creator in Austin, Texas. And host of the podcast, Every Day is a Food Day.

0:01:21.0 NI: And I'm Nick Irvine, ambassador of buzz at the Drinking Horn Meadery and co-host of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast.

0:01:26.5 AVV: And I'm Anna Van Valin in Los Angeles, California. The other host of every day is a food day and your resident Foodlosopher, you guys got all that? 

0:01:35.0 NI: Today, the ladies from every day is a food day are gonna tell us about mead's many, many cameos in ancient mythology from around the world, plus some mead holidays and celebrations where you can get your buzz on.

0:01:47.2 LB: And the guys from the Mead Cast are going to tell us all about their devotion to the potion, adventures with bees and brewing and how mead might just save the planet and save you that hang over.

0:02:00.2 AVV: Be sure to follow both Every Day is a Food Day and the Drinking Horn Mead Cast wherever you get your podcasts.

[music]

0:02:12.4 AVV: First things first, Food Day listeners, what's the requirement for Lia and I when we do an episode about alcohol, that's right, we have to be drinking it, Evan and Nick very generously has sent us a few bottles from their Meadery and we're gonna crack one open, so guys, What are we drinking first? 

0:02:28.3 EA: I think we're gonna start today off with a little bit of pomegranate Mead if Nick, if you wanna get that poured up, and I'll start talking about it.

0:02:36.1 LB: I'm showing it off.

0:02:37.4 EA: Oh, it's beautiful.

0:02:40.0 AVV: Oh sexy.

0:02:40.1 EA: It's a nice, deep red color, almost a violet, if I could tell the difference between those, and it's got a little bit of carbonation to it and kinda just start off with mead in general, it's fermented honey, so that's where all the good stuff... All the alcohol comes from fermented honey outta there.

0:02:56.0 LB: I just popped the cap off and it smells so good.

0:03:00.9 EA: It's kind of dangerous stuff, this one's about 13% alcohol, and it goes down like a fruit juice, so you just think you're drinking juice and then all of a sudden your couch is on fire, you don't know where your pants are. It's crazy.

0:03:11.5 LB: This sounds fun.

0:03:12.3 AVV: That happens when I drink Kool-Aid anyway, so.

0:03:16.0 EA: So a little bit of carbonation in this one, we use a forced carbonation method, we don't do any sort of like letting the yeast do their natural carbonation, it's really hard in brewing to get that carbonation right. If you just let the yeast do their thing, you usually end up with explosive bottles, so we just force carbonate that guy in there, and it's a nice juicy pomegranate flavor. A lot of the pomegranates come right out of Arizona. We try to use as much in the way of local fruit as we can, all the honey comes locally from about just a few miles south of where our production studio is here.

0:03:44.9 LB: Wow, that is so cool. To be hyper-local with how you make your mead. That's amazing.

0:03:50.7 EA: We're trying to support our local beekeepers as much as possible, and we're going through 3000 pounds plus of honey every month right now, so we're doing a good job trying to support those local beekeepers.

0:04:00.9 LB: Whoa, 3000 pounds.

0:04:02.0 EA: Yeah, yeah. Fair amount of honey.

0:04:03.3 LB: That's a lot of honey. How much honey would you say goes into making your 500 ml bottle? 

0:04:09.2 EA: It'll have about a quarter to a half a pound of honey depending on just how sweet we want it to end up being. Finishing sugar on this one, is sitting... We use sg, which is like standard gravity as a measurement for it, and then it's sitting about 10.14, 10.12, but if you put a soda like a Coke on to standard gravity, you'd be at like 10.45 or something like that. So it's not as sweet as people think it is, I think a lot of times people think it's more sweet than it is because of honey, we're just associating with the smells and the flavor, we associate with that sweetness, but most of the sugar has been fermented out into delicious, delicious alcohol.

0:04:46.9 LB: Yeah, this tastes so lovely, I think, just like you were saying, Evan, when I first heard about mead and I thought, it's just gonna be thick and sweet, I don't know if I'm gonna like that, and the first bottle of mead I had, it was like it was nothing like what I had envisioned at all. To me, this pomegranate, it's amazing.

0:05:04.3 EA: I'm glad to hear you say that, that's a huge component of what we wanted to get across to people was that... 'cause a lot of the commercial meads that are out there are thick, syrupy you could eat them with a spoon, and we wanted something that after you had a little tiny taster of, you're like, Oh, can I get an adult-sized glass of that? Do you have it in pints? 

0:05:21.8 LB: So how big of bottles can we really get? 

0:05:26.0 AVV: Before I drink this, I just have to confess that this is my first ever mead. Oh my God, it's so good.

0:05:33.7 LB: It is, isn't it? 

0:05:33.8 AVV: You guys, I was really worried.

0:05:37.3 LB: What were you thinking Anna, before you tried it? 

0:05:40.5 AVV: No, I was just worried I was gonna hate it, and then I gotta drink three of these and I act like I love it 'cause I don't. No, it's really good. Oh my gosh, I think I was imagining maybe like a flavored beer, 'cause sometimes you get a fruity beer or something that's flavored in that way, but this is its own thing.

0:05:58.1 NI: That's a big part of what we wanna, again, show people through Drinking Horn is that it is its own thing, people call it honey wine or like you said, maybe they think it's gonna be flavored like beer, but... Yeah, mead is a category all to itself. For sure.

0:06:10.6 LB: Cool. Y'all, this is dangerous. I'm like looking at the other two bottles and then this one, I'm scared.

0:06:18.2 AVV: Yeah. My immediate thought was, I'm in trouble. It's only 2:42 in Los Angeles right now, guys. So this might be what I'm doing for the rest of the day.

0:06:28.1 NI: How many times that's happened? Yes.

0:06:30.6 EA: You're gonna get to experience some of those better qualities of mead where you get done with this, you'll probably be feeling pretty good after three different meads, and you just drink a little water and you sober like you never even drank. It's fantastic.

0:06:42.1 LB: Amazing.

0:06:43.7 AVV: Well, before we dive into talking deep about mead, why don't you guys tell our listeners a little bit about your show.

0:06:49.8 NI: One of the main components that we kinda just discussed was trying to get the word out there about mead and what mead can be, and so a platform like a podcast, I feel like can be a great avenue to not only just reaching people, but maintaining their interest and telling new fans even more and deeper things about it. What I love about the Mead Cast is it's not just about one subject, not just about mead, but we can also dive into bees and honey, the ingredients, there is so much to talk about, as you guys already know about bees and honey, and then we've got our other component, since we have the Mead Hall and we are drinking Horn.

0:07:26.4 NI: We pull from the Norse part of the culture of mead, and so we get to talk about awesome Viking stuff as well, like the mythology, and you guys talked about the mead of poetry, that's just one story that kinda gives you a taste, a taste of the mead culture that's enveloped in those stories. Yeah, so the Mead Cast is not only just an avenue to educate people, but to be completely honest, it's a way that me and Evan can chill out from work, and even though it is still work and drink a couple of glasses of mead and hang out and talk about some cool stuff. And so, yeah, that's our mead cast in a nutshell or in a hive, if you will, it's bees, honey, mead and cool Viking stuff.

0:08:10.8 LB: Love it.

0:08:10.8 AVV: Love it, we are going to wear out the pun bell today, guys, it got a work out in our honey episode, but today, the poor thing's gonna be begging for breaking.

0:08:21.9 LB: That was awesome, Nick. So thanks for telling us and our listeners all about the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, and for the folks in your hive, just a little bit about Every Day is a Food Day, Anna and I love to talk about stories, scandals, holidays and heroes, all behind our favorite foods, everything from French fries to popcorn to apple pie and to honey, which is how we got here today, and Anna actually has a fun story of how we connected with you all.

0:08:47.7 AVV: Yeah, so if you're a long-time Food Day listener and you listened to the honey episode. I gave a shout out to these guys. So one of the things that we love to talk about, Lia mentioned food scandals is food scandals and food crimes and people, there are so many of them. You would not believe we've talked about things like in our fruit cake episode, there was an accountant at a fruit cake company in Texas that embezzled $13 million in fruit cake money.

0:09:15.5 EA: I didn't even know people bought that much fruit cake.

0:09:18.3 LB: Oh, they buy a lot of fruit cake.

0:09:21.0 AVV: People buy a lot of fruit cake. We also did an episode about poisonous foods and talked about famous poisonings throughout history, again, there are so many, and then kind of the mac daddy of all food crimes is the great maple syrup heist, which we talked about the maple syrup episode, which if you don't know, some sketchy people over the course of a year, stole hundreds of thousands of gallons of maple syrup from the Canadian strategic maple reserve warehouses in Montreal, all of which is a real thing. So I had heard a story about the hive heists, about people stealing other people's hives, Beekeeper on beekeeper crime, and I went to look a little deeper into that for researching the episode to come up with the topic, and there were so many bee and honey crimes, I couldn't believe it. There's the honey laundering. Again, respect whoever came up with that term, respect.

0:10:13.2 LB: A government worker come up with that.

0:10:15.9 AVV: A government worker earned their pension, that's what our tax dollars are being used for. Brainstorming epic food puns, and smuggling, the hive heists, all kinds of things. And so I was doing research for that, I listen to a whole bunch of podcasts and I just loved the Mead Cast, I thought you guys were the most well-researched, you're super sincere because your hearts are so much in this, and it was entertaining. So I went to your website and the first thing I see was it said, "Pleased to mead you," and I was like, "Oh. Oh, these are our people."

0:10:49.4 EA: Puns of steel.

0:10:52.8 LB: Oh yes, love it.

0:10:52.8 AVV: So reached out to you guys and you checked us out, and we connected, so I gotta ask, what did you guys think of our honey episode? 

0:11:00.6 NI: Embarrassingly, you guys did way more research and in-depth education than we did, so I was actually on a run while I was listening to that and I just kept rewinding and being like, "I didn't know that." There was definitely a lot of... You guys dig in deep, and that's what I'm... I'm glad we connected because I found you guys' podcast and it's... I don't know, it's awesome. I can sit here and talk about how genuine you guys are and how much research you do, and it's a joy to listen to and you're entertaining, and not all podcasts... Everyone does a podcast. Right, not all of them are that good. And you guys' it just, I don't know, I love it, it's great. I know there was a lot about the heists and those crimes that we didn't look into a lot of the details that you went into there. And so that was one of the things they caught my attention was that there is even more than me and Evan discovered, you guys dug even deeper into there and found more of these big numbers and money or honey laundering rather, things that are going on.

0:11:55.4 NI: And so it's just, it's amazing. It is really kind of mind-blowing how lucrative crimes with honey can be and bees, crimes with bees, not just the honey but stealing the bees, and some of the things you were talking about with the bee keeper on beekeeper crime was really interesting, and when you talked about not being able to tell whether it's a bee keeper's bees or not, 'cause they're in a bee suit so you can't identify them, you're like, Oh, that must be Charlie over there with his bees, and meanwhile it's like John instead of Charlie and he's heisting them, so I thought that was really...

0:12:28.7 AVV: Beekeeper John again.

0:12:31.6 NI: Right, man, old John.

0:12:33.9 EA: It's not that big of a community either, as Nick was saying like, you guys did a lot of research into just figuring out how much of that stuff is going on, and there's not that many beekeepers, so it's a good chance that it really is somebody that they know each other and they're like, Oh yeah, your hives are over in the southern almond field right now, are they? Okay, thank you. You're not gonna be there for a week. Excellent.

0:12:55.8 LB: You're going out of town? 

0:12:57.5 AVV: It almost feels like an Agatha Christie, like the thief is in the room. You have beekeeper convention, beekeeper meetings. It's one of these people, who's it gonna be? 

0:13:10.9 NI: If you're in a convention and you look around, there's a whatever percentage chance that someone in there is a thief. I never thought about that. Man, you really gotta bee careful out there.

0:13:21.3 LB: Now, I feel like we're just giving you guys nightmares.

0:13:24.5 EA: Yeah, I'm gonna be picking up honey tomorrow, I'm gonna be like eyeballing the beekeeper, "Are these all really your bees? Are they though?"

0:13:34.8 AVV: So in the episode, I predicted that your Ren Faire costumes are on point. Are your Ren Faire costumes in fact, on point? Because I may or may not have seen a YouTube video that involved costumes.

0:13:47.7 EA: I wouldn't say they're fully on point, to be honest with you, just because we thought they were on point until we started doing some of these festivals and things like that, and you get to really see some of these people that build their own chain mail and all this stuff, and sitting there knitting all of the metal pieces together into full suits and...

0:14:06.5 AVV: Forging their own weapons and...

0:14:08.8 EA: Yeah, so we have a decent set up for sure, mostly 'cause Nick likes to do all those videos and it's good for advertising and it's fun too. Our Killing Them with Kindness series, we're always trying to promote people just being nice to each other, there's a lot of mean folk in the world, we wanna promote niceness and mead.

0:14:26.2 LB: That's awesome.

0:14:26.4 AVV: No room for mean with mead.

0:14:30.7 LB: You're not officially in that society of creative anachronists? 

0:14:34.3 EA: No, no, they do take over the Mead Hall periodically especially...

0:14:38.6 LB: Do they? 

0:14:39.3 EA: Yeah, now that the weather is getting warmer out there, they come every Sunday and they pretty much take up the whole long table, which fits like 25-30 people, and they're all dressed up in garb, and it's a pretty fun time. People come in the front door and they like bang on the table and go, and it startles the crap out of people, and it's... It's pretty fun. But then if somebody's leaving I'll go and they turn around and they buy another bottle before they leave, so it helps us out too. It's good.

0:15:06.3 LB: That's wonderful.

0:15:06.6 AVV: You've got your very own LARPers.

0:15:10.6 EA: Yeah, pretty much.

[music]

0:15:16.2 AVV: Alright well now that we're warmed up and we've got some mead in us, why don't, Evan, you tell us all about your journey to a meadery.

0:15:22.9 EA: Yeah, so I started as a... Well. I guess started out... Started out as a baby, but I was a fish biologist before I started the meadery, I kind of was looking for a different job, I've got two kids, and at the time they were pretty young, and I got really tired of hearing the, Oh, do you remember when... No, you weren't there. Do you remember when... You weren't there. 'Cause my job as a fish biologist kept me away in the field for months at a time sometimes, and you literally start ending up feeling more comfortable sleeping on the sand than you do in a bed, and it starts to get a little weird. So I was looking for a change in career, and when my wife and I got married, I wanted to be a little romantic and bust out a whole bunch of mead because the word honeymoon is tied in with mead, you're supposed to have enough honey wine to last a moon cycle.

0:16:06.6 EA: Yeah, there's a lot of history, as you guys have found, there's a ton of history of mead sort of sprinkled throughout our culture, and I wanted to just sort of express my romantic side, it's not my best side, I'm working on it. And we made a whole bunch of mead for the wedding, and when folks came out, they drank all the mead and didn't touch any of the beer, we had three kegs of beer from one of the local breweries and nobody drank any of it, and they were coming back the next day after the wedding, and they're like, You got any more that mead stuff, and so I was like, Well maybe this something.

0:16:32.9 AVV: Were you and your wife like, "We're busy."

0:16:34.5 EA: Yeah, seriously, yeah.

0:16:36.7 AVV: Come back in a week, God.

0:16:38.5 EA: Why are you knocking, this is the day after I got married, I'm not supposed to have to wear pants today, get away from here. We started making mead. I never had any sort of design to really do anything besides just make mead and sell it at wholesale, and that changed the first time around when Guy Fieri came into our place and did his show here.

CLIP:

0:16:58.1 Guy Fiere: This Guy's Family Road Trip. It's gonna be a wild ride. While the boys are hanging out with their new friends. Lori and I are gonna go check out Drinking Horn Meadery. I don't have any clue what a meadery is. All I know is that they're making some kind of booze, it's something different and something funky, and we're all gonna figure out what this is at the same time. Turns out, mead is honey wine. Evan and Kelly Anderson make seven different kinds.

0:17:29.8 EA: He came in here, we're like the last five minutes, we were only supposed to be a 30-second piece on there, and when he started trying the mead, he kinda had the same initial reaction that you guys did, where it was like, I've heard of it, I heard about it in Game of Thrones, maybe or Vikings or one of those things, but I had never actually tasted it. And once he started drinking it, he really enjoyed it, and he's like, Well, when this goes live, you gotta have a taproom where people can drink this stuff, and you gotta have online sales and you gotta have all this other stuff, so we initially started setting things up and building it, and it's just kinda... At first you have to push the business and push, push, push, push, and now it's like I'm grabbing the tiger by the tail and just trying to hold on.

0:18:09.1 LB: That's awesome, but I think it just goes to show, people enjoyed the mead from the first sip and they wanted more, and you were kind enough to deliver and create your meadery and build this.

0:18:21.7 EA: Yeah, it was fun. Nick actually was a huge part in helping me get started with stuff, like I said, I originally, I had no idea what I was doing, and I thought I would have a... You guys can see the production here behind me, but I thought I would have just a library of carboys, which is the big glass fermenting vessel that most people use, people even making kombucha and stuff use it, it's just a big fermenting glass vessel. And I thought I would have a library of those and just be making it on a much smaller scale. Nick Irvine there, talked me into getting a conical steel fermenter, and then the guy we bought fermenters from, got me to buy a four barrel and so it just kind of same thing, I just sort of kept growing and growing and growing.

0:18:58.7 EA: We opened up the Mead Hall in September 2019, thinking that 2020 was just gonna be awesome, and 2020 was what 2020 was. And we made our way through that though, and got it all built out and it gave us a lot of extra time with the shut down and everything to be able to kinda put some of our own fine tuning touches on it, the whole facade on the bar is all bee hives on it, it's really fun, made all the bar top myself and a bunch of the tables and stuff, and so it was a lot of fun building everything out.

0:19:28.9 AVV: Whoa, and I have read that part of what started the engine revving on mead in the last decade or so, was shows like Game of Thrones or Viking. Have you noticed a correlation between that kind of pop culture aspect of it? 

0:19:42.9 EA: Oh, absolutely, there's been meaderies around for nearly 20, 30 years or something like that, and it's just never been very popular at all, but it's kind of... It's in the zeitgeist right now, people are thinking about it, and so it definitely helps sort of push things forward, and we've just been trying to kinda be in front of that wave and ride it and not let it plow us over.

0:20:01.1 AVV: And so we're drinking a pomegranate mead, and we've got a couple more options. How do you make a pomegranate mead or a mango mead or an any kind of mead? 

0:20:09.1 EA: Very slowly. So beer is made in about two weeks, you can go from an idea to actually being able to drink it, and with mead, when I was making it at home, it was a year, year and a half that it would take to make something to actually get it all the way through to the point that you wanted somebody to drink it, 'cause there's definitely a bit of aging that needs to happen with it, when it's really fresh, it can kinda taste like something you might use to power your vehicle. It takes a good bit of time. So with the commercial equipment, we've been able to refine that and get it down a whole lot further, but we're still sitting... Shortest time is probably three months or so, and it all starts with just mixing honey, water and yeast together, we definitely try to make a product that doesn't have all kinds of extra junk in it.

0:20:48.5 EA: So we didn't wanna use sulfites, we didn't wanna use sorbates, we didn't wanna use any of those chemical preservatives to make a shelf-stable product, and so we came up with a filter system to allow us to bring it down to shelf stability and get all the yeast out without having to deal with any of the chemicals that go into it. So you just basically mix up honey, water and yeast, you stick it into one of these big shiny steel tanks and you let it sit there for about three weeks, it takes to ferment, and then all the rest of the work after that is kinda back end work, but you have to try to cold crash them, which just gets the density to sort of work itself out so that all of the solids become the most dense thing within the container and they settle out to the bottom and then you end up moving it from one container to another, to get it off of that sediment, otherwise you'll end up with a mead that tastes a lot like bread, which everybody's got their own palette, I'm not here to yuck any yums.

0:21:35.2 LB: Is that bad? I mean I love bread.

0:21:37.7 EA: Some of them are great when they taste like bread, we have a super dry plum mead that has a very yeasty component to it, and people love the taste of it.

0:21:44.8 AVV: Gotta be careful about those barrels though guys.

[music]

0:21:47.8 S?: That's a call back.

0:21:50.8 NI: That's a call back.

0:21:52.4 AVV: We need you guys to come up with your version of the call back.

0:21:55.8 NI: That's a call back. Sorry.

0:21:58.5 LB: I think that that's perfect. So Evan, it sounds like making mead requires a lot of patience, that wait seems pretty long, do you taste throughout as you're waiting to get your final product, are you tasting it? 

0:22:12.0 EA: Every day, continuous tasting. Yeah, it's something that you never really know exactly what you're gonna end up with, especially when you're making something that's brand new, like that, the mango reaper that we're gonna be having later is something that was a brand new mead to make on a big scale like that. And you just... It's always hard because we'll make little batches of things, but when you scale up from five gallons to nearly 200, it's hard to know exactly how all those flavors are gonna play together, 'cause just like cooking like none of the flavors are linear as you increase it in size. So it's a little bit of work sometimes to try to re-arrange and get those things, but you're always tasting it throughout, and you have to be able to taste it and envision not just what it tastes like, but what is it gonna taste like, and so you get good at picking out the sort of flavors of a clean fermentation and a healthy fermentation, 'cause you wanna minimally stress out your yeast, making alcohol is all about point stresses for the yeast, you want them to only be lacking oxygen and have everything else they need.

0:23:09.7 AVV: What flavors have you tried to make that just did not work? That you had to abandon halfway through like, there's no way this is gonna be quaffable at the end of this process.

0:23:19.6 EA: I tried to make a yellow watermelon mead, I'm never gonna make it again. People are probably gonna hear it on this cast and they're be like, "Oh yeah, that sounds delicious." I'm like, No, it's not. It wasn't very good because the yellow watermelons don't... Like I was looking for that juicy red, it's summer time, I'm biting into a slice of watermelon taste, but I thought using the yellow ones would just be kind of unique and different from what else was out there, yellow watermelons tastes like cantaloupe. It was a cantaloupe mead.

0:23:47.4 LB: What a bummer.

0:23:49.3 AVV: You should have used honeydew.

0:23:53.5 EA: Honey has such like a gentle characteristics to it, it goes on so many things, it goes on everything from sweets to barbecue, to everything else, the fermentation process doesn't end up providing much in the way of tannins or bitterness, and so it's really... You can make just about anything into a mead. I was contemplating a tomato mead just yesterday, I don't know if we'll actually do it, but.

0:24:16.1 LB: Well, that was something I'm curious about too. When you're sourcing your honey, are you looking for specific ones where people have their hives and what sorts of fields their hives are in? 

0:24:24.7 EA: Yeah, absolutely. Varietals of honey are extremely important and really kind of big in the mead world for sure, as well as in the culinary world too, here in the south west, we have mesquite honey, which is pretty unique to the area and it just is from the blossoms out from a mesquite tree, and it kind of... We actually have a whole bunch of it in barrels that I'm actually hanging out right next to right now, but it gives it like a very kind of smoky almost flavor to it. We use a lot of orange blossom honey, so that's like kind of our main go-to is the orange blossom honey, and it all comes out of what's called Black Canyon, it's just North of Phoenix down there where they have a bunch of orange orchards, and orange blossom honey is one of the few honeys that actually tastes like its name sake.

0:25:03.0 EA: So lavender honey doesn't taste like lavender, Clover honey doesn't really taste like Clover, but at the same time, just like with the honey laundering and everything else people put whatever label they want on things, 'cause honey isn't a highly regulated industry at this point. You have to take everything that somebody calls a honey with a bit of grain of salt, if somebody tries to sell you organic honey, you should probably be a little skeptical about it, because a normal beehive, the bees that are coming in and out and working, the worker girls there. That sounds terrible. The worker bees.

0:25:35.9 LB: Those working girls.

0:25:36.9 EA: Those working girls.

0:25:39.9 AVV: We're keeping it, leave it in.

0:25:40.3 EA: They have a five-mile radius around the hive, so they can be traveling a huge range, and unless you have your bees in a warehouse, you wouldn't be able to tell what the bees are actually going after, and it takes some two million visits to a flower to make a pound of honey, so it's really hard to be able to tell what exactly your bees are going for. So we've had some orange blossom that ends up tasting a little minty 'cause there was a bunch of mint that was flowering near it, and they were going after that. Sometimes it can be a little spicy or peppery, but it's one of the things that's great about this size of batch that we're currently making, once you get much above this, you're using so many different honeys that it starts to homogenize that flavor and you're not necessarily getting some of the small nuances that you do with smaller batches.

0:26:23.4 LB: That's cool.

0:26:24.6 AVV: And have you ever kept your own bees, raised your own bees, created your own honey? 

0:26:28.5 EA: We sure do.

0:26:30.1 AVV: I guess they create the honey, you just steal it.

0:26:30.2 EA: Yeah, we're just honey thieves. We're just honey thieves. But yeah we do. We have a few hives down in Camp Verde that we use mostly for educational purposes for stuff, just like we were talking about with the Mead Cast. We do a bunch of YouTube videos and stuff too and just try to educate people about bees, and so we use those hives for that, we tried to keep bees up here in Flagstaff and it really just didn't work and people are like... Because of the cold winters, and it was actually no, because we get so many warm days in between our cold days up here, as soon as it gets above 45 degrees, your bees are gonna start hopping out flying around looking for food. We can get days in January where it's negative six, we can also get days in January where it's nearly 60, and as soon as it gets warm, bees come out and start flying around, there's nothing for them to eat, and so we would end up having to feed them a bunch of sugar water up here, which... Yeah, exactly. You don't wanna make mead with sugar water, then I might as well just be like fermenting the canned sugar. It's gross.

0:27:28.0 AVV: Well this pomegranate is great. But what else do you got? Let's crack open mead number two.

0:27:35.0 NI: Let's crack open mead number two. Number two is gonna be our lemon ginger, which just came out recently, and it is another just kind of representative of a different style of what you can get through mead, and Evan is running over right now. Thank you, sir. Oh, I gotta finish this one first.

0:28:00.0 EA: Drink up.

0:28:00.5 NI: There we go. And lemon ginger used to be my favorite.

0:28:02.8 LB: Oh, used to be.

0:28:04.2 NI: Used to be, yes, and we will be drinking my favorite after this one.

0:28:07.2 AVV: Spoilers. I love a lemon ginger kombucha, so I'm really excited about this.

0:28:14.9 NI: Nice, now I'm nervous.

0:28:17.0 LB: Again, I'm just hit with the smell and already... It's so bright.

0:28:22.3 EA: We kicked up the ginger in this batch, so some of our seasonals only come out once.

0:28:26.8 AVV: This'll wake you up.

0:28:27.9 LB: I love this.

0:28:29.4 AVV: This feels like a breakfast mead.

0:28:29.5 NI: With lemon and ginger, it's practically a health drink. And honey.

0:28:34.1 AVV: Right, got a sore throat, hello.

0:28:36.5 LB: I feel so good right now.

0:28:38.6 NI: You were talking about the sore throat right now, one of the great things I like to do, it's warming up around us right now, but in the winter time, a great thing about mead is that you can also have it heated up, so we will take our apple mead or we've got one called Metheglin, which is orange peel, black tea and cinnamon and heat that up on the stove, and then you could throw in a little whiskey or bourbon in there, a little shot if you want to also, but it is such a great beverage, depending on the style, I wouldn't necessarily warm up pomegranate, but yeah, apple, lemon ginger, even the traditional... Oh, the mango reaper maybe, and mix it with some kind of tea as well, is a great way to drink it. I feel like it is, and we have a lot of customers. We always have two cocktails or mead mixers at the mead Hall, and one is hot and one is cold at least through the spring, through the fall season, and people love those hot mead mixers.

0:29:31.2 LB: Yeah, I saw on the label that it said, This is delicious with hot tea too, so I am definitely going to try that.

0:29:38.2 AVV: I think I know what I'm leaving out for Santa to this year.

0:29:44.0 LB: Santa's so lucky.

0:29:44.1 AVV: Warm apple cinnamon mead.

0:29:47.9 NI: So what do you guys think about that lemon ginger.

0:29:49.7 AVV: God, it's so good. It's got a real kick.

0:29:51.8 LB: This is awesome. I am a ginger fan. Well I love lemon, I love ginger, I love alcohol. So it's perfect.

0:30:00.7 NI: The trifecta has been hit.

0:30:01.5 AVV: These are a few of her favorite things.

0:30:04.8 NI: These are a few of my favorite things.

0:30:06.8 AVV: I've got lemon in my ice water over here, so I'm like already primed. Oh man, I need to slow down though, guys, 'cause I'm gonna be three sheets to the wind by the time we get to my section and I'm gonna be like, Gods and stuff.

0:30:23.8 LB: I remember, Nick, you were telling us at one point that you could have a bunch of mead one night, but still be able to get up early the next morning and go for a run and not feel like, Oh, this is gonna be tough.

0:30:32.9 NI: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah talking about some of the health benefits, or not claims, you can't claim health benefits, but some of the better things that I've experienced and a lot of people have experienced with mead, one of those, Yes, is that there is a thing called congeners, which are basically... It's a fancy word for saying stuff in your drink, and so there are very limited... We talked about it's just water, yeast and honey, and then obviously whatever, like fruits and stuff like that they put in it. And so there is very limited things for your body to deal with, number one, and so the processing of it is a lot tamer on your body and then also, we've evolved as a species with honey for a lot of that time, bees were around a long time, agriculture with grains and grapes and large quantities, that wasn't around, and so our bodies may just be kinder to this.

0:31:20.1 NI: And so I've definitely found anecdotally, I get a certain level of buzz on, having a good time and I start worrying 'cause I'm supposed to get up and do something, but that alarm goes off and as long as I've had a couple of glasses of water, it's crazy almost to the point of like, did I actually drink that much mead the night before, whereas I can do that with beer or whiskey, and I'm just kinda like, Oh man. Snooze button, Snooze button. So anyway, I think it is just kinder to the body. We've evolved with it. It's a simple drink. One of our mottos is live simply drink simply. And so we really take that to heart with this product, and that goes into not adding sulfites and sulfates as well. I know that can have an effect on people, and so by Evan creating this production protocol that takes that out of the equation, man, it not only tastes better, but I know my body is happier having that.

0:32:13.2 NI: And then just... I mean, the honey, we all have heard the benefits of honey as an anti-inflammatory kind of thing, I wanna get this out to all you people out there, all you people out there, all the party people, actually, not the party people, all the people out there running long distances, mountain biking, climbing, doing big hikes, backpacking, that kind of thing. I wanna put it out to you guys that the anti-inflammatory properties in honey come through in this mead, and it is a great recovery beverage. People talk about beer as a great recovery beverage and yeah, it's got this carbohydrate kind of balance, but oh my gosh, mead as a recovery beverage for athletes, at least those who might have a drink after a big push, big thumbs up for me, I wanna get that word out there.

0:32:52.9 LB: You gotta start doing some mead runs then, I always... I have friends who always do beer runs where they're doing some kind of like half marathon or 5K, and then it always ends up at a brewery and it sounds like we need to have more mead runs, I might start running.

[laughter]

0:33:07.4 AVV: This sounds like a great way to incentivize people to start running, 'cause I know personally, I have a rule that I only run if something's chasing me.

0:33:13.5 NI: Me too.

0:33:15.0 AVV: But if I knew that it ended in one of these meads, I'd think about it. I'd think about it.

0:33:21.0 EA: I'm with you, I run for fear and fear alone.

0:33:25.2 NI: It doesn't have to be running.

0:33:27.3 LB: Well, I love seeing too. Like mead it's gluten-free. Right, that's something that I have been seeing a lot of with my snack company Yumday, is the desire and the want for more gluten-free snack products, gluten-free foods. And so, I love this, this is such a great alternative for folks who are trying to have gluten-free diets.

0:33:44.6 NI: Yep, absolutely 100% gluten-free through the whole process, there is a way that beers can become gluten reduced, but this is 100% gluten free all the way through, yeah, you don't have the inflammation potentially from the grains, so. Yeah, it's awesome.

0:33:55.8 EA: Unless we barrel age it, a lot of times, if we're barrel aging, we're putting it into a barrel that's had whiskey or whatever in it beforehand, and so then you can pick up some gluten in the barrel aged stuff, but the majority of our mead isn't barrel aged, and so it's just naturally gluten-free, easy drinking.

0:34:11.8 AVV: I'm telling you the barrels, they're nothing but trouble, between all the food crimes and all the true crime and Breaking Bad where people are just getting dissolved in barrels, I'm just like barrels equal shady shit. That's it.

0:34:29.3 NI: Which episode of you guys' is that that people and listeners can go right to, if all of a sudden they wanna hear about this shady barrel stuff.

0:34:36.5 AVV: The maple syrup episode is where the barrel paranoia started.

0:34:40.7 NI: Barrel paranoia. I love it.

0:34:42.5 AVV: Yeah, and then it just keeps creeping up.

0:34:48.1 LB: It's weird. It's always barrels now.

0:34:48.6 AVV: Always barrels. And then, of course, the honey episode barrels play a big part.

0:34:53.2 EA: It's making me nervous now. I keep looking over my shoulder at these barrels. I'm worried that they're creeping up on me.

0:34:57.9 LB: You gotta install some more cameras.

0:35:01.9 EA: That barrel's closer to me, what the heck happened.

[music]

0:35:08.7 AVV: In our honey episode, we talked a lot about how there are several crops that are actually kinda hurtful for bees, lack of biodiversity, monoculture, things like almonds, and so that is hurting the bees and therefore creating bigger climate crises or bigger environmental crises. How do you find mead affects the environment as opposed to beer or something else? 

0:35:30.7 EA: Minimal effect, I mean, compared to some of the other beverages, and one of the biggest components of that, and I think one of the bigger components moving forward that people are gonna start thinking more and more about, is water consumption and beer is the least of some of the other ones, but if for a liter of beer, you're looking at close to 300 liters of water to make that liter of beer, and that includes both all of the production, the brewing, all of that stuff as well as the upstream costs of actually growing that grain and that's where that huge number comes in, wine's even worse. I think wine is sitting somewhere between 7 and 8 hundred liters of water for a liter of wine, with mead, we don't have to water our bees. You're mostly trying to protect them from other bee thieves, that's your biggest component there.

0:36:13.4 AVV: They prefer you don't water them I bet.

0:36:16.8 EA: They do prefer it. They tend to just drown. So it's... You definitely don't wanna water them. Definitely don't wanna... I learned that, I learned it. No, our bees are fine. They're good and dry. Don't worry. So for mead, you're looking at somewhere between three and four liters of water to make a liter of mead. And if you drink a liter of mead, you have probably... At least of our mead, you have drank too much mead.

0:36:41.0 LB: That's incredible, that gap in water use for mead versus beer and then wine and distilled. Oh my gosh, that's crazy.

0:36:48.5 EA: It's huge.

0:36:49.6 AVV: Yeah, it makes sense if you don't have to grow grain in order to make it, but I wouldn't have thought about it unless you pointed it out.

0:36:54.5 EA: Bees are used very commonly for a whole lot of pollination factor, where they're just like you guys talked about, but you don't need that for them, you can just have bees out in the middle of the desert and they collect plenty of honey. It just makes life a whole lot more environmentally sound when you don't have to worry about that water component, especially in the year like it is right here where we're... Arizona is going into deeper and deeper water restrictions with Lake Powell and Lake Mead hitting all-time record lows on stuff, so it's gonna become more important as things move forward. And I'm hoping people start to think about that, 'cause if you decide to drink mead instead of drinking beer, that means you can have a 30-minute shower and still feel good about yourself. It's beautiful.

0:37:33.0 LB: I like it.

0:37:34.5 AVV: Drink mead, smell better.

0:37:36.0 LB: Sip sustainably.

0:37:39.4 EA: We definitely play off the Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy sort of thing, and we have a Save Water, Drink Mead.

0:37:45.8 AVV: Love it.

0:37:47.3 LB: Beautiful.

0:37:48.4 EA: We made T-shirts.

0:37:50.5 NI: We made T-shirts. Yeah.

0:37:50.6 AVV: Alright, that was great, guys. I feel good from the buzz of the mead, and I feel good about myself for drinking this mead.

0:37:56.8 EA: Bees do make the best buzz.

0:37:56.9 AVV: Well played.

[music]

0:38:17.9 NI: So on me and Evan's Drinking Horn Mead Cast, we definitely talk a lot about the Vikings and the Norse culture and some of that stuff. But bees are all over the world. And so there are stories that abound through all cultures, and I know that's y'all's specialty is looking at that, so are there any cool stories about bees around the world or mead mythology around the world? 

0:38:39.4 AVV: So many. In fact, the bar was set pretty high for mead since I had spent all this time researching that it was the nectar of the gods, that there was rivers of it running through heaven, that it was... The bar was set pretty high, you guys, so I appreciate you meading it, meeting it with your mead, but yes, on Food Day, we talk a lot about foods that are... They're kind of in the "Everybody's got a version," category. So again, fruit cake, every culture has some version of cake with fruit in it, or like a dessert bread with fruit in it. Another is hand pies. We talked about this in the take-out episode, I believe.

0:39:16.0 LB: Yeah, I mean, it's a container...

0:39:18.2 AVV: Exactly.

0:39:18.3 LB: Made of food.

0:39:20.6 AVV: Whether it's an empanada or a pierogi or a turnover, every culture has some version of a hand pie, and mead, some kind of fermented honey drink, totally falls into that category of everybody has a version of mead, there's evidence of honey in ancient cultures in China, India, Greece, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Wales, you name it. We're familiar with the Northern European version, which is kind of what we've been talking about. So I was gonna tell you about a couple of others that I thought were really interesting. So one is an East African version called Tej. Have you guys ever had Tej? 

0:39:53.6 EA: Absolutely, with a little bit of gesho root in there.

0:39:56.2 AVV: Yes, exactly.

0:39:58.4 LB: What? Tell me more.

0:40:01.0 AVV: It's from Ethiopia and also drunk in Eritrea, which is just north of Ethiopia, and it's honey, water and gesho, a medicinal herb that gives it a funk, makes it a little funky. It has the look and consistency of orange juice, so it must be a little less filtered than what you guys are making.

0:40:18.4 EA: A little pulpy.

0:40:19.4 AVV: A little puppy, but it's also ancient, so the oldest evidence of mead comes from places like India and China, from something insane like 40,000 years ago, which I have no reference point for. I'm American, 100 years is a really long time. So let's just say it's super old, and researchers have found evidence of Tej being drunk and used in rituals during excavations in a city called Aksum, which was the capital of the ancient Aksumite empire that existed from 80 BC to 825 AD. That's not quite 40,000 years ago. But pretty freaking old. Right.

0:40:56.4 NI: Very.

0:40:57.8 EA: That's cool.

0:40:57.9 AVV: Now, prior to the 1900s, Tej was only consumed by the King and anyone who was in his physical presence.

0:41:06.4 LB: Oh, so it was very special.

0:41:06.5 AVV: You wanted to get on his calendar so that you could have some Tej. And it was only produced in the houses of the ruling classes, and honey was actually so valuable in Ethiopia that at one point it was used to pay taxes and rent, it was actually currency, they relaxed a little bit, so it's now made and drunk by pretty much everyone and has become officially the country's national drink. As I was reading about it, it reminded me of Ginjinha, which is something we talked about in our Portuguese food episode. So Ginjinha is a liquer made from fermented sour cherries, and it's kind of like their official drink and you can both get fancy versions in the gift shops, and everybody's got a jug of hooch Ginjinha under a windowsill somewhere, and the Tej sounded like that a lot too, like you could buy the fancy stuff in the hotel bars, but what you really want is like grandma's jug of Tej, that's like in the back room, right? 

0:42:02.8 NI: That's awesome.

0:42:04.5 AVV: Fermented honey drinks, they're also in the Americas because there's an ancient Mayan version as well. The Mayan civilization dates back to 2000 BC, and Mayan cultural influence still thrives in Mexico, especially in the Yucatan region and beekeeping was very popular, bees were considered sacred and also kind of like part of the family, which is something I also saw in Celtic lore as well, which we'll talk about it in a second. So there was two meadish, mead-adjacent beverages that I discovered. One is called Xtabentún. Sorry, I don't speak Mayan, I speak Spanish, but not Mayan. Xtabentún. Why am I pronouncing it like it's German. Tún. What is happening? 

0:42:46.7 LB: It's in your blood Anna.

0:42:47.6 AVV: It is in my blood.

0:42:50.8 NI: It's got that ish in it.

0:42:53.4 AVV: It's got the Xtabentún. I just put an umlaut over it, I can't help it. So that's a honey drink in the Yucatan and then Balché is a honey fermented with water and the bark of a Balché tree, and sometimes they add psychedelics like mescaline, peyote or mushrooms mixed into it, I'm assuming to just give it a vibe.

0:43:14.6 EA: Gives it that extra little kick to it.

0:43:15.0 AVV: Have a deeper experience.

0:43:19.4 NI: So this is one of the only times I'm actually taking notes for some reason was on that one right there. So okay so Balche... Alright, I got it. Continue.

0:43:29.1 AVV: And valuable consumables, foods, crops that were really, really integral to society there, were considered to be controlled by gods. That's how important they were. So there actually is a Mayan God of bees and honey called Ah Muzen Cab. The images of it are really interesting, it's like a bee with its arms and legs spread out upside down, it looks very, very cool. That's a good segue, that it has a sort of mystical element to it, because mead is so old, fermented honey drinks are so old and they're part of all these ancient civilizations that it ended up in a bunch of their myths. And we actually talked about the Norse myth of the blood of poetry in our honey episode. Lia gave us a great concise and a tilting version, there was a dwarf murder, there was all kinds of just blood drinking. And I know you guys have talked about it a lot on the Mead Cast, so instead of going back over the Norse stuff, we're gonna talk about a few other places in their myths. So the first one is Greek Mythology. We've probably heard the phrase, nectar of the gods.

0:44:33.7 EA: Oh yeah, absolutely.

0:44:34.8 AVV: Yeah, we're talking about mead y'all. Nectar of the gods, mead was thought to be drunk on Mount Olympus by the gods, it was rumored that Aphrodite served it to her lovers.

0:44:47.4 NI: Smart.

0:44:48.7 AVV: Her gentleman callers or whatever she was into that day, I don't know. And because it was the nectar of the gods, it was thought to give you sort of godly attributes, like long life, strength, verily, intelligence, fertility, things like that.

0:45:01.9 LB: Is mead an aphrodisiac? 

0:45:03.4 AVV: Guys? 

0:45:05.3 EA: Yeah, that's part of that whole honeymoon thing, part of the reason it was used in the honeymoon is that mead is supposed to... And this is, I think this was mostly maybe Greek or Norse cultures where I'm pulling this from, but that mead was supposed to help increase virility and fertility, and so that's why you were supposed to drink mead for an entire moon cycle. It helps make the babies.

0:45:27.6 LB: Okay. It's all coming together.

0:45:30.3 AVV: Interesting.

0:45:30.4 NI: That makes me a little skeptical because I'm listening to you guys' deep dive into aphrodisiacs, which I listened to, your episode on that, which is super interesting to hear about how many there are, and I don't know, did you guys say, honey or mead in that whole list, you guys listed something like, it was like 50 different items that were aphrodisiacs, like Pez candy and some stuff like that, I don't know, but.

0:45:52.3 AVV: Yeah, I don't remember if honey or mead was on there, but we might as well tack it on.

0:45:54.0 LB: There we go. Guys, you heard it here first. From Every Day is a Food Day and the Mead Cast.

0:46:02.9 AVV: It's liquid, bubbly Viagra.

0:46:03.8 LB: That's right.

0:46:05.4 AVV: Get in on it.

0:46:05.5 EA: Number 51.

0:46:06.6 NI: There we go. Oh, Evan. Yup, we need to use that. Mead is liquid Viagra, there we go, boom.

0:46:12.1 AVV: You just need to make a blue one.

0:46:13.5 EA: I'm already picturing the most terrible advertisement for it ever, we're definitely gonna get in trouble for it.

0:46:18.4 AVV: But sales will be through the roof. Love it. I mean, if somebody can claim that arugula is an aphrodisiac, I feel like there's carte blanche too to claim mead and honey is as well.

0:46:33.2 NI: There'd be conceptions all over Whole Foods all the time if that was the case.

0:46:38.9 AVV: But this is something I thought was really cool, was they believed that mead sort of descended from Heaven and gathered on the plants, and that's what dew is. And then the bees would gather up the dew, the nectar to be collected and prepared for the humans. So the bees were kind of doing God's work.

0:46:58.9 LB: Dewing God's work.

0:47:00.9 AVV: Yes, Lia, they were dewing God's work.

0:47:04.0 NI: Yes, that was awesome. I love it.

0:47:06.9 AVV: And then once grapes were introduced to Southern Europe, wine became more of a thing, became more of a preferred drink, but mead was so revered and people truly believed that it would bring all of those attributes that even after it was not the most popular drink out there, it stayed part of Greek ceremonies for a very, very long time 'cause it was so revered.

0:47:27.8 EA: Which is kind of interesting because it really just sort of dropped out of our historical reference, there's a ton of old stuff, there's a ton of myths, there's a ton of history, and then at a certain point, whatever Dark Ages-ish somewhere in that realm, it just sort of drops out of history and it's like people just... And I don't know if it was just because grapes were cheaper or grapes were more available. I've heard people say that it's because the wax all of a sudden started becoming more valuable than the honey, and so people were less interested in trying to save the honey and they were more interested in using the wax for candles with the rise of the Catholic Church and that sort of thing, and so we started shifting over to a grape-based beverage instead of the mead.

0:48:05.4 AVV: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think that the place where it stayed more prominent, more popular, more part of the culture, were the places that grapes didn't grow, so like Scandinavia.

0:48:14.7 EA: Absolutely.

[music]

0:48:20.4 NI: And you guys, you talked about the mead of poetry and that kind of Norse myth, but hearing about that mead's got me thirsty for possibly some more of any kind of Northern Europe or Norse culture. Do you have anything else to give us with that? 

0:48:34.8 AVV: Oh yeah, the Celts, the Celts were all about the mead, bees in Celtic culture were seen as being very intelligent and sensitive, and even having souls, they were kind of sentient beings, this is super interesting to me because their myths about bees were very much tied to death, the presence of bee after a death, signified the soul being carried away from the body. In their mythology, honey and mead were actually part of the afterlife, so in Celtic heaven, which is called the other lands or Avalon was believed to have rivers of mead running through Paradise.

0:49:11.4 EA: You think one bottle is dangerous.

0:49:13.2 AVV: Right. I'm just imagining a Willy Wonka situation.

0:49:18.7 NI: Augustus! Augustus! 

0:49:18.8 AVV: With Augustus.

0:49:22.2 LB: Drinking it from the river.

0:49:23.2 AVV: Gets sucked into a tube.

0:49:24.6 NI: Evan, you're getting too far in... Oh, there goes Evan, okay.

0:49:29.0 EA: I had no chance.

0:49:29.9 NI: He's got a smile on his face.

0:49:31.9 EA: Went down happy.

0:49:33.2 AVV: And there was this super fascinating tradition called the telling of the bees. Have you guys ever heard of this? 

0:49:40.2 LB: No.

0:49:40.3 EA: No, I haven't.

0:49:40.4 LB: I've never heard of that.

0:49:41.0 AVV: Okay, so beekeeping, having hives at homes or family farms was very common, and since they were considered sentient and part of the family, it meant that the people who owned them needed to show them respect by telling them news about the family. So any changes, weddings, births, departures, and especially deaths, it was thought that bees were so intelligent and sensitive that they actually mourned, people would actually... I saw etchings and things of people putting black sashes over the hives to indicate that the bees also were in mourning.

0:50:12.8 EA: Do you just tell one bee, or do you try to find the Queen and tell her? Do you whisper it into the front of the hive? Sister died.

0:50:20.0 AVV: They have a PA system.

0:50:22.4 LB: Yeah, tell the one and the one goes back and does their waggle dance to tell the other bees.

0:50:29.2 AVV: Oh no, the saddest waggle dance.

0:50:29.9 LB: The saddest dance. The saddest waggle dance ever.

0:50:34.0 AVV: And if you didn't tell them this, but they found out, they could feel disrespected, they could get angry, and they could either leave, abandon you, there would be colony collapse, or they'd stop producing the honey for you or they'd swarm, they'd attack you, like you went out there in UGG boots.

0:51:00.7 S?: That's a call back.

0:51:02.1 LB: Oh no.

0:51:02.9 EA: That might be why my bees are so angry is I don't tell them enough about what's going on.

0:51:06.1 LB: Evan, you're not telling them? 

0:51:09.3 EA: No, I just go down there and I'm like, What's up bees, and slap them on top of the hive, How you doing? 

0:51:14.3 LB: Maybe it's the hive slapping.

0:51:14.4 AVV: Also maybe it's the slapping they don't like.

0:51:18.3 EA: You might be onto something.

0:51:20.7 NI: Man, I wasn't telling them 'cause I thought you were telling him the family news. And the UGG boots, you're saying UGG boots are not good to have around a hive? 

0:51:29.6 AVV: That was a bit of a call back to the honey episode, you're gonna have to listen for that.

0:51:33.6 EA: Just wear white, don't look like a bear.

0:51:35.2 AVV: White, shiny. You'll be fine. And that practice of the telling of the bees actually continued into the 19th century in Western Europe and in North America.

0:51:45.1 LB: Oh, really? 

0:51:47.1 AVV: Ruh-roh Evan's finished his second one.

0:51:47.4 LB: Oh my.

0:51:49.9 AVV: Okay, there's another Celtic, Celtic-adjacent legend that I thought was interesting of King Llud, so speaking of a river of mead being dangerous.

0:51:58.3 LB: Llud like...

0:52:00.0 AVV: No, it's L-L-U-D, so maybe it's Llud, but now...

0:52:05.8 LB: I like Llud.

0:52:06.7 AVV: I understand that that's the immediate thought. So you know what, let's go with it. Whatever the first image was in your head, I want you to go with it.

0:52:13.8 EA: King no pants.

0:52:15.6 AVV: King inappropriate jokes. So His kingdom was being attacked by dragons, and so what he did is he commanded his armies to dig ditches and fill them with mead, and then the Dragons were attracted to the mead, they landed in the ditches, they drank the mead, they got so inebriated that they fell asleep, and they slept so well that they slept through being bound with fabric and buried in a ditch.

0:52:42.5 EA: That's a true story.

0:52:42.8 LB: I mean, that's where the saying comes from, you can catch more dragons with mead.

0:52:50.1 AVV: Than with plain dirt.

0:52:52.3 NI: That is awesome.

0:52:52.4 AVV: I don't know what it says about me or that my age that I'm getting older or whatever, but my first thought was, God, I would love to sleep that well.

0:53:04.6 LB: Well just keep drinking. Lemon ginger and you're on your way.

0:53:05.8 NI: Yeah you've got a whole another bottle.

0:53:08.2 EA: There's still one more mead to go, you'll see how you sleep, you'll see, you'll see.

0:53:12.5 AVV: Well I'm gonna get through this last myth, this is actually a superstition, and then we'll crack open that last one, so this one comes courtesy of my dad.

0:53:21.7 LB: Dr. Van Valin.

0:53:23.3 AVV: Dr. Van Valin. So I come from an entire family of academics and professors, and my father's love language is random facts.

0:53:33.0 EA: Hey I got an engineer for a dad. I know how that works.

0:53:34.1 AVV: There you go. So I know when he's listened to an episode because all of a sudden I'll get a text of 800 random facts about whatever the subject food was complete with links to source material and a viewing or reading list.

0:53:47.8 LB: I love the study guides that he shares, it's so sweet.

0:53:50.0 EA: Did you know...

0:53:51.7 AVV: Dr. Van sends all kinds of supplemental materials, but he's a linguist, so this is a kind of a language superstition, so med... The root med means honey. So a lot of versions of mead and honey have the word med in them, or the root med, including in Russian or Slavic languages, medvedits means bear. So the med means honey and vedits means eats, So the literal translation of bear is honey eater. And there's even a region and a river in the Volga area, Volgostad, Volgograd... One of those, it's either a stad or a grad, called the medveditsa which is literally translates she-bear, and the reason why the word for bear is not worse urso or ursa or one of those is because they had sort of a... I don't know Beetle Juice superstition that if you said the actual name, you would conjure it.

0:54:48.7 AVV: This area is a very, very rich river Valley, the river itself is full of tons of kinds of fish, and the forest around it is super lush, so it's basically bear heaven. So the people who lived in this valley were very afraid of the bears, the bears were a menace, they were going to hurt them or at least eat all of the fish that they needed, so they stopped saying a direct word of bear, and started referring to them as honey eaters so that they would not conjure the presence of the bears.

0:55:21.1 EA: That's kind of common in a lot of cultures, like avoid saying the direct name of things for fear of calling it back, whether out of respect or fear either one.

0:55:29.9 AVV: So I thought that was very cool. Thanks, dad. Thanks, Dr. Van for that, and if you guys are interested, I have lots of supplemental reading materials and sources on that one.

0:55:40.6 NI: Absolutely.

[music]

0:55:45.6 AVV: So now we know all about mead, but before Lia tells us all the excuses we have to drink it with our holidays and our celebrations. I got a need. A need for more mead.

0:55:55.6 LB: A need for mead.

0:55:56.0 EA: For a third mead.

0:55:56.8 AVV: What's our last mead, guys? 

0:55:58.1 EA: This next one, I'm gonna...

0:56:00.0 LB: I'm so pumped about this one.

0:56:00.4 EA: Are you excited? So this mead kind of originated because we started letting all the guys in the back have a little bit of say in how things were done and how things were fermented and what we were trying to make, 'cause a lot of them are home brewers as well, we would make them in small, like five gallon batches, and we would just serve them on tap, basically as like a cocktail. And we came out with this one and it was the mango reaper. And so being in the Southwest, once again, I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, like Chipotle mango candy that's super common out this way, and I grew up on that stuff growing up in Albuquerque, and when one of the brewers decided to make this one we wanted to make it so that it wasn't so spicy as to scare people off, but spicy enough for the spicy people, the spicy people.

0:56:43.3 AVV: The spicy middle ground.

0:56:44.7 EA: The spicy middle ground, and we made the five-gallon batch, it was delicious, and then we were trying to make the big one, and we ended up using something like almost 20 pounds of Carolina Reaper and ghost pepper in there, and it was... Yeah, it was a lot. So we finished fermenting and I come in the back and the guys are filtering it through and finishing up some of the last steps. I come into the back and they've got this whole five-gallon bucket full of all these Carolina Reaper and ghost peppers that are sitting there and I was like, hey, have you guys tried any of these? 'Cause I was really curious how much of the capsicum would actually be pulled out of the pepper, especially with alcohol, like... Oh. Storing water in plastic. Not great, but it's not bad either. Storing alcohol in plastic, that's bad news, it starts to pull out terrible chemicals and so on and so forth.

0:57:29.6 EA: And so I was kind of curious how that worked with the capsicum, and the peppers, how much of it would actually get pulled out and I kind of thought I would be tasting like a bell pepper sort of thing by the time they were done soaking. Nope, I come back and I was cautious, I just gave it a little tiny lick, lick, just like licked the tip of it, and it was like, "Oh my goodness, that is still super spicy," and of course, it quickly became like a Who can eat the most pepper contest in the back, and these guys are just chowing down on them and pretty much everybody called in sick the next day, but I've now probably terrified you from trying to drink it, but it actually is... It's a nice balance, it brings up the heat, you feel it in the back of the throat, you feel it in the front of your mouth, it definitely brings some heat, but it doesn't go past where like that first sip gets you to, which I think a lot of that is the honey component to it, it just kinda smooths things out a little bit.

0:58:19.0 AVV: Yeah.

0:58:19.1 LB: Can I ask what's the capsicum? 

0:58:21.8 EA: Capsicum is just the actual chemical component that's in those peppers that provides the heat, it's where you get your Scoville from, yeah, it's got a...

0:58:32.0 LB: It's good for your heart.

0:58:34.3 EA: It'll make it back. But it won't go above that. Where you're at right now, Anna, it's not gonna take you too far.

0:58:38.9 AVV: I see why you do this one last 'cause it woke me up.

0:58:42.3 EA: Totally. And it would make all the other ones taste weird for sure. If you look on the bottle, it's got a Grim Reaper kind of overlaid into the back of it. Now you see that guy.

0:58:52.4 LB: That's perfect.

0:58:52.5 AVV: I couldn't see it until I had a sip and then he appeared. He materialized.

0:58:58.2 EA: Did you say his name three times in the mirror? 

0:59:00.3 LB: Yup. This is so good.

0:59:04.5 NI: Yeah, yeah, it definitely has a little bit of a kick. But I like to say, don't fear the Reaper and then I whip out my cowbell and start banging it, but... Because it is... It is a perfect balance, and they hit that in the back in production for me so perfectly, I've probably drank half of the batch that we made, I love this mead and it's the one that I give to everyone who has any bit of keenness to spice at all, and I think this one could put our name on the map, if you will, it's... Yeah, anyway, I like it. I like it a lot.

0:59:37.4 LB: Yeah, no, that's really good.

0:59:37.6 AVV: I don't know that I'm gonna get through it, but it is good. In one sitting.

0:59:42.1 NI: I've marinated chicken in it as well, that honey and that spice. That's another great... Here's another great thing about mead, is it pairs with food, you can pair wines and stuff like that, and beers and stuff, but mead is just another great food pairing and with that honey, and then now with this spice it is a beautiful little marinade but don't over do it 'cause you gotta drink most of it.

1:00:07.5 AVV: Well, now that we're awake and I can feel the back of my eyeballs.

1:00:10.9 EA: Yeah, tingling.

1:00:14.5 AVV: Lia.

1:00:15.4 LB: Oh man.

1:00:16.7 AVV: I don't think that we need an excuse to drink mead anymore Lia, but I still wanna hear what you got.

1:00:21.0 LB: If you are looking for an excuse to drink mead, there is national mead day, which happens on the first Saturday of August. So this year, it's August 6th, and I'm sure Evan and Nick already had that highlighted on the calendar, big hearts all around it. Ready to celebrate National Mead Day. And this day was actually created by the American Home Brewers Association, and they organized this mead day to increase awareness of this sweet fermented beverage, and to bring mead lovers, mead drinkers together, and to really just get folks to learn more about mead, which is what we got to do today with you guys, which is awesome, but if you do wanna celebrate mead on other days, I'm sure you can find festivals.

1:01:00.1 LB: I'm starting to see them pop up around me, we had a Texas mead Festival in February with some meaderies from Texas, Central Texas. And then I read that one of the largest mead festivals is called the Sugar Belt Mead Festival in Crown Point, Indiana. So I don't know if you've heard of this or if they're just claiming to be the largest mead festival, you know how people can be on the internet, but that's actually coming up in a couple of weeks later in May, and it has... I think this festival is boasting that they've got over 20 different meaderies around and they're also saying they are mead only because I think there are some other mead festivals that invite beer, wine, and so, I know. So they can't really call it a mead fest.

1:01:41.4 AVV: I just got the West Side Story theme in my head, that's a recipe for a rumble.

1:01:45.1 LB: It is, I can see it right now.

1:01:45.2 NI: Yeah, always a good excuse for a knife fight. But I'd throw bees at you, and you lose.

[laughter]

1:01:54.6 EA: That kind of goes to show where mead at, where mead at.

[laughter]

1:01:57.8 AVV: Let me see that bottle again, Evan, where's the bottle again.

1:02:03.3 LB: Empty bottle.

1:02:04.3 AVV: Listeners, it empty, she empty.

1:02:08.6 EA: So that kind of goes to show where mead is at right now currently as a beverage is you can have 20 meaderies all together and it's the biggest mead fest in the entire world.

1:02:17.0 LB: That's true, yeah.

1:02:19.6 EA: Yeah, right, right. And that's a huge part of what we like about it is as far as business-wise goes, it's an open playing field, so we here actually host our own, it's the Arizona Mead and Cider Festival, so maybe we kick ourselves out by also inviting cider.

1:02:32.8 LB: But you're just friendly like that.

1:02:35.4 EA: Well, and it's part of the licensing. So federally, most cidery... Most... Fuck you, mead. So federally, most...

1:02:44.7 AVV: It's turned on you.

1:02:45.7 EA: It has, it's totally turned on me, it's fighting me now, it's fighting me. Meaderies are classified federally as wineries technically, and a lot of cideries are also classified as the same because we ferment things that are other than grain or grape, so when we do our big Arizona Mead and Cider Festival, which is the biggest in our state, and probably the biggest in the south west, 'cause we end up with, I think we had 15 meaderies the last time we did it, so like six more and we'll be the biggest in world.

1:03:11.4 LB: Yeah, watch out Sugar Belt.

1:03:15.3 EA: But it is fun, like we talked about earlier, like mead being a slightly different feeling than say, whiskey or beer or whatever, and being that we are mead, we would go and do all kinds of different festivals, and a lot of them are whiskey, a lot of them are beer. We would do cocktail festivals and you get different vibes out of the people that are there, not so much at the beginning of the festival, but maybe more towards the end, you start to kinda feel out what they all feel like, and you could say it's a one-off but when you do these festivals year after year after year, it's just kind of different, and the Mead Festival's like, it's amazing, and there's not nearly enough of them, there's a couple in California. There's actually one that's called Meading in the Gardens, of course, with the pun, pun tied in there.

1:03:53.3 LB: I like that.

1:03:53.6 AVV: There must be something about mead that it either attracts pun people or pun people are attracted to mead, I don't know, but we've all found each other.

1:04:02.8 EA: Right, that's all the matters is that we all found each other. They're pretty fun and just you get a whole different vibe of people, you're never gonna end up with a whole bunch of dudes dressed up in full armor at a beer festival.

1:04:15.5 AVV: Right. Just the lederhosen. It's not as cool. It's not as cool.

1:04:19.4 EA: Maybe a kilt or two but, you know.

1:04:22.3 LB: What I think is cool though, and you were explaining this at the beginning of the show, is you kind of have your own festivals all the time in your Mead Hall, and having a Mead Hall is really an important part of culture, because back in the day, that's really where the society building was happening, that's where the meetings, the meadings were happening between people who are decision makers in the communities that they lived in, that's where kings would talk poorly about other people and send them off, or that's where you know who was who, and so in a sense, it's like mead has always been sort of the center of celebrations, part of weddings, birthdays to celebrate really exciting milestones, and you guys seem to have mead festivals all the time in your own drinking hall.

1:05:06.0 NI: I love that, I love that you say we have a festival every day, it is a gathering spot. It was the gathering spot, and we want it to continue to be the gathering spot, Evan and Kelly, they didn't create a bar, they created a hall, and that's what I kinda tell people all the time, it is a community meeting space, we've had weddings, we've had people come in and teach leather classes and chain... Like metal working classes, we've had film festival panels on important topics, we just had the Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival in there, and people came together and talked about Glen Canyon and Lake Powell and water issues.

1:05:38.0 EA: Baby showers.

1:05:41.6 NI: Yeah, yeah. Baby showers. Exactly. It's a hall, when you think of the word hall, it's that community gathering space, and it does take a little bit of want and effort to create that, you could just sit back and be like, "Let's just get people drunk," but to invite everyone to come in now, it's to the point where word's kinda getting around to where people think of us and that's so awesome, they think of the Mead Hall to have whatever the celebration or ceremony is, and so yeah, having a festival pretty much every day... Evan talked about when people come in, people say like, Hoorah, or Hey. Or not hoorah that's military, but Hwah.

1:06:18.2 NI: And pound on the tables and imagine coming into a place and having that kind of, again, celebration of you coming in to the community gathering, and one of the biggest things we've heard about our Mead Hall, or one of the best things and the most heart-warming things we hear about the mead hall is, it is a place where people feel 100% safe, not necessarily even physically, but emotionally, we have people coming in in witch hats and dressed up and playing board games and Magic the Gathering, we have a couple of Dungeons and Dragons nights. Yeah, it's a great celebration space, and we'd love to see it grow for sure.

1:06:51.2 LB: I love that.

1:06:52.8 EA: It's what the Mead Hall was supposed to be right, Like you were saying, Lia, it was a place where you not only conducted business, but you also officiated everything they needed to be officiated, if you need somebody to basically sign off on you selling your house to somebody else, you came into the Mead Hall and so the guy running the Mead Hall would be like, "Yep, I saw it happen."

1:07:09.9 AVV: So it was like also City Hall? 

1:07:12.6 NI: Yeah, it was, it was city hall, it was the Church, it was the school, it was all of those things kind of tied to each other.

1:07:17.7 EA: The notary.

1:07:18.6 NI: The notary.

1:07:18.8 LB: The notary.

1:07:20.1 AVV: I love it.

1:07:20.2 LB: The center of life is at the Mead Hall.

1:07:23.3 NI: Yeah, and we have a whole episode, I talked to a guy who basically wrote the book on mead halls, the whole building itself is kind of an extension where the hall was the main thing and there were little rooms on the side, and now we've kind of culturized, bigger rooms and just a little hall, but I wanna go back to the big hall, we have a long table. We wanna bring everyone and be like, Guess what, you're gonna talk to these people, and if you feel uncomfortable talking to them right now, have a glass of mead, you guys are gonna end up being best friends or you're gonna find out this guy can rent you a boat to go fishing or whatever.

1:07:54.8 LB: That's awesome.

1:07:56.0 AVV: More of an open-floor plan.

1:07:58.1 NI: Yes, absolutely. And a fire, you always have to have a fire.

1:08:01.6 AVV: Gotta have a fire.

1:08:02.5 EA: An open-mind plan.

1:08:05.6 AVV: I like that.

1:08:06.1 LB: I like that. So good.

1:08:09.0 AVV: This has been awesome. You guys, thank you so much for sending us your mead to sample, thank you so much for telling us all about it, we hope that you've enjoyed listening to some of our historical tidbits as well.

1:08:20.2 NI: It's delightful listening to you guys talk about these things and taking your deep dives has been great, and so everyone listening to the Mead Cast go over because I know we've got a lot of foodies in there who are just gonna get their minds blown by everything that you guys give on your episodes. It's awesome.

1:08:34.2 EA: Absolutely. It's a pleasure being on with you guy and like, I didn't even know about the Mayan mead before today, so I've actually got some research that I'm actually kinda kinda itching to go do now, I'm excited to learn some more. You guys got my brain juices flowing.

1:08:48.0 LB: So we're gonna start seeing some of this on your menu right? Nice.

1:08:51.9 EA: We're actually, we've been working on a Tej, actually.

1:08:57.7 LB: Very cool.

1:08:58.8 AVV: Can something be named after us, can there be the Call Back Tej, the Pun Bell Tej? .

1:09:03.4 EA: It's just gonna be the Anna-Lia Tej, or Lia-Anna. Of course it's gonna be named after you guys.

1:09:07.4 LB: That's so sweet.

1:09:08.7 AVV: We love that. Well, yes, everybody go follow both shows, Every Day is a Food Day and the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, search for us, or we'll put links in the show notes to both shows, and if you already follow both shows, you win.

1:09:23.2 LB: Yeah, winners.

1:09:23.4 AVV: You win podcasts.

1:09:24.6 LB: You are best friends.

1:09:26.9 AVV: You are best friends. For Food Day, you can find us anywhere you get your podcasts, you can check out our website at yumday.co/podcasts. We are very active on social media, especially Instagram at @FoodDayPod, where we post a lots of behind the same stuff and super fun visuals and background info on all of our stories and foods, we do Instagram lives every month, which you guys joined us yesterday.

1:09:46.6 LB: Yay, thanks for hopping it.

1:09:49.6 AVV: Yeah, that was so fun.

1:09:50.7 NI: And for the Drinking Horn Mead Cast, if you're interested in listening to a slightly less professional production with two goofballs who will entertain at the least about bees, mead and Viking... Cool Viking shit, then you can find us anywhere that you catch your podcasts as well. We've got Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all that good stuff going on as well. We're happy to be your entertainment and yeah, it was fun to jump onto your Instagram Live, a great time there, so... Yeah, follow them, following us, like they said and then we're best friends, and you're stuck with us.

1:10:24.4 EA: And you can follow us at Drinking Horn Meadery on anything.

1:10:29.3 AVV: Literally anything.

1:10:30.5 LB: All the places.

1:10:31.2 AVV: All the places.

1:10:31.5 EA: All of them.

1:10:32.3 AVV: Gmail, Friendster.

1:10:36.0 NI: Bumble.

1:10:37.7 LB: Friendster.

1:10:38.8 AVV: All.

1:10:38.9 EA: We're always looking for a match.

1:10:41.4 AVV: Pour one our for Friendster. Should we mention that you ship your mead world-wide? 

1:10:48.8 NI: No, not worldwide.

1:10:49.4 AVV: Or is worldwide or national? 

1:10:51.1 EA: I wish it was worldwide, that would be fantastic.

1:10:53.0 AVV: Should we mention that you ship your mead outside of Arizona? 

1:10:54.4 EA: Absolutely. You can find it on www.drinkinghornmeadery.com. And you can ship it... We ship to 38 states at this point. So, I'm sorry, if you're listening from one of those states that has weird laws that we don't ship it into yet, but we're always working on more licensing, and so if you're in a state where we don't ship to get a friend in a state that we do.

1:11:18.0 AV: Cross state lines, open a PO Box.

1:11:20.9 NI: We're looking at you, Oklahoma.

1:11:23.3 EA: Arkansas, come on.

1:11:27.4 AVV: Alright, well, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.

1:11:31.2 LB: Thanks.

1:11:31.2 NI: Yeah, well, all you mead is love.

[music]

1:11:39.7 AVV: Thank you for joining Lia Ballentine, Nick Irvine, Evan Anderson, and me, Anna Van Valin, for this special episode from Every Day is a Food Day and of the Drinking Horn Mead Cast. Be sure to follow both shows wherever you get your podcasts. The clip you heard today was from Guy Fieri's Family Road Trip. This episode was edited and sound designed by Anna Van Valin and Lia Ballentine. See you next time.