Blog
The new batch of The Statement will be available soon. It is dense and rich. It is not exactly the same as the last batch; it has a touch more weight, a denser mouthfeel, and as of now has a woody/earthy note in the aromatics that brings cherry pits to mind (there are never any pits used in The Statement). It may be the different honey we used. We have also moved from the smaller tanks that we had when we opened to a newer set of larger tanks. That will obviously have an effect on the fermentation and aging kinetics. It will take a few batches to get to the level of consistency to where every batch tastes as much like the last as we can make it. Repetition is the key to learning, but brewers, bakers and chefs get a lot more reps on their systems than mead- and winemakers. To be honest, with the variability of honey as a vintage crop, and the nature of subtle annual variability of the fruit, clone-like reproduction of meads like ours may not ever be possible, but we’re trying.
People seem to like our mead. We’re really happy about that. Thank you. And we get a lot of inquiries along the lines of, “do you distribute in (insert state other than Michigan here)?”
No, not yet. In fact, we still don’t use a distributor in Michigan, but that will be changing soon, so that hopefully we can get our mead out to the western side of the state. In comparison with breweries and wineries across the state and across the country, we’re really small. How small? We can make a batch of about 350-400 gallons, depending on how much space in the fermenter is needed for headspace for fruit cap expansion, or is taken up by the fruit itself. We are so hemmed in on bottling days that I have whacked my head, my elbows, and my knees on stainless steel whatchamacallits so many times I have lost count. When they come back to fill a food order, the tasting room staff weave in and out of the bottling crew like they are skiing moguls in a New York subway car, and the customers wonder what the heck all that racket is.
But we are getting bigger slowly. Hopefully, we’ll be able to move that along a good bit in a few months, when we secure a new production space. We are working hard to get the point where we can make many or all of the meads in our regular lineup simultaneously, so we can deliver them to our retailers and at the tasting room all of the time. We are committed to getting better only as quickly as we can while maintaining the quality of our meads.
So, we’re asking that you stick with us. We genuinely believe that we will be making meads in three or four years that are better than the ones we make now. We intend to keep getting better with the systems, the sourcing, and hopefully some new recipes. We have been approved by the TTB to make some new varieties, and we think you’ll like them. Schramm’s Mead is committed to getting better, but it will not be quick or easy. It shouldn’t be.
I travel around a bit, and I have very much come to dislike the process of getting from Point A to Point B on our nation’s freeways.
It used to be that you could pull off at most of the rural exits in our country and, after gassing up, find a bite to eat and cup of Joe at Carrie’s Diner or Pop’s or The Vanderbilt Sip and Bite. And I’m talking about the city of Vanderbilt, not the rich family. If you were lucky, there would be some just-made soup and a good slice of homemade pie to finish it off with. If it was breakfast time, you’d want to ask which way the cook liked to make the potatoes, and get those. The best places had jam in a sugar bowl with a little spoon, and there was often a honey bear on every table.
Sadly, that’s not the case anymore. Now, if you’re within 50 miles of a large urban area, what you’ll find along the interstate are Panera Bread franchises, fast food and maybe a Bob Evans. Perhaps a Cracker Barrel, the most inadvertently appropriately named restaurant I can think of. Finding a great local restaurant within hailing distance of a freeway exit is like finding a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. Everything within half a mile is coated with corporate plaque. Our automotive circulatory system has hardening of the arteries.
It is sad that local groceries, local bakeries and local book stores have so often been driven from the landscape by mega-corporations intent on mining main street for every last dollar from the American public to send off to yacht owners on Long Island. I want there to be a guy (who has the same last name as the sign over the door of the hardware store) to answer my questions about which hose attachments will last a few years longer, and which screwdriver will give me the most leverage on a screw I can’t get out.
So it is a great feeling to watch what is going on in the world of craft beverages. You can find personality and heritage on the grow in beer, mead, cider and craft distilling. There are once again reasons to head for Ferndale and Kalamazoo and Dexter Michigan. You can find a place where the décor is not shipped in and unpacked from boxes, accompanied by a template that tells you which wall is supposed to have which poster.
The beer or mead will be good, sometimes great, and there will almost always be one or two that will tell you what the owner/meadmaker/brewer actually loves. At Schramm’s, you’ll find meads that will practically punch you in the face with fruit and honey flavor, and right down the street at B. Nektar, you’ll find sparkling, fun meads from combinations of tastes that will set your mind spinning. By the time you get done, you’ll know why we wish that Ferndale had a hotel, or a bed and breakfast. But then, you can stop by Assagi or Local or Flytrap, or Toast or Mae’s, or any one of a bunch of locally owned joints, and get your stomach full and your head clear.
That is how it should be in America. Freedom of choice is worthless without choices. If it takes brewers and meadmakers to give America back its sense of self and purpose, we may be in good hands. These are hard workers, who love their fellows, and who are giving of themselves until it hurts. They are the statins we need to treat our cultural hardening of the arteries.
Beer and mead aficionados love to share their treasures. Schramm’s Mead likes that. But I’ve seen a few things happen with mead lately that have left me a little sad.
It comes down to how people treat their mead (ours, and every else’s, for that matter). The world of beer trading is filled with people who groove heavily on instant gratification. That's understandable. Beer lends itself to that kind of attitude in general. It can be ready in a few weeks, and beer traders tend to ship beer across the country all year round.
In the world of fine wine, however, that kind of behavior is discouraged. In fine wine commerce, there are two shipping seasons – or “windows” - each year, during the few-week-period each spring and fall when nighttime temps are above freezing, and daytime temps top out around 55 to maybe 65 degrees. Wine sellers who ship prefer to hold purchases until those conditions prevail, and wine buyers rejoice as their cellars are replenished with choice buys that they have been anticipating for months.
This past winter was no average winter, but on more than a few occasions, we heard from folks who had received a bottle from a friend that the cork had pushed up, almost assuredly because the bottle had frozen in the back of a truck somewhere between Point A and Point B.
Summer is no better. It is, in fact, worse. Leaving a mead in the back of a car over 75° F is not going to do it any favors, and leaving it in a car or trunk above 80° will damage it pretty quickly. Depending on the angle of the sun, if your windows are up and it’s sunny out, the temperature inside your car can be 30° higher than the ambient temperature in 20 minutes. That will do two things to your mead, beer or wine: it will cook it, causing all manner of off flavors, and it will cause it to expand, creating pressure on the cork or cap. At Schramm’s, we like to fill our bottles almost completely, so there is very little air in the bottle to create risk of oxidation should you elect to lay your mead down for one, two, or twenty years. We learned that trick from Burgundy estates that make blindingly expensive bottles that may be cellared for decades. We think it’s a nice touch, but it doesn’t leave much room for hot car (or semi or UPS delivery truck) error.
So treat them with care, please. You may want to take a cooler full of ice with you if you’re going on mead collecting adventures during the summer. And please consider shipping during the “windows” when conditions are prime. We’ll thank you for it, your mead will thank you for it, and in the end, your mouth will thank you for it. Everyone’s a winner!
Things are busy in the mead world, and there are lots of people who are yearning to learn more about mead, how it’s made, and what the quality spectrum in mead looks like. That is very exciting.
This is a look at the sometimes-controversial concept of terroir, and a consideration of how, or if, it applies to mead. Terroir is a French term from the world of wine that is used to describe how a sense of place is reflected in the makeup of a wine. Terroir reflects the geology, geography and climatic conditions, and how they interact with the vines to produce the grapes used to make wine from a given location. The term is also used to communicate both the long term and immediate impacts of vineyard and winery practice on wines. Terroir is why a Chardonnay from Burgundy is different from a Chardonnay from Napa Valley, California or the Colchagua valley of Chile.
So, what does this have to do with mead? Well, rather a lot, really. Since Jonathon White, Mary Riethof, Mary Subers, and Irene Kushnir completed their USDA technical bulletin on Composition of American Honeys in 1962, we have known that even honeys from the same floral source from different locations are dramatically different. They are different in flavor, aroma, and chemical make-up. Their sugar balances are different, the acidity is different, and the water in the nectar and that the bees consume for their own needs are different. More recent research in Spain, at Ohio State University, and elsewhere is revealing that amino acid profiles and aroma and flavor compound levels are different.
The same is true for the fruits and spices we use in our meads. Cherries from Traverse City will differ from those grown in Washington State, and cherries from a southwest-facing slope on the Old Mission Peninsula will differ, even if only slightly, from those grown on a north-facing slope of the Leelanau Peninsula. Soil types, sun exposures, fertilization practices, and harvesting times and techniques will all have significant bearing on the quality of the fruit produced.
Those in the coffee trade have been keen to these subtle qualitative differences for years. They have been cultivating relationships with growers who have great “terroir” in their beans. Point sourcing has allowed coffee roasters to deliver beans with distinctive mouth feel, acidity, aromatic character and finish. Side-by-side tasting of coffees from nearby or distant sources provides a fascinating and revealing showcase for these attributes.
And what, then, does this mean to mead makers? First and foremost, it is our obligation to do the legwork to identify and procure the best ingredients we can find. Then, it is our obligation to do everything we can to capture and deliver the wonderful and eclectic characteristics of our honey and other ingredients with the greatest authenticity and precision we can muster.
In some regards, honey and mead represent a huge challenge for reflecting a sense of place by comparison with wine. One way to express the terroir of a winemaking location is to allow the grapes to ferment with the naturally occurring yeast brought on the fruit from the field to the winery. Honey, though, has an incredibly high osmotic pressure, and is very inhospitable to microorganisms like the yeast strains that ferment wine. It is hazardous at best to utilize the native yeasts that can survive in honey to ferment our mead. This may make the challenge of regional authenticity more difficult. It may mean taking a shot at fermentations with the yeast that comes in on the fruit we use to make Schramm’s Mead. It may mean using ingredients that are harder to obtain, such as honey varieties with huge and unique aromatic signatures. It can also mean locating ingredients that are more difficult to deal with – fresh fruits with extremely short seasons, for instance. And then we must know and adhere to those methods that maximize the contributions our ingredients make to the flavor and aroma of our mead.
At Schramm’s the shortened version of this philosophy is “Quality and Fidelity.” We seek out the best possible ingredients, and do what we must to insure that our mead delivers their characteristics as faithfully and accurately as it can. Mead makers have only scratched the surface of how we can express the personality of our local bounty, but the writing of that book will be a truly compelling process to observe. We’re getting started at Schramm’s, and many others in the world of mead are working on chapters of their own.
©2014, Ken Schramm
Recently, Robert Parker took some heat for comments he made at The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley. Somehow, I never got an invitation to attend. But the take on Parker’s comments was that they were divisive and dismissive; condescending to the attendees and lacking in the way of humility.
The whole situation is a stark reminder to me of the reality that the leading writers and the real experts in any field are not always the same people. That truth became very evident to me when I became more and more familiar with some of the top fly fishing authors of our time. What rapidly became clear was that the most famous writers were the people who were really good at two things – writing, and promoting themselves. They often weren’t the best fly fishermen. Dropped onto any given stream, our silk-tongued sages would inevitably be students of the situation for long enough to reveal their fallibility. The best fisherman on any given stream is almost always a local guide who knows the hatches better than his relatives’ birthdays, can tie great patterns, and who knows each riffle and pool down to its smallest fish. Those guys can catch fish in their sleep, and they know the casting patterns and drifts of each stretch of stream cold. They may not be able to write worth a good goddamn, and even if they can pen prose like Shakespeare, they would much rather spend their expendable time fishing than writing.
That is why, to my tastes, the best fishing writers have always been guys like John Gierach and Robert Traver; writers whose estimation of themselves has always been a solid notch or two below where it probably should be. They are writers who will talk reverently about their guides when they explore a new fishing hole, and who will celebrate their foibles when they reveal themselves. Mostly, though, they are writers who do a good job of capturing why they love to fish, and relate the tales that expose to the world the glory that is time with your feet in cold running water, a fly rod in your hand and no boss over your shoulder.
Which brings me back to wine writers. All too often, the writers that get the most acclaim are cats who taste zillions of wines in machine gun fashion, out of the very context that makes wine drinking such a pleasure. They plow through dozens of wines with glass and pen alternately in hand, or worse yet, a keyboard in the place where a plate of great food should be.
They may have decent palates, and they definitely have done the work to connect their tongue with their vocabulary, which is no mean feat. But they may not be the best wine drinkers. The people I want to learn from most are the ones who know how to prepare great meals and pair them with the right wines and the right people. Some of them are chefs, and some of them are winemakers, and some of them are HiLo operators at a Ford assembly plant who put in their eight hours and spend the rest of their time finding ways to live and love and cook and drink better.
I still love to write. And I think some people may like to read what I have to say. So I am going to try to spend as much time as possible trying to pass along the few things I have learned about how to live better, and try as hard as I can to leave the pretense and the pomposity in the trash. Because I know damn well I’m not the best at anything I am trying to do, I’m sure not the best at anything I’m writing about, and the best may well be reading.
