Growth

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.