Bringing Back The World's Oldest Fermented Beverage | PARAGRAPHIC

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
(bees buzzing) (upbeat music) - [Jeff] We make something that no one knows about. And it's really expensive to make it and to sell it. A mead is the most delicious beverage that you've probably never tried. (upbeat music) - [Tyler] You see the honey mix it in there with the water. No better way to drink than get to the source right here. - [Man] I'm so excited about tasting. - [Jeff] You know, all your friends and family will say, "You know, so many 90% of small businesses fail "and all of that." Well now looking back like, well no kidding, it takes a lot to pull this off. (upbeat music) Oh wow. (upbeat music) It's not beer. It's not wine. It's not cider, it's its own category of beverage. We have a warehouse in Phoenix, we have a warehouse in Sweden. We are sending mead all over the state, the country in the world but it's all made right here. - So basically right now we're just gonna be re-circulating this water while we pump in honey, so it mixes all together till homogenized. - [Jared] For the recipe, it's basically like two parts water to one part honey. - [Tyler] Alright. Let me start this big guy up, he's our honey pump. This guy does all the heavy lifting essentially. So you can see the honey going through here, it's gonna be going through this hose over into a three way valve over there. And that three way valve is also pushing water through as the honey goes through. So it's mixing it in line, as well as in the tank while circulating. So if we just had, you know, put in a bunch of honey at the bottom of it, it will still ferment. You know, cause it's gonna eat up that sugar, but it's gonna be way too high concentration of sugars at the bottom for a healthy fermentation. So you wanna really get to that target gravity. - [Jared] Gravity is a fancy term for the sugar content basically. With the recipe that we have designed for this, it's designed to ferment to about 13 and a half percent alcohol. To get to that, we have to start at a specific sugar content, a specific gravity. You can see the honey mixing in with the Must right here. It's a it's the winemakers term for just basically the bare sugar-water is our Must. (gentle music) - Mead is the world's oldest fermented beverage. And all of our ancestors no matter where you're from, whether it's Europe, Africa, even Meso-America. Our ancestors were all enjoying mead. Honey was really one of the easiest sugars to get because nature's making this beautiful source of honey. - So this is the honey that we use here. A lot of honey that you get at the store is probably rice syrup from China. You can't really tell the difference by tasting it. It's a pretty good imitation, but fermenting it is very different. If you're a consumer buying honey at the store, you wouldn't know by tasting it or by looking at it that it was not real honey. Buying local, like the more locally sourced you can find the honey the better. - [Tyler] Whether you're cooking, you're making beer, you're making wine. The ingredients are really what make the product. Fermentation is very important for the quality of your ingredients. And where you source them from are almost as important as the work that goes into it. - [Jeff] Different honeys are just like different grains, different hops, different varietals of wine grapes. So when you take Arizona Wildflower honey, or Arizona, Mesquite honey, or a honey that was extracted from a hive in the end of the summer, that almost cooked and turned dark brown. All of those different honeys are gonna wind up tasting different, not just as honey but after you ferment them in a mead. The bees actually will put that honey into the honeycomb in the hive. And they have to dry out the moisture content to be below about 18%. And that will be stable. So when we talk about stability and alcohol, it means that it won't ferment. So they remove so much moisture from the nectar that honey is something that is stable and will not ferment inside the hive. If they didn't do that, the bees will be making mead themselves. And there are cases in nature where a beehive in the, you know, cracks of a tree will become swamps from a big rainstorm, and then that'll actually start with some just ambient heat dissolve some of that honey and mead can happen spontaneously in nature. People knew that there was something magic going on, because there was always going to be this resident East culture sitting around in those vessels that were creating alcohol. And so people all around the world were making mead. - I'm gonna prepare the yeast. And to do that, we need specific water temperature and this is coming out at 105 degrees which is exactly what we need. So like, if you're making bread, you normally rise the yeast in a water that was about this temperature. All the water in the building is filtered. We've got a very large charcoal filter that filters everything as the water comes into the building. So, even the water in the toilet is filtered. Alright, so we've got our two and a half gallons. And then I need... 675 grams of these nutrients. It's an Appetit, if you will for the yeast so that... it can start chowing down on the honey we're about to give it. Quite simply, yeast eat sugar, creates alcohol. And that's the basis of all fermentation. This here is... It's dry yeast, billions and billions and billions of cells. This is going to rehydrate and get all nice and hungry. - [Jeff] We get to use techniques from the wine world from their craft brewing world in order to create things that are truly unique and like you've never had before. - [Tyler] So gravity is actually a measurement of density. Like the gravity of water is like 1.000. And so we're measuring on a scale of like water to thick water. So what I'm looking for here is well, this is like 1.125. For our purposes, the density is indicative of the sugar content. It can be used for other things as well, like rocket fuel is also measured by gravity. The gravity tells us the sugar content. And so, with a recipe like this that we've made many, many times, we wanna make sure that it's consistent, and this will become important as we ferment. As this ferments, the gravity will get lower as the yeast consumes the sugar. And so, if we take a measurement in a few days, this will drop down and down and down until it's to the point where we wanna stop the fermentation basically. - In this process of making mead, there's a lot of science that goes into what we do. And we're looking at the pH and the gravities. And the temperatures, and all these different factors that go into having a happy healthy fermentation, creating the best product we can. Well then there's the artistic side, and that's what the Barrel program here really represents. The different qualities that we're gonna get from the different woods, the different barrels, the different way that they were all treated. Really put in flavor to what we're doing, that is sort of magical in the way that we don't know exactly when this is gonna be ready to drink. And it's gonna be different tomorrow, just a little than it is today. And it will definitely be different in six months than it is today. When you cook or toasts the wood, the lignin that makes up wood, you can chemically change lignin to Vinilin. And Vinilin is the exact same flavor that you get from a vanilla bean or that you have in vanilla ice cream. So, you can get flavors like vanilla, and even coconut and nutmeg from Oak. There are so many factors that can be considered when it comes to barrel aging. This is actually a Ruby Port barrel from Portugal that we imported. So... I'm gonna get this just right. Now we're taking a sample of some beautiful raspberry mead, that's aging in a Port barrel. (gentle music) That is something. So the first thing we wanna do is evaluate the appearance and the aroma. And it is just, this beautiful Garnet red color. So that's spot on. And it's just everything honey and raspberry bustin out of that nose. Oh, wow! Wow! This is just one of the best things that we've ever made. Even though mead is the oldest fermented beverage, at some point in time, people developed ways to make wine and beer and develop distilling. And mead had a lot of competition. Mead was never an inexpensive product, because the primary fermentable ingredient that defines the category is honey. Honey is the most expensive commonly used fermentable ingredient in alcohol today. The good news is that we've been able to transition that great challenge into one of our greatest assets. And that's that, we get to define in industry. We get to define, what is mead to everyone that comes into our tasting room. A traditional mead is when you take honey and water and yeast. Yeast is the catalyst to start the fermentation. And that's really it. We try and source the very best international ingredients from all over the world. But we pair those, with what we feel is the best honey in the world, which is Arizona honey. Don't just drink one mead and think that's what it's all like. I mean, imagine if you only had a Bud Light and you felt that's what all beer was. And you're like missing the whole world on, you know, barrel-aged stouts and double IPAs and this crazy cool flavors that are out there. If you have the opportunity, go somewhere that's offering. Go to a meadery. Look them up, see where they're at. And do a flight, try different meads because some are gonna be just like a white wine. Some may taste kind of like a beer. The tradition of the honeymoon was across many different cultures, especially when there were arranged marriages and like, the husband and wife didn't know each other. And so, the tradition is that you would give a newly wed couple a cycle, the moon or a month supply of mead, and that was your honeymoon. And so that would help break down barriers and get the guy and girl to know each other, and then start a family. And that's where the story of mead being the world's original aphrodisiac comes from. Mead is amazing. And I use that word on purpose because the word amazing like how many times have you said that? But you don't know what it means. So the etiology of the term is based on this ancient wooden bowl that you would drink a mead out of called a Mazer. And if something is amazing, it's as good as being drunk on mead. It's like caramel covered raspberries, and a hint to alcohol and the ports shining through. That's just beautiful. The creativity and the potential to make something really unique in the mead world rivals our best, anything else out there that I've ever had. So, that's why I think mead is amazing. And you should try it. (gentle music)
Info
Channel: PARAGRAPHIC
Views: 1,335,444
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: paragraphic, the paragraphic, documentary, cinematic, mead, meadery, honey wine, what is mead, making mead, barrel aging, barrel aged mead, fermenting honey, superstition meadery, nectar of the gods, mead renaissance, rennaisance
Id: ewGZLfUFGmc
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)
Published: Tue Jun 16 2020
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.