Honeymoon at Home: Omaha, Nebraska

I live in the town of Bellevue, Nebraska.  It's a bedroom community for the city of Omaha and home to Offutt Airforce Base.  Other then that it's just like any of the thousands of tiny hamlets that dot the landscape in and around this country. 

Except that it has a meadery.  I'm not talking about a winery that happens to do a mead or two, but a full-on-we-put-honey-in-water-and-ferment-the-hell-out-of-it-goddamnit- meadery.  Just a couple miles from my house, no less. 

Moonstruck Meadery is a father-son project that opened just a little over a year ago in this little town.  Distribution is still really small, you can only find it in the state of Nebraska and even then it's a bit of a challenge.   But with plans to buy a new building just to build enough fermenters to keep up with demand, it's growing.

This is the first time I've covered mead to any real degree in this blog, so a quick introduction in case there are people who have no idea what I'm talking about.

Mead is basically fermented honey.  It's about as simple as it gets.  You take honey, you put it in water and wait until it becomes awesome.  Of course, simple is boring and most mead makers start adding all sorts of weirdness.

Fruit mead (melomel) is pretty standard.

Mead brewed with herbs (metheglin) are less common but open a lot of doors to weird and wild flavors. 

Really, mead has been made with all sorts of combinations which makes it a unique medium for experimentation.  Pure mead has very little flavor outside a light sweetness or dry champagne flavor. It's an extremely versatile beverage which is probably why it exists in this weird grey area between wine making and beer brewing.  The process for making mead shares more with beer brewing, but it can and does age like wine. 

So what does Moonstruck have to offer?  The tasting room is open every day except for Monday.  For five dollars they allow you to sample five different meads.  So I went with two melomel, a metheglin, a pure mead and something called a capsumel which will be explained in a moment.

Show Mead: The pure mead, made from local honey.  It's on the dry side of the spectrum.  I picked up some very light herbal and grassy flavors off of it.

Cherry Melomel: Made with tart cherries that makes it taste just like cherry pie.  Really, it's pretty fantastic.  It's sweet with that nice tartness in the background.

Plum Melomel: By far the sweetest mead I tasted while I was there.  It had a thicker, syrupy quality to it.  Not really my thing, but for someone like my wife who likes drinks as sweet as they will come, it's just about perfect.

Hoppy: Where beer and mead really come together is the tendency to spice mead with hops.  This one has a combination of cascade and hallertau hops.  Think mild IPA with everything beer-like removed.  Take away the malt flavors and you have this.  It really features the hops which are citrusy floral and slightly spicy without a huge bitter flavor.

Capsumel:  Pepper mead.  This one is flavored with Anaheim, Serrano and Jalapeno chilies.  It has the aroma of fresh chopped peppers.   Flavor has spice, it's spicy but not to any unpleasant degree.  I wasn't looking longingly at the water faucet at any rate.  It's also packed with nice vegetable flavors.

That's all for now, but they have enough variety for at least one more visit some time.  So I'll return with that report another time.

Cheers!

The Figid Northlands: Minneapolis

Another quick entry this week.  I would have had more time, but weather in this country seemed to forget that it is MID FREAKING APRIL.

It wasn't just Minneapolis-St. Paul where I found myself this week.   Here, cold, snowy weather is more common then sunny, warm weather.  It was all through the Great Plains.. so yeah fun times.  Bad situation if you have places to go.  Good situation if you can hide in a bar drinking beer until the damn thing blows over.  So let's do that.

Barley Johns Brewpub in Minneapolis this week for a couple of pints.  The brewpub itself is kind of cool.  It's a small, quiet place on the outskirts of the city that dedicates itself to good food an a brewing style that, while not exactly redefining what crazy shit you can put in a pot and ferment, is different enough to cock an eyebrow or two at.

Wild brunette: The flagship beer of Barley Johns brewed with wild Minnesota rice.  It has a sweet caramel aroma with some fruity wine notes.  Sweet fruity flavor right off the top.  Charcoal flavor and herbal bitterness hits really fast after that and finishes dry.

Oyster Stout: At this point in time half the people reading this blog are absolutely disgusted and the other half are intregued.  The wierd part is that when I asked my server about it, he gave me the impression that they didn't use actual oysters, just the shells.  Their website, however, says that yes, there are real whole oysters in the brew, so take from that what you will.

It really doesn't matter either way because there was nothing, for lack of a better word, oystery about it.  There's no aroma to speak of.  I picked up lots of charcoal and roasted barley with a hint of fruity sweetness although it finished fairly bitter and herbal.  Apparently the perfect beer to pair with oysters, but that is an experiment for another day.

Barley Johns actually has a fairly exstensive menu of beer brewed on site, but like I said, I could only pop in for a pint or two.  Until next week where I'll hopefully have more time to sit down to a proper tasting.

Cheers!

Mountain Time: Colorado

Quick one this week. A solid work schedual has made it tough to sit down to a quality pint.

But I did grab a couple as I hurried through Idaho Springs, a small ski row just up.the mountain from Denver.

Tommyknocker Brewing has a number of things going for it. Number one, I think they were running one of the brew kettles at the time because the area around it smelled wonderful. It's got a groovy rustic mining town atmosphere. Best of all, lots of good beer.

I had to rush through, so I could only sample two of the ten or so beers they had on tap. It was a good sample, but there so much more awesomeness still waiting therein.

Rye Porter: it came out black with a sweet ,caramel, woody aroma. Sweet woody flavors with roasted barley and a slight peppery flavor. Not terribly different from a typical Porter, but enough to be interesting.

Oatmeal Stout: Getting my dark beer fix out if my system before warm weather has me reaching for lighter beer. Very light sweet aroma here. Slightly fruity, almost wine flavor right on top. Caramel and roasted flavors bring up the rear and leave a kind of lingering burnt wood flavor.