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!
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