Lyme Bay Meads (review)
Lyme Bay Winery is an English winery that produces a variety of very high quality, delicious, and award-winning English Wine, Fruit Wine, Cider, Mead, Liqueurs and Spirits from their home in Devon’s beautiful Axe Valley.
I have a review of these four beautiful meads right here: Lyme Bay Winery Mead
Helderberg Meadworks Heritage Mead I love this mead. I am not sure how to describe it but let me give it a try. It is rich and has a beautiful full-bodied sweetness. Definitely one of my favorites.
Interesting story about how I discovered and tasted this mead.
It came from a book about mead and food pairings. I ended up choosing a recipe from a book that was paired with this mead. So, I bought the ingredients, made the recipe and tried the mead.
It was a wonderful overall experience. You can watch that video right here on my youtube channel. The recipe was Pork tenderloin.
St. Ambrose Meads
St.Ambrose Cellars is a meadery located in Beulah, Michigan and the good people over there were kind enough to send me some samples of their mead. And... they are really doing some wonderful stuff with mead.
To start with they are also in a partnership with Sleeping Bear Farms which is a producer of high quality honey. Sleeping Bear carries a lot of amazing products including Tupelo Honey and Star Thistle honey.
This partnership between St. Ambrose and Sleeping Bear means their meads are made with some of the absolute best honey.
Here are the six types of St. Ambrose mead that I review here:
They are from left to right:
- "Black Madonna" Blackberry and Honey
- "X.R. Cyser" Honey and Apple
- "Razz" Honey and Raspberry
- "Wild Ginger" Honey and Ginger
- "Evil Twin" Cherry and Ginger
- Star Thistle Mead - Made with Star Thistle Honey
I couldn't wait to try these out so I started with the Blackberry:
And I was astonished. That is the best word to describe what I discovered with this mead. It is different than your average mead. It has some pop to it. A wonderful sourness. Not sour in a bad way, but sour in a way that tickles you. I was literally amazed. How do they do this? I don't know but I like it. My second thought was that they have made a specialty mead with a lot of appeal. Makes me think of the revolution in craft beers. Seems to me that this revolution is now in the mead world too. And I like it.
Second I tried the X.R. Cyser - Same thing, except rather than sour being the word to use I would use tart. Again, An absolutely amazing specialty mead.
The Raspberry "Razz" -Raspberry is one of my favorite flavors. It has a nice tartness combined with a nice sweetness and they capture it well with this mead.
Next is the gingers: They both have a robust ginger flavor and I found myself wondering how they did it. If you like ginger you are going to like these meads and my understanding is that the Evil Twin Cherry and Ginger is one of their most popular meads.
The Star Thistle Mead: This one is my favorite. It is a more traditional mead. If you are familiar with meads and have tried a few this one is going to be exactly what you expect. It is light and full of flavor. And Star Thistle honey is a light and sweet honey so we get a light and sweet mead. Very good.
In summary,
I have been watching in awe as mead making has moved into the 21st century. What I mean is that there has been a revolution in craft beer making where there is a lot of experimentation in beers. And this same experimentation has also moved into mead making and now there are lots of wonderful craft meads and St. Ambrose, in my opinion, is one of the best at it.
If you like mead and you like craft beers with distinct flavor you might want to give St. Ambrose a try. Here is their website: St. Ambrose Meads
Hidden Legend Meads
 The Kings Mead by Hidden Legend - This is an outstanding mead. I really love it. It has a full bodied taste and is a great representative of what a mead should be! If you have never tried drinking any mead and want to get a sense of it I recommend you try this. It will give you a great sense of mead. I really like this mead.
Hidden Legend has a new line of meads called Kings Meads and they include The Kings Mead, the Kings Cyser and the Kings Pyment. You can buy these online (depending on what state you live in) right from their website: Hidden Legend
I have the Cyser and the Pyment and I will be posting reviews of those too. The King's Cyser is an apple mead The King's Pyment is honey and red wine.
 The Three King's Meads.
This is a polish mead made by a company called APIS. You can check out their website at: www.apis.pl. And it is one of the best meads I have ever tasted. Mead making has a very long tradition in Poland and it shows. And they actually have specialized vacations to poland where you can learn how to make mead. Pretty amazing and a once in a lifetime thing if you are serious about mead.
This is a bottle of raspberry mead and it cost me $60 dollars in a local wineshop. It is worth every penny but at that price it is proably best used for special occasions. (It has been aged 6 years)
APIS is actually an apiary company that raises bees and they have a wide variety of honey and wax oriented products but mead is definitely top on the list.
I do have a more extensive review of this mead with pictures, alcohol content and more right here: Polish Mead
HIDDEN LEGEND MEADERY
The picture here shows six of the flavors of mead that Hidden Legend makes. They have added a couple more to this list and they now have 8. Pure Honey, Dark Honey, Spice Honey, Maple Honey,
Elderberry, Chokecherry, Huckleberry, Peach.
This meadery has won a whole lot of awards for their series of meads.
These are a bold and daring series of meads, no weaklings in this bunch! There is a viking on the bottle and that is for good reason, they really bring out the flavor along with the taste of the honey. I have tried most of them but haven't het tried the Peach. I bet that is fantastic. Now, if you are an absolute beginner to mead and have never tasted it you might be surprised by this family of meads. They are full-bodied. You can check out their website and see if they can ship to your state. Hidden Legend Winery
Okie, I just tried one of the B. Nektar Meads, the Vanilla Cinnamon and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
B.Nektar makes a nice array of meads. This vanilla cinnamon is pretty good. I give it a B+ or 4 out of 5 stars.
Love the bottle and the label. The mead is good. Hints of both vanilla and cinnamon in a very good proportion.
The mead is a little cloudy which is quite common in meads but I tend to lean toward clearer meads. That's just a personal preference. You can buy B. Nektar and learn more about it on their website: B.Nektar Meadery
Here is a look at the mead in a glass. You can see it has a little bit of cloudiness to it.
I got an email from Julia who really likes the Oliver Camelot Mead. Here is what she has to say:
Just wanted to say, "Thank you for you site!" and also to tell you about Oliver Camelot Mead. My favorite is the Camelot Mead. Attaching pic. They do a really nice job. The one thing though is that you cannot refrigerate it or the sugar/honey will fall out and it'll be less sweet. So, you have to slightly chill it, if you do, and drink it up after opening. :) Julia
http://www.oliverwinery.com/camelotmead
 Redstone Mead
They come in an attractive blue bottle and they have a very convenient resealable cap. Here are some thoughts and taste testing of three meads from the Redstone Meadery line of products.
Traditional Mountain Honey Wine - If you never tasted mead and you really want to give some a try in a way that you get a real tasting of what mead is then this is the product you should buy. It it characteristically mead tasting - plain mead with no flavoring. Now the unusual thing about that is that if you never tasted mead you may be surprised. It is different than wine. Some people like it and some people don't. So give this a shot if you want to give mead a try. The alcohol is 12% by volume. They use a variety of honey types and Montrachet yeast.
Sunshine Nectar with Apricot Puree - Of these three products from Redstone Meadery this one is my favorite. It is gently carbonated and mildly flavored with apricot. The alcohol content is 8% so this is a much milder mead experience. If you like flavored drinks you might want to give this one a try. I really like it and it is fantastic when served cold.
Honey Wine With Juniper Berries - This one is ok. I am not a big fan of juniper berries but they do a nice job with this. To me, it is kind of a like a balance between traditional mead and flavored mead. It is a perfect in-between for traditional mead and heavily flavored or carbonated meads.
They also have quite a few other meads that you might find attractive. Here is their website: Redstone Meadery
OKAY - MORE REVIEWS COMING!!! If You are affiliated with a meadery and would like me to review your mead send me an email.
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