Mead Library
Endless Raspberry: (Old Florida) Tupelo Reserve
Years ago, we first made Endless Raspberry to see if it was even possible. We never expected the looks on people's faces, or the feedback that we received, when they drank it. It inspired us to make the Endless one of the main series that we would focus on at the Zymarium Meadery.
In order to make a mead, you need to dilute the honey with at least an equal amount of water, in order to make it fermentable into alcohol. For the Endless Series, we pushed this concept as far as physically possible by only using fruit and honey, there is no added water, and this requires an incredible amount of fruit. Endless meads are a labor of love in pursuit of making something unforgettable.
As raspberries are extra tart compared to most berries, we wanted a honey that was extra sweet compared to most honeys, and it just so happens that Florida has the sweetest honey there is - Tupelo! While being the perfect fit for this mead, Tupelo is also one of the rarest and most expensive honeys on the planet. We wanted the best for this first official release of Endless Raspberry, so while future releases will use other honey varieties, this batch used the same masterpiece Tupelo featured in “Soliloquy of Nectar: Old Florida Tupelo”.
We used over 1800 pounds of raspberries for this mead, and due to the number of raspberry seeds, we spent weeks sifting them out during fermentation only to get a fraction of the yield we had originally hoped for. We then aged the mead on more fresh raspberries and Tupelo honey to achieve the perfect balance of tart and sweet with an amazing aroma. It's big and jammy with just the right amount of oak to make the fruit pop, increase the body, and extend the finish. The result is even better than the original, it truly captures everything delicious about raspberries.
This extra special mead is now extremely special, and limited, as we ended up with half as much as we expected.
Awards:
- 93 Points - Mead Institute US Open
- Silver - Mazer Cup International
- Bronze - National Honey Board
Soliloquy of Nectar: Old Florida Tupelo
A blend, by the bees, of Tupelo Honey, Black Gum Tupelo Honey, Maple Blossom Honey, and Holly Blossom Honey from the Florida Georgia border.
The only Florida honey more famous than Orange Blossom, is Tupelo!
Due to its unique sugar composition it's the sweetest honey out there. Unfortunately it's also one of the rarest and most expensive honeys there is
The trees only grow on the river banks and every year this honey gets harder to source as the river gets built up and the hurricanes get worse.
While driving around the state meeting with apiaries, we met Jerry. He has been beekeeping for nearly 70 years, and he knows more about honey and bees than anyone we’ve ever met. Our timing could not have been better, while sampling his honeys we asked about Tupelo, and it just so happened that he was getting ready to bottle something even better.
One of Jerry’s lifelong goals was to produce a completely unique honey by placing his hives in strategic locations and moving them around the area with impeccable timing, allowing the bees to make his blend. This medley of nectars was produced in the Okefenokee swamp region and culminated along the banks of the St Mary’s River which separates Florida and Georgia This method of bee blending is an art form at its best and allowed Jerry to achieve his goal!
Regular Tupelo honey has a distinct flavor but it's simple, with no real complexity or depth. Jerry’s Tupelo blend is a masterpiece, it’s all the classic Tupelo up front, but has a long caramel finish that gives it a whole extra dimension of flavor. We practically begged him for as much as he could spare (and as much as we could afford). We split the honey we got into 3 different cold and slow fermentation with 3 different yeast strains, then blended the meads back together in order to make this Soliloquy
Awards:
- 90 Points - Mead Institute US Open
- Gold - National Honey Board
ENDLESS BLUEBERRY
In order to make a mead, you need to dilute the honey with at least an equal amount of water, in order to make it fermentable into alcohol. For our Endless series, we pushed this concept as far as physically possible by only using fruit and honey, there is no added water! This takes an incredible amount of fruit in order to even give the yeast a chance at this herculean task.
For our first Endless mead we made at the Meadery, we sourced 1800 pounds of amazing Southern Highbush Blueberries, huge, full of juice and perfectly ripe. We combined them with drums of very rare local holly blossom honey, a perfect pairing that we will never be able to repeat. This honey was collected in early spring, before gallberry blossomed, and the beekeeper who has been doing this for over 25 years said he’s only seen a bloom like this once, over a decade ago. The honey was extra rich, with notes of caramel and an almost buttery aftertaste.
It took the two of us a few very long days, and nearly sleepless nights to process the fruit and combine it with the honey. This was made the same way a winery would make a red wine, and without any temperature control. With so much on the line we stayed all night next to the fermenter to keep an eye on it the first few nights after fermentation started, anxious the fruit would overflow, or the temperature under the fruit cap would get too hot and kill the yeast, losing everything. We spent days pumping the mead from the bottom back on top of the fruit in order to cool it off and extract the skins. Post fermentation, it took us over 18 hours to press all the fruit, separating each pressing based on the pressure applied, the harder pressed gave the most flavor but also the most tannins. We then took our time selectively blending the pressings back into the main mead. Finally we aged it on a little more blueberries and some more honey to balance it all out.
The result of this, nearly hubris, gamble paid off more than we could have ever hoped for. The mead is an unbelievable vibrant purple and quite possibly the best fruited mead we’ve ever created. For all this effort of working with whole fruit, it was worth it, the true magic of blueberries is in the skins!
Awards:
- 92 Points - Mead Institute US Open - Awarded by Master Sommelier Madeline Triffon
Heart of the Tempest
A Meadowfoam Blossom Mead with Cranberries, Madagascar Vanilla Beans, Korintje Cinnamon, and aged on French Oak!
Early last summer we started contacting apiaries in Oregon that pollinate meadowfoam blossom fields in order to secure this rare honey. This is one of our absolute favorite honeys, it's naturally bursting with aromas and flavors of vanilla and marshmallow. It’s our go to honey to share with people that think all honey tastes the same, it never fails to wow people. After a few months and a train ride across the country, the pallet of honey arrived!
This is an Endless mead in spirit, but cranberries are impossible to fully ferment since they naturally contain an acid which inhibits yeast from multiplying. So instead of gambling one of the most expensive and cherished honeys by fermenting the cranberries, we instead made an imperial mead with just the honey, fermenting it cold and slowly over a month to preserve all the aromatics, then once it was finished we blended it with the juice of nearly a thousand pounds of cranberries! The incredible tartness of the cranberries allowed us to work in as much honey as possible in order to attempt to tame them!
The mead then spent a few months maturing in a neutral barrel with French Oak staves which imparted soft spices, body, and tannins that helped dry out and extend the finish. To add an extra dimension of flavor to the oak's spices, we recirculated for a few days through our favorite Korintje dessert cinnamon!
The cranberries’ wild tempest of tartness was still not tamed though, so we gave it the same vanilla treatment as Endless Cherry Pie, letting it spend a few weeks on multiple pounds of huge grade A Madagascar vanilla beans. Their heavenly rich vanilla aroma with creamy, buttery undertones was the perfect addition to round everything out and amplify the honey’s natural flavors.
Barrel- Aged Heart of the Tempest
The original mead has been described as Thanksgiving in a glass, and this barrel-aged version is even better! Tart cranberries balanced by Meadowfoam honey, which has big notes of marshmallow and vanilla, with a little bit of clove. The final addition of cinnamon and French oak brings everything into balance.
Heart of the Tempest aged for 8+ months in new French Oak barrels, then we replaced the volume lost (15%) to the barrel with Soliloquy of Nectar: Meadowfoam, this blend brings this mead into it’s final form, finally taming the tempest!
Barrel-Aged French Toast Mead & Barrel-Aged Banana French Toast
Black Mangrove Blossom Mead with Vermont Dark Maple Syrup, Vanilla, and Cinnamon. Aged in a New American Oak barrel toasted for a warm spice and vanilla profile for 4.5 months.
The elements of some of our favorite flavors harmonize perfectly to create this french toast in a bottle!
When searching for the perfect maple syrup for a dream mead, we sourced a bunch of samples from all the Great Lakes states and all the way up to Vermont. A lot like honey, every syrup had different flavors, aromas, and colors. We tried close to a dozen to find the perfect one — and most were forgettable and average — but a dark amber one from Vermont was by far the best we had ever tasted! Not only did it have those ideal maple notes, but it was buttery!!
Since falling in love with that syrup, I’ve wanted to showcase it in a mead, and the perfect honey to pair with it was Florida Black Mangrove with it’s dark caramel and butterscotch notes. We aged the very high abv mead in a New American Oak barrel with a custom toast for months to layer in more flavors and body, but most importantly the tannins that would help prevent the mead from being cloying and provide it with a clean finish. After the barrel we blended it with the heavenly syrup, providing nearly all the sweetness, let it rest on vanilla beans, and then finally finished it off with the perfect amount of our favorite Korintje cinnamon to bring everything into balance. As always, our cinnamon profile is that of cinnamon buns and baked goods, never spicy red hot fireballs.
The result jumps out of the glass with aromas of buttery, vanilla, cinnamon pastries and french toast, then the flavors deliver on all those aromas. Perfect for a share, a cold night by a fire, or poured over actual french toast, waffles, or pancakes.
For the very limited variant, we finally played around with the dried “Wild Thai Bananas” that have become famous in the stout world. We recirculated a portion of the mead through these banana nibs for nearly a week, extracting all their banana goodness.
Awards:
- Silver Medal for Acergyln, best in the United States- Untappd Community Awards 2023 - BA French Toast
- Silver Medal for Acergyln, best in Florida- Untappd Community Awards 2023 - BA French Toast
Vanilla Lehua B.A.S.T.
Barrel Aged Sweet Traditional
Seven months ago we filled a very special barrel sent to us from @vanillasoftheworld with one of our top-selling meads "Soliloquy of Nectar: Lehua", and the result turned out luxurious!
THE MEAD: "Soliloquy of Nectar: Lehua" (which has completely sold out in the taproom) was a Sweet Traditional mead made from one of our all-time favorite honeys from Hawaii. Unique to the islands, the Lehua flowers are the first flowers to grow on the lava flow, and the honey it produces is rich and complex, with flavor notes of candied fruit, pineapple, guava, mango, cooked peaches and butterscotch. These notes shine through so prominently that many people believed we actually added these ingredients to the mead, not realizing that this flavorful honey was the sole ingredient.
THE BARREL: Vanillas of the World has one-of-a-kind vanilla-cured barrels. They take a brand new American oak barrel that was custom toasted to bring out the maximum amount of vanilla notes, then they age their double fold vanilla extract in it! The barrel absorbs over a gallon of extract, super charging it even more. These rare barrels are sent out to select breweries chosen by Vanillas of the world, and we were chosen as the first meadery to get one!
THE RESULT: The barrel-aging elevated this mead to its final form - a full bodied mead, enhanced with a new rich and creamy vanilla oak profile. The months of evaporation concentrated the tropical fruit flavors and slightly raised the alcohol content, while slightly mellowing the perceived sweetness, making the final result a luxurious sipping mead.
Miel de Miel
Pet Nat
Our naturally sparkling 'champagne-style' dry Florida Orange Blossom mead, and the perfect way to ring in the new year, pair with dinner, or just to relax with!
This special bottled version was made with the best Florida Orange blossom honey we got our hands on last season! This honey came from the "Florida's Natural" orange juice groves in Lake Wales. This honey was never filtered or heated, and as raw as it gets, with beautiful white flower aromas and big citrus taste.
Made in the style of a Pet-Nat (Petillant Naturel), aka Methode Ancestral, this mead is unfiltered, unpasteurized, with no added SO2, and bottled during fermentation to allow the honey to create all the sparkling bubbles and capture the maximum amount of the honey's beautiful aromas.
We chose a special strain of yeast that would further amplify the tropical citrus characteristics of the honey, and it's also one of the lowest SO2 producing strains, ensuring the aromas are as abundant as possible.
While the yeast consumed all the remaining sugar leaving it dry, we fermented it with a special blend of oak to provide some illusion of subtle sweetness to prevent it from becoming bitter like some champagnes.Awards:
- Gold - Dry Traditional - Valkyries Horn 2024
- Silver - Varietal Dry Traditional - National Honey Board
Soliloquy of Nectar: Florida Black Mangrove
Sweet Traditional Mead
Soliloquy of Nectar: Florida Black Mangrove!
If you’ve been to the Zymarium taproom, chances are you’ve had this big sweet Traditional Mead on draft! This is one we’ve gotten countless requests to release in bottles…and here it is!
This style of mead is the truest of meads as it showcases the honey and alcohol.
Full flavored, rich with dark caramel and butterscotch notes, you can taste that 16% (without it being hot).
Florida Black Mangrove is our favorite Florida honey (and we’ve tried a LOT of honeys!).
Tupelo gets all the fanfare, but this is the true hidden gem of the South. Out on the Space Coast is all uninhabited government land, and it’s thick with dense Black Mangrove groves. Our honey source is the only person with the permits to be allowed to put hives in the middle of these groves, making it the purest, most mono-floral, honey we can source!
These unique trees grow on the edge of the saltwater, and some people swear there’s a faint hint of salt to go with all the caramel flavors.
Our previous mead releases in our ‘Soliloquy of Nectar’ series have been sweet, and we do a great job of hiding the ABV, but this one we let show through a little to help balance the sweetness even better. This mead isn’t “hot” but the 16% comes through in a wonderful way, and we’ve been aging it since June to mellow to right where we want it.
The ‘Soliloquies’ have also been oak-less in the past, but we couldn’t resist working in a little blend of oaks to help smooth the finish, temper the sweetness, and compliment the existing flavors.
Fun Fact: This mead was also the base for our BA French Toast Mead, so they would make an amazing side by side.
Endless Banana and Endless Banana Marshmallow
Waterless Banna Mead
Our previous experiments with banana meads have taken the approach of making the mead, then aging it on an "endless" amount of bananas. This time around, we decided to take advantage of the fact that Bananas are about 75% liquid and make a truly Endless mead out of them!
To start out this mead, we lightly caramelized all the Florida honey to create a bochet mead to act as the perfect flavor profile to pair with the bananas. We then got 1400 pounds of ripe Cavendish bananas and spent days peeling, slicing, and bagging them. Once fermentation was over we removed and pressed all the bags of bananas to get as much liquid back as possible. This is where a sane person would stop, but we've had some amazing stouts that were aged on dried bananas, so we didn't stop there.
We sourced a few different samples of dried bananas, did some individual trials, and concluded that the sliced dried Mysore bananas from Sri Lanka not only increased the banana flavors and made them more complex, but also increased the caramel flavors! We then left the mead to rest on 600 lbs of dried bananas and a special blend of oak for a few months.
The final resulting mead is a luscious Bananas Flambé with complex waves of real caramelized bananas - a rich and decadent liquid dessert.Awards:
- Gold - Mazer Cup International 2023 - Endless Banana
- Bronze Medal for "Mead - Other", best in Florida - Untappd Community Awards 2023 - Endless Banana Marshmallow
Florida B.A.S.T.
Membership Exclsuive Barrel Aged Sweet Traditional
Florida Barrel-Aged Sweet Traditional - A special select blend of three Florida honeys, Palmetto, Black Mangrove, Gallberry, and matured with a blend of American and French Oaks.
For our very first mead we would be remiss if it wasn't a traditional mead, made with only the best local honey we could find. We have gotten very familiar with honey varieties over the years, but what we didn't expect was the regional differences within our own state.
A honey 'varietal' is a majority of nectar from a specific plant that was in major bloom in the area of the hives, which means it's 50% to 80% nectar from one type of plant, but that other minority could be 20% a different plant, or 1% of 50 different plants. This really became apparent while traveling around to different local apiaries and farms (within two hours of Orlando) to buy our first inventory of honey. We brought back a sample of each of their honeys to compare at home in order to make our decision on who to buy which honeys from. Everyone's honey varieties tasted different from each other, they had common elements, but some had very pronounced differences when tasted side by side. Our favorite version of each varietal came from a different supplier, of course, but the effort was worth it for our first batches of mead.
For our Florida BAST we decided to blend three of our favorite lesser known Florida honeys (aka not Orange Blossom or Tupelo). The different ratios of each produced very different results, we went with the blend that resulted in the most complex journey of flavors showcasing the citrusy cotton candy sweetness of Palmetto, the rich caramel with a hint of bitterness from the Gallberry, and the incredibly smooth butterscotch of the Black Mangrove honey.
In mead, just like bourbon and wine, oak is a component that can truly elevate the beverage. Different oaks can add flavors and aromas like coconut, vanilla and spice, they can also dry out the sweetness or add sweetness of their own. It can add volume and structure, making it feel fuller and richer on your tongue, it can lengthen the finish so it lingers long after each sip, or smooth out rough edges allowing all the flavors to be one harmonious whole. We aged this mead in a neutral barrel loaded with a blend of different types of oaks (species, formats, toast levels) to let the micro oxidation weave everything oak has to offer into the mead.
We hope you enjoy sipping on this mead and teasing out the huge array of flavors it has to offer from only two ingredients that are the building blocks of all our meads, honey and oak.
Awards:
- Bronze Medal for "Mead - Traditional", best in Florida - Untappd Community Awards 2023
Existential Magnestism
Coconut Mead
While driving around the state to find the best examples of Florida honey we met a farmer that put hives along the Government owned part of the Space Coast. This area is almost nothing but a dense population of Black Mangroves trees, which is one of the very few species of plants that grows in saltwater and produces nectar for bees. This incredibly pure honey tastes like a Werther's Caramel candy covered in butterscotch.
We bought an entire drum of it immediately and made a sweet traditional with it to showcase the honey! But...one of the greatest parts of mead making is how much of a "black box" it is, there is no such thing as mead yeast, the options are cultivated wine or beer strains. Pinot uses Pinot strains, Belgian beers use Belgian strains, etc, all very predictable. So what any of those yeasts do with honey, and every honey is different chemically, is a surprise, near infinite combinations, and no time to test them all! Though some strains are very predictable for any honey, so we went with a yeast strain that respects the honey and shouldn't alter it in any way, and we fermented it cold to preserve the aromatics of the honey.
But after fermentation, this mead was a tropical fruit explosion, you'd swear it was a sweet pineapple mead with hints of coconut, maybe even a little salt water taffy, it was AMAZING! This mead told us what it wanted to be when it grew up, and that was a Pina colada! So we ordered 100 pounds of Bob’s Red Mill raw organic coconut flakes and recirculated the mead through it for over 80 hours straight. Even though the coconut soaked up over a hundred bottles worth a mead, the result was worth it. We then aged it on American Oak, giving it its own version of coconut flavors, some vanilla, and rounding out all the edges into a luscious liquid dessert.
Just pure Florida honey, raw coconut, and american oak.
Complexity from simplicity.
Please Note: This mead is unfilited, it’s a beautiful pineapple haze at room temperature, but the coconut infusion will settle out in the fridge, shake it back up before serving for the best experience!
Awards:
- Gold Medal for Metheglin, best in the United States - Untappd Community Awards 2023
- Gold Medal for Metheglin, best in Florida - Untappd Community Awards 2023
- Bronze Medal for Sweet Metheglin - National Honey Board
