If you've ever created your own recipe in the kitchen, or maybe as a homebrewer then creating a mead recipe is in the same vein.
You start with where you want to finish. What I mean is, all recipes begin with what you want your finished product to taste like. What flavor profiles are you trying to capture, are you trying to evoke a certain food, like a fruit pie? A cocktail like a margarita? Highlight a certain fruit or spice? You need to try to visualize what you want your finished mead to taste like, look like, and smell like.
Once you have an idea of your end goal, then you start to work backwards and figure out how you're going to achieve that flavor profile. This is my favorite part of meadmaking because it's really where creativity can shine. Let's say you want to make a blueberry pie mead. Excellent! What flavors evoke that pie? What components make up that pie? You have blueberries, let's add blueberries to the mead, check! You have sugar and sweetness; you can get that from the honey, check! You have the crust; hmmm, you can approach this any number of ways, you could add graham crackers to your mead, you can add things like flaked oats or grains, maybe add an ingredient that will give it a little nutty flavor, like almonds, maybe a little vanilla. The possibilities are nearly endless and that's the point. Because it's your creation be creative and do what you think needs to be done to achieve your desired flavors.
Think like a chef. You always have to be mindful of how certain flavor profiles play with each other, and how flavor combinations are combined in a finished product. Or how you can use flavor combinations to achieve your desired flavor. Like the crust. You can't really age your mead on a pie crust (well, you could, but you probably don't want to). But if you dissect the flavors of a crust you can identify some key ingredients that will have you achieve the desired "crust" flavor.
Another great example that mead makers and beer brews often do is evoke the flavors of a certain cocktail to mimic that cocktail. The margarita is a great example. You're not going to blend your mead with a margarita, but if you look at the flavor components of the drink you can mimic it. What's in a marg? citrus, lemon, lime, orange, tequila, salt, coconut, all these things you can pick out in that margarita. So choose a few as ingredients in your mead. For example I made a coconut lime mead with salt that does very much resemble a classic margarita.
Be adventurous! Be creative!
Labels: Blueberry, lime, mazer, meadmaking, MYOM, salt
