Superstition - Amante

Amante by Superstition Meadery is their mead Safeword aged on coffee, cocoa nibs, cinnamon and chiles.  It is a yearly release available online and in their tap room for $48 for a 750mL bottle.  It is 13% Alcohol by volume.  

Amante is a Gold Medal winner at the 2016 Mazer Cup International.

For background, the base mead is Safeword, Safeword is Superstition's bourbon barrel aged mead with Belgian Dark Candi syrup.  So Amante cranks Safeword up to eleven by adding coffee, cocoa, cinnamon, and chile to the mix.

The easiest way to describe this mead to anyone familiar with craft beer is: Hunahpu.  This is the mead version of Cigar City Brewing's beautiful cinnamon, cocoa, and chile imperial stout, Hunahpu.  

This mead pours a very rich, dark ruby. It's dark and near opaque but still has beautiful clarity.  
The nose is this bouquet of aromas.  You get hit with honey sweetness, candy, coffee, cinnamon, bakers chocolate, rum soak dates.  It's just this explosion of richness to it.  Just on the nose and appearance you know this will be a decadant drink,

The taste is wow.  Much like the Coffee Marion, Amante takes a tasty base mead and elevates it to another level.  All the flavors are there, the coffee, the honey, the bourbon, the chile, the cinnamon. 
 However it is so well balances that none of the flavors overpower.  They all are beautifully balanced to create this extremely rich, dark, flavorful drink.  It's damn near like drinking a bourbon barrel aged imperial stout.  So if you're a fan of that style, this is the mead for you.  
This is a very lovely mead and worth seeking out if you are a fan of the flavors described above

Superstition - Coffee Marion

Coffee Marion is, as you might have guessed, Superstition’s Marion aged on coffee.  

The base mead: Marion is a blueberry, blackberry, and raspberry melomel available as a yearly release.  This base mead has won numerous awards including a gold medal at the 2016 Mazer Cup International.

Coffee Marion is currently a tap room only offering in Prescott, AZ. 

First I will start off by saying the base mead: Marion, is a lovely mead by itself.  It’s dry, tannic, a bit tart, yet still has a nice fruitiness to is and ample honey sweetness.  However the addition of coffee raises this mead to another level.

Coffee Marion

The color of Coffee Marion is a muddled dark ruby, almost brownish.  It’s not the most pleasing color.

The nose is straight coffee. No prominent berries notes from the aroma, however you do get that slight ripe berry nose that some coffee roasts like an Ethiopian bean can provide. 

The taste is what really grabs me and elevates this mead.  There is a perfect balance of berry and coffee in this mead.  Neither is overpowering, perfectly restrained yet each very prominent.  The acidity is perfectly balanced with the sweetness, neither coffee nor berry, nor honey is overpowering.  What I also loved is how the coffee smoothed out some of the dry, tannic characters of the base mead.  

It’s hard to find a flaw in Coffee Marion, and believe me I tried.  It’s about as perfect as a mead as I’ve tasted.  So if you ever get the chance to visit Prescott Arizona, do yourself a favor and not only visit Superstition, but order this mead.  As wonderful as their tasting menu is, which include meads like the Berry White series, Coffee Marion would be at the top of my list to try.

Misbeehavin' - FOMO

FOMO is a buckwheat honey mead made with Dagger Mountain Roastery's abino coffee and aged 10 months in a new American oak barrel.  FOMO is available in 375mL bottles and was released on November 12th, 2016 for $18/bottle; limit 3.

This is a great mead.  Very unique and inventive.  Buckwheat Blossom honey is a perfect fit for barrel aging.  It's a pungent honey that's more malty and has a flavor profile more akin to molasses.  This bigger, bolder honey stands up nicely to the wood of a barrel.  Integrating and balancing nicely the oaky, green woodsy flavors of the barrel.  The coffee is also very well integrated into this mead.  There's not many coffee meads on the market, and very few I've had that have actually worked.  this one works, its works very well.  

The nose is like dark chocolate covered coffee beans.  The taste is like a combination of a sweet cold press with a rye whisky spiciness.  I get burnt/caramelized molasses as well.   The color is a rust, a nice crystal clear reddish-brown.  FOMO is an excellent example of mead experimentation and the balance of coffee and barrel into a mead.  

B.Nektar - Dark Dark Goose

What a cool, fantastic mead from B.Nektar.  Dark Dark Goose is a coffee mead aged in bourbon barrels, then aged a second time in a Goose Island's Bourbon County Stout barrel.  

There's a pretty interesting story behind this mead:  The inspiration was the big stouts that B.Nektar loved to drink, so a coffee mead was made with the help of a local Ferndale, MI roaster, Chazzano in 2010.  The blend is 75% of a Nicaraguan french roast and 25% of a Yemen full city roast.  The honey profile is 50/50 wildflower and Buckwheat. The coffee mead was then put into a Heaven Hill barrel for 11 months.  Then in 2011 their co-founder Brad drove his car to Chicago to pick up a just emptied Bourbon County Stout barrel from Goose Island, which he then drove back home to Michigan on this roof.  They then aged the coffee mead in this barrel (purportedly still with some BCBS still left in the barrel) until the summer of 2012.

This mead is a limited, one-time release in 375ml bottles.  Released at Summer Mead Fest in the Summer of 2012.  It was originally $25, limit 6 bottles.  The bottle count is estimated at about 500 bottles.

I thoroughly enjoyed this mead.  The intensity of the coffee was mind blowing considering the bottle I drank was 4 years old.  There was no sign of coffee fade or green peppers.  The sweetness of the honey was nicely offset with the spiciness of the buckwheat and oaky/spiciness of the barrel. There was a huge roastiness that was both bitter and smooth at the same time.  This mead is top notch, and I loved the chance to try it.  If you ever come across a bottle don't hesitate to jump on it, it's one of the best coffee meads I've ever had, and drinking fantastically.