Mead and More with Ken Schramm – BeerSmith Podcast #326
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Ken Schramm joins me this week to discuss mead, our relationship with alcohol, and the future of homebrewing and mead making. This is Beersmith Podcast number 326.

This is the Beersmith Home Brewing Show, where brewing great beer is our passion. If you want to take your brewing to the next level, visit beersmith.com, where you can download a trial version of our Beersmith software, subscribe to the newsletter, and get dozens of free articles on home brewing. And now, your host and the author of Home Brewing with Beersmith, Brad Smith.

This is Beersmith Podcast number 326 and it's early June 2025. Ken Schramm joins me this week to discuss mead, our relationship with alcohol, and the future of homebrewing and mead making.

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And finally, a reminder to click that like and subscribe button on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, or whatever platform you're listening on. Clicking those buttons is a great way to support the show. Now let's jump into this week's episode. Today on the show, I welcome Ken Schramm from Schramm's Meadery. Ken wrote the book on mead making and called the Complete Meadmaker. Ken was also a founding member of the Mazer Cup and won numerous national awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Homebrews Association.

His meadery makes some of the highest rated means in the world from fresh fruit, spices, and honey. Ken, it's always a pleasure to have you back on the show. How are you doing today? I'm well, Brad. How are you? You look good, man. You've been working out at the farm or what? I have been earning my physique, honestly.

Well, I last had the chance to meet you back at Homebrew Con in 2023. Of course, I've met you a number of times before that, but in San Diego. But no Homebrew Con in 2024, which kind of leads to my first question. Why is homebrewing and now craft brewing, and I believe even mead making, kind of in an extended slump? I think there are a lot of reasons. I've never been one to believe that there is a single reason why things happen.

For me, I think the pandemic had a lot to do with it. There's a huge degree of community involved in all of the things you talked about, all of craft, craft mead, craft beer, craft distilled beverages. People love to go and hang out at the places where those things happen and press flesh with the people who do it. They also like to go and...

sit and talk with fellow fans or fellow aficionados because it's a deep subject uh

Same thing is true with wine and wine is suffering from the same situation. Oh really? Is it? Oh sure. Yeah. I mean, all, all of, all of beverage alcohol right now is having a tough go of it. Um, I think that, um, I think a cannabis has something to do with, um, people, people are choosing to, um, indulge in other drugs and use alcohol less. Interesting. Um, I think that's, I think that's something that, um,

I don't know how long lasting that will be or if that will just simply be something there's a permanent adjustment. I don't think alcohol will go away. Alcohol didn't go away when it was illegal. Alcohol didn't go away, has never gone away. Alcohol has been with us as part of human culture now for probably as long as there's been human culture. So I don't think it's going away, but I do think that there'll be a balance that's struck between

various other legal intoxicants and alcohol. I also think that there's a degree to which the neo-prohibitionist anti-alcohol movement in the country is affecting alcohol sales. And some of that may be

Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, no, I was just saying, I want to talk about that in a minute, but COVID's kind of interesting to me. We saw a spike at the beginning of COVID because everybody's stuck at home, so they started buying brewing equipment and started brewing a little bit, but it didn't really last long at all.

No, no. And that whole communal nature of, I mean, a lot of people started making their own pizzas too. And that didn't really last either. People needed a, you know, people were looking for ways to get the things that they wanted without having to interact with other humans. But that didn't really change, I don't think, the underlying...

um, behaviors as much while the, the, the isolationism of it was really unfortunate. I mean, I, the, the, the loss of homebrew clubs and the loss of, of, of tasting groups, uh,

That, that impacted the way that people are interacting with craft beverages. People used to love to get together and, and share a table full of really interesting things and talk to them all over and, and, and discuss them. And, um,

point out likes and dislikes or favorites and rankings. And that was great. I mean, it was really terrific for craft beer. There were some aspects of it that were a little bit ephemeral, meaning that it's tough to build a client base on people who buy things one time to share them with their friends, as opposed to people who buy things online.

on a regular basis to have them in their basement when they're going to have pizza or chili or whatever. That kind of pattern behavior is really essential to successful business development. But I think that just the loss of that sharing

It minimized the amount of exposure that people got to really cool beverages. And it just broke the pattern behavior of people doing those things, which were really beneficial to the business. Yeah. And I mean, I speak at a lot of homebrew clubs and I've noticed virtually all of them are struggling and trying to build back up to, you know, just a fraction of what they were before COVID. And then, of course, you mentioned, I think that you closed your, we were talking before the show, but you mentioned that you had to close your tasting room.

And in fact, you know, you've downsized somewhat. You don't have the same staff you did at the same time you were expanding to start growing on the farm, right?

Sure, sure. I mean, that was kind of a perfect storm. We had gone ahead and made an investment, a pretty big capital investment, that we were going to rely on a steady income stream to support. And then that income stream got hammered a little bit.

We're still, we're still kind of struggling along just like everybody in the, in the craft world is. But that, that didn't help us. And it didn't help us in that both the, the, the lack of revenue was,

affected us but when we closed the tasting room we we had to you know stop employing people on a regular basis and some of those people would come out and do shifts and work at the at the orchard and that was really valuable if i mean there's the the stuff never stops the weeds don't quit growing at any point just because you don't have as much staff uh the the uh nature calls as they say in so many different ways and um and so that that

did did cause problems i mean i'm i'm working as much now uh in the field as as i ever have and it's it's it's a very physical endeavor to to try and run an orchard you're you're trying to keep plants in production and keep plants healthy and beat weeds and mow lawns and and keep buildings maintained and keep equipment maintained it's a it's a it's a very uh physical and and um

challenging line of work. Well, I did want to talk a little bit about that. Back in episode 289, actually, it was the last time I had you on, we talked about your effort to grow and compare various fruit varieties for the purpose of making mead. How are things going with the farm project? Last I talked to you, you had, I think, like six acres going?

It's about six acres. It's not all in production yet because we have deer issues. The deer will assault everything that we don't have contained. And for right now, I mean, there are some things they won't eat. They won't eat black currants because they're just so full of that cat ketone and so high in acidity that they won't take them on. And there are a lot of other plants to protect themselves, gooseberries and other plants.

And raspberries, a lot of the brambles, they're called brambles for a reason. They all have spikes, and the deer don't necessarily love that. So they kind of protect themselves. But anything else like cherries or apples or plums, anything with leaves that the deer can take out, they have. And so we've only got as much area in production as we can enclose in an eight-foot-high deer fence. Wow.

So that's that. And we, we have to enclose the entire property and that's another big chunk of dough. Yeah. If anyone, if anyone out there wants to partner with a company that's doing an innovative and, and, uh, farsighted work in the land of fruit cultivation for fermented beverages, let me know. Um,

We have had a lot of success, though. I mean, you mentioned that we were just getting started when we last talked. And since then, we have released the first set of single varietal fruit meads. We released a white currant. We released two different red currants. We released two different gooseberry meads.

We've released three different blackcurrant meads from varietal blackcurrants. So, yeah, we're doing what we set out to do. It's happened on a really small scale because that's just going to be how it works. You know, you can't have full production from the get-go. You've got to build up, and we're building up.

Well, I mean, you're making, from what I understand, you're making test patches, really. I mean, you're making, you're trying to find out which varieties are worth growing here, right? Right, right. And we've also figured out, I mean, part of that experiment as well was the agricultural part, which is, you know, here's this chunk of dirt and this sun exposure and these climatic conditions.

And which varieties like those, which varieties will produce well, which varieties will grow well, which varieties. I think I may have mentioned this the last time we talked, but we tried to plant three different varieties of black currants. Sure.

We planted Minaj Smeriu, we planted Titania, and we planted Consort. Those are the straight-up black currants. And then we also planted a golden currant, which some people also call a black currant, but called Crandall. Crandall did great. Minaj Smeriu did great. Consort did great. Titania just didn't like our conditions at all. And we planted during an incredible period.

uh, incredibly wet spring the first year we were on the orchard. And so, and so, um, there, you know, the condition of root rot is when you have a spring that wet is, is a consideration and, and Titania got it and didn't like it. And, you know, instead of having, instead of having,

30 or 40 titania plants we had three or five um and and so we're still struggling to get that that uh variety cranked back up again so there's there's a lot we're learning sure

Well, back in 2023, you coined the term noble fruits to describe fruits like raspberries that have high tannins and acidity and work well in need. Can you cover those again really quickly? Well, yeah. And raspberries are a bramble, right? Brambles are all those fruits with the little clumps that grow on vines that are perennial. And so all of those go into that category. That includes plums.

raspberries blackberries things like thimble berries they have they all have high acidity we've been experimenting we were growing boysenberry now and that's a very difficult berry to grow in Michigan but we're having a little bit of success there are other other berries links with Logan berry Tay berry

that can be grown um so that i that also fall into that category of having like really rich flavor high acidity and and moderate to high levels of sugar sure so all the brambles all of the currents red currents white currents we're growing pink champagne currents oh wow yeah and and there are the golden currents the ribus odoratum also known as crandall

I consider those to be noblefruits, red currants, and we're growing three varieties of those. We're growing Rovada, Red Lake, and Jean-Cure Van Tets. I would consider gooseberries in that group. They are a similar plant to a ribus plant. They are thorny, but

and uh they are a real bugger to pick they you have to we we wear we wear uh heavy duty arm protection and gloves to to pick them sure although you have to use fingerless gloves because you got to get to them um but those are great and there are several varieties i mean many many varieties of gooseberries i wasn't i wasn't

cognizant of how many different varieties of gooseberries there are. Oh, gooseberries were one of the most popular fruits in Victorian England. And there were more than a hundred varieties being cultivated in, in, uh, Great Britain. And they're great. They're, they're really delicious. The ones that we have going right now are Hinomaki yellow, Hinomaki red, and, and, uh, let's see. So what was the last one we made? We, we did, uh,

Yanomaki Red, Yanomaki Yellow,

It's not poorman. Anyways, there are several varieties and they're all terrific. They have thick skins. They have a lot of tannin in them. They have slightly tannic seeds and high acidity levels. Acidity levels that are not as high as black or red currants, but higher than raspberries. I consider tart cherries one of the noble fruits. Sure, absolutely. There are.

two kinds of tart cherries. There are the Amarelles, and the Amarelles are the varieties that have light skin and light juice, like Montmorency or Montmorency, depending on who you ask. And Meteor is another one that's like that. They're very delicious.

But then the ones that are even more appealing to me are the Morellos. The Morellos are the cherries that are tart cherries that have really dark purple flesh and purple skin and purple juice. And that includes things like English Morello and...

Let's see, Balaton, which is the one we use to make our Charbake, our statement from, and then Charbakes, which are the classically famous variety from Belgium that are used in Lambic beers and the statement Reserve, which, and the Heart of Darkness.

Those are the kinds of cherries that are really incredible. Lutovka, Pozog, Oboshinska, they all fall in that Morel category as well. Wow. And then there is one more kind of cool variety of quasi, I don't know if they're Morelos or what they're considered.

But there's a new set of cherries that have been released from a Saskatchewan breeding program. And they're attractive to people who are home brewers and mead makers because they're relatively easy to grow. And they're also really cold tolerant. They will fruit after breeding.

brutally cold winters and they will also fruit through later frosts than most other cherries will tolerate i'm having a i'm having a bad year this year with my charbakes because i say a bad we'll have a fair year uh but but the the frost damage was pretty substantial this year cold winter yeah

We did, and we had an early warm-up, which is how this classically works. You had an early warm-up and then some frost, and then you get bud damage. But that's the central group. I also think that there's going to be, eventually, and I'm giving you the fruits that are sort of native or at least native,

that can be cultivated in my area. I'm in the Great Lakes. Sure. In Michigan. You're near Detroit, yeah. Right, right. There are a lot of other fruits, though, that fit into that set of categories. The sugar levels are high, the flavor impact is big, and the acidity levels are high. Things like passion fruit that really do contribute

all of the components that you want, maybe not tannin, but they contribute the things that I would use to categorize a fruit as a noble fruit. Sure, sure. And I think, I mean, maybe after I retire...

I will have time on my hands to do the research on some of those other fruits and get the specifics, the specs, as it were, on those fruits to see how they line up in comparison with currants and raspberries and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, nice. What did you find out actually using some of these fruits and needs, though?

What did you grow? Big differences in varieties? Small varieties? Yes. Yes, absolutely. The gooseberry meads that we made were terrific. Both of them came out really well. Well, I mean, we did learn, for example, we released a white currant mead and we released a pink champagne currant mead. And they were very tart.

I think the acidity in white currants and the acidity in pink currants is a little higher than it is even in red currants. I don't know if it's quite as high as it is in black currants, but it's very high. And so we're in that same category.

that winemakers are in, which is you get to experiment once a year. Yeah, you got to adjust your sweetness levels to balance it, I guess. Yep. The other current, I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead.

I get dehydrated and then I can't think as well. No, the other current that we use is one called Pickswell. Okay. And it's called Pickswell because it's got a few less thorns than Hinomaki Red and Hinomaki Yellow. But it doesn't have no thorns. There are no thornless gooseberries that we found that are worth their salt. But Pickswell came out beautifully. I don't think we're going to have to adjust that recipe at all. I don't think we're going to have to adjust our Hinomaki Red recipe. We...

We did two versions of a red current. We did Jean-Curie Van Tetz and we did Red Lake. And that was a real learning experience. I thought that Jean-Curie Van Tetz would have the more aggressive and fruity sound

aromatic profile, but it turned out that Red Lake did. Red Lake is not considered to be as quote-unquote a high-quality culinary variety as Jean-Cure Vintesse. Jean-Cure Vintesse was softer, rounder, and instead of being aggressively fruity and big cranberry, cherry, plummy kind of things going on, it was more floral. And that was...

um, both surprising and, and also really welcome. I mean, it's, it's, it's nice to know that there is going to be a, a red current that we can use to create that kind of a meet. Um, and I, I, I love them both. I, I can't say as I had a favorite, um, the, the, the red Lake has a stronger forehand in, in tennis terms. Yeah, I understand. But, but, uh,

I like them all. And the same thing is true with the Blackcurrant varieties that we did. They all stood very distinctly on their own, all very different. The Consort is the

black current deist black current there is it has the highest level of that cat ketone and they're also incredibly acidic they're tiny they're dark um as black currents go they're really black they aren't like purple ish they're black and when they're completely ripe they're they're um

just little very ebony and they they are also a pain in the butt to pick because they're much smaller than the other varieties are which means that the ratio which means that the ratio of uh skin and seed to flesh is higher and that the the aggressive um black current character which comes from gives you more tannins right yeah lots of tannin yep lots of tannin lots of skin lots of skin you know

body and acidity. It's, it was, it was wonderful to see play out what we were hoping would play out. And, you know, I don't, I don't know if that's, it's even, even, you know, avoidable if you're, if you're pretty decent with your production technique for these things to actually shine like you hope they will, but they, they definitely did. That was incredibly rewarding.

And, and the nice thing is that, I mean, there, there are a few people out there that got a set of the whole thing. And in, in two or three or five years, um, they, they should be magnificent expressions. That's the common term these days. Yeah. The black current means they just get better and better with age. It's what I found. They, they, they sure do. Um, yeah.

Well, another interesting question, though, I guess, is there any hope of scaling some of these things up? I mean, can you buy some of these varieties in larger quantities at some point? Yeah, I believe so. The thing is, right now, when you buy black currants from commercial producers, you're usually getting a blend. You're usually getting a blend. And if you're buying from Poland, for example, you're getting a blend. There are some producers in Michigan that are starting to produce varietal black currants.

at scale. And that's going to be, that's going to be really welcome for the, for the mead making community. If, if people are interested in, in doing those expressions yeah, there are some people that are starting to do that. And there are some people in, in, in New York that are doing the same thing as well. I'm glad to see the black currants are back in production for a long time. They weren't growing, right?

No, no, they were, they were pretty much a European commodity for a long time, you know, because of the whole white pine blister. And there was, there were banned in a lot of States. Right. There are still varieties. There are still varieties that I can't grow in Michigan. Varieties that I really, really want to grow that are famous from Poland and from Scotland and they're banned. So I can't grow them. Interesting.

Well, today you actually wanted to talk a little bit more about our relationship with alcohol. And earlier you mentioned the modern push towards temperance or neo-prohibitionism. I've really not heard much about this movement, but can you tell us a little about how it's affecting homebrewing, craft brewing in 2025? Sure. I don't know if anybody, everybody's like connecting the whole thing. But, but,

Things like dry January, right? Dry January didn't come from nowhere. It was concocted by a bunch of people who were interested in promoting the reduction of consumption. And some of that reduction of consumption can be health-related, but I think some of it's also being driven by ideological people in the community. There are people out there who just don't like alcohol.

and who are interested in utilizing social platforms to discourage that behavior. And I can understand that there are some health reasons for that. I mean, certainly overconsumption of alcohol is not good for you. No. And I don't make a beverage that is intended for overconsumption. But on the other hand, the vilification of alcohol and the attempt to promote alcohol

abstinence for the sake of abstinence is going to have an impact on the alcohol business. If you tell people it's bad to drink and that you shouldn't ever drink and promote things like dry January, where you take functionally, what, 8% of a company's annual

period and shelve it, well, that's going to have an impact on the trade. It's going to decrease revenues. It's going to put strain on things. It modifies product flow. People, especially in beer, meat and wine are perhaps a little bit different.

But if you're in a brewing situation, you're used to churning out beer. On a consistent basis, you've got a production schedule that you're trying to maintain and keep your tanks full and keep everything moving along. And if someone comes along and says, yeah, for the month of January, we're going to tell you, no, don't bother. Well, that's going to affect production.

all of the aspects of the supply chain and, and the, the delivery process, you know, the, the sort of the, the machine, the clockwork machining of, of your brewing practice and, and mess it up. I mean, it's interesting. I really hadn't heard about dry January until probably this year. I remember, do you remember hearing about it? Was, was there a big impact this year? Uh,

Oh, I think so. I, I, I didn't, well, January is traditionally something of a down month. I mean, in, in, in the, in the wine trade and we're, we're more similar to the wine trade than we are to the beer trade. Sure. And in the wine trade, people give each other a lot of bottles at Christmas. And so there's a big, there's a big boost in, in wine as, as, as a gift. And then, and then in

In January, things fall off a little bit. Slow down, sure. They do. They slow down consumption-wise. The retailers, for the most part, though, I mean, January hasn't been a terrible month for us because if things have gone well over the holiday, the retailers have to restock their shelves.

They don't want to just have bare shelves. So there is some pickup that occurs then. And then February is a little slower. Well, February was a lot slower for us. And that's, I think, part of that impact. Interesting. Well, isn't alcohol just one of the things that drives our complex lives and relationships with each other? Oh, sure. Oh, sure. And I mean...

There is a tendency in the media which grasps onto any story that it can get its hands on. The insatiable maw of the news world is such that they need things to chew on all the time. And so a trendy thing like dry January or non-alcoholic beverages, it'll get a lot of attention.

And there's also an inclination in the part of the media now, it's kind of a simplified thing that's going on, to kind of reduce everything to heroes and villains and turn the entire spectrum of things that we interact with into a hero and a villain. And if you want to make alcohol the villain, well, that's a problem for me.

I run my life based on the production of an alcoholic beverage that is intended to be consumed in moderation. Sure.

So that's one thing. But I also think that there is, you know, in this whole media cycle, there's an inclination to grab onto this one thing and talk about it for a while. I mean, an example of that is CCD. We can talk about that later, but people talked about CCD a lot for a while, and then it kind of fades out. But if this, you know, non-alcohol trend

catches on, or alcohol is the villain, you know, and no alcohol is the hero, if that's the way the spectrum is going to be portrayed, it's going to have an impact on our business. And what I find fascinating is that we don't deal with that quite as much in the rest of our lives. I mean, we have complex relationships with everything.

We have complex relationships. We have complex relationships with transportation, right? We all need transportation. We use it all the time and it kills people.

It just does. And the same thing is true with a lot of other things. We have a complex relationship with tobacco. We have complex relationships with all kinds of things like prescription drugs. I think food's a good example. Food is probably the best example. Food is the best example. Salt, refined sugar, fat. There are lots of things that we know

have to be dealt with in moderation that are harmful. Processed foods, right? Processed foods, absolutely. Highly processed foods. And yet, I don't really see nearly as much of an abolition approach to those things. We're not trying to abolish fat. We're not trying to abolish sugar or

Or salt or potato chips. Right. You don't see potato chip free January. It's true. We don't do that. It is interesting. I looked this up one day, you know, big beer, you know, the big, big, big beer producers, big beer has been in decline since the 1950s. Long-term trend, just, just slow. I mean, it's been slow.

But consumption per person has been declining since the 1950s. And that's a pretty long trend. Now, obviously, craft beer has been down the last year or two. Right. But I mean, just in general, beer consumption has been going downhill for, what, 60, 70 years? Yeah, but craft went up and wine went up. And right now, the thing that's going up is craft.

Excuse me, craft distilled beverages. Yeah, especially the prepackaged. All my brewing friends tell me that the prepackaged beverages are very popular. The vodka, you know, I call them wine coolers, but they're wine coolers made with vodka, right? Well, I mean, the probably even more derisive term is Alco Pops. Yeah. And, yeah. But those Alco Pops...

have been around forever. I mean, there's been Bartles and James wine coolers and Mike's Hard Lemonade for a long time. And I tend to believe that that is as well a cyclical trend, right? There will be people who come on and decide that that's how they're going to approach their consumption of alcohol. And then the people who learn that, well, you know, there's really actually

incredibly delicious beverages that you can drink that are alcohol, uh, you know, contain alcohol and, and they are, they are built for moderation and really connoisseur enjoyment. That's, that's part of the maturation process of populations all the time. You know, when I was a kid, when I was a kid, there was Boone's Farm and Ripple and, and Lord knows how many other, um,

really pretty much obnoxious, um, just barely flavored alcohol products. Sure. And, and that, that hasn't gone away. All we're looking at right now with White Claw is the, is the, is the Boone's farm of the 2020s. And, and certainly there's trends, big trends. I, you know, uh, Zima is perhaps my favorite example. Oh, sure. The clear beer trend. Right. That was, that was, but, but,

I mean, the interesting thing there, and this is a challenge that Kraft has to deal with. Mega alcohol has been really good at introducing the young consumer to alcohol through insipid little beverages like Zima and Bartles and James wine coolers and Mike's Hard Lemonade for a long time. It's a point of entry, and the consumer...

All consumers in an age-based product like alcohol have a point of entry. How do you decide that you're going to do this? And you can choose to drink mixed drinks or you can choose to drink pre-mixed drinks. And then there is the educational process. And that's where craft beer and craft mead

have an obligation that they need to fulfill. And there's, I mean, it's ethically complex. I mean, if you look at, you know, when you talk about since the 1950s, if you look at how beer has been marketed

to American consumers, especially young American consumers. There was a bud man. There was a hams bear. There have been horses that kick field goals and chameleons that talk and all manner of gorgeous women who have been involved in the marketing of alcohol to get people to move into it.

And it hasn't for the very rarely has it been based on a quality spectrum saying, look, this is what's really good about our product. And this is what we want you to know. That's the challenge that craft beer and craft mead face because what they're trying to market. I think, as you pointed out, it's a maturation process too. I think as you get older, you tend to drink a little bit less, but you also tend to drink better. I think. Sure. Yeah. I completely agree. But, but there is, there is a,

an educational obligation then for the craft beverage world to help those kids and young people to learn what it is about our beverages that's appealing and warrants merit. What is it about our beverages that are literally better than fizzy water with some alcohol?

Well, I wanted to dive into mead because, of course, that's your specialty. Mead is very likely the oldest fermented beverage we have. How has mead shaped human history and what role has it played in our culture? You know, Brad, I hope you'll forgive me for going off on a tangent here. No, it's fine. The thing that's been fascinating me over the last few months is that

Organisms on this planet have relationships with each other. Oh, sure. And all of the organisms and things that are involved in mead kind of converge. If you look at it, the first organism that's involved in all of this stuff is yeast. And yeast is about 400 million years old as an organism.

Right. Yeah. And and yeast hits this combination about 120 million years ago, hits this combination of of angiosperms, plants that make flowers and usually make a fruit and bees and bees and angiosperms.

go together perfectly, right? They both evolve between 120 and 130 million years ago together. And they can't survive without each other. They can't survive without each other. Well, there are also ways that all of these fruiting plants get their seeds spread out. And yeast comes along and plays this magnificent role that makes the fruit

more appealing to the animals for them to eat and then take the seeds somewhere else. And so yeast and bees and honey all get related really quickly. Fruit has sugar in it to make it appealing, and sugar is appealing to yeast. And so this whole thing, now those three species are intertwined. Yeast, bees, and fruit.

And along come humans and, and, you know, there's, there's primates for a while, but the, but the alcohol dehydrogenase gene in humans is 10 million years old. Wow. It pre, it's pre, predates homo anything, homo sapiens, you know, Neanderthals, it, it, it predates anything that we call modern humans. It goes back in the author of Australopithecines and, and, and the various evolutionary, uh,

iterations that end up being humans. So we've, we've been involved. We, we jumped into that three-part relationship package and,

10 million years ago. Yeah. And I, like I said, I think meat is arguably got to be the oldest beverage, right? It has to be. All you have to do is take some honey and a little water and it's going to ferment, right? There's a guy named Neil Rush right now in who's from South Africa, who is making the argument that humans have been actively controlling fermentations for 40,000 years, which would predate beer and, and, you know, virtually everything else. Yeah.

He has found evidence of beeswax in caves in South Africa that was obviously extracted from a beehive and then wrapped in twine.

And it's still got the twine markings on it. So it was manipulated and it's 40,000 years old. His argument is if you have control of that kind of technology, you're going into beehives, you're taking the wax out and you're wrapping it up some way. And you also have control of the technologies like fire and bows and arrows. And his point is that human pharmacology goes back a long way because we've been putting like,

poison tipped arrows on things for tens of thousands of years. And so if you're capable of controlling that kind of chemical activity, you're probably also making meat, right? If it does, as you said, it produces itself. Well, your willingness to figure that out and make it happen for you

it probably goes back way further than we have given it credit for. Yeah, I agree. So why do you think mead fell out of favor in modern society? I mean, it did play a huge role throughout history, religious ceremonies, all kinds of things. Sure, sure. Well, I want to point out one thing that hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention lately.

And that is that there has really never in any of the cultures that I know of, other than perhaps in Africa, and it goes back a long way in Eastern European cultures, but there has never really been a commercial mead trade.

anywhere in Western Europe or the United States. Interesting. It was always the beverage of kings, and it was the beverage of kings, and it was the beverage of the elite in religion, of popes and cardinals and people in monasteries, because the monasteries had access to the

I mean, the wealthy class. It was widely used from what I understand, religious ceremonies across the world. Sure, sure. It wasn't something, though. This is one thing I've been looking at lately, and I haven't had enough time yet, but I also haven't had a lot of success at trying to find commercial examples of mead from...

from the 1700s, 1600s, 1500s. I have yet to understand how in Western culture that was the case. And so now you hit the United States, right? Here we are in the U.S. And they knew about Meade, but the founding people in our country worked very hard to avoid

the aspects of royalty that were present in Europe. In the United States, there are no barons, there are no earls, there are no counts, there's no nobility at all. True. And in fact, the founding fathers worked very hard to reject

the aspects of European culture that reflected nobility. There aren't, you know, we don't have estates and we didn't divide up the property, you know, we didn't divide things up according to, you know, which nobles got what. We worked very hard to avoid that. And in fact, I mean, you could say there was a little antipathy towards those things here. And it may well be that that is reflected in Mead. Mead never caught on here. And if Mead was the beverage of kings, and it has been for a long time,

then there is something of a case to make for the fact that the American royalty, the American power structure, the American top, you know, the top of the political structure in the United States wasn't really interested in Meade, if that was a reflection of European power.

European nobility. And the other thing that's really true in the United States is it never caught on because honey is hard. Honey has always been hard. It's the hardest thing that we use to ferment. You can't do anything automatically. The

the frames come out of the supers manually. The supers come off of the thing manually. Every, every aspect of it is me. You can spin the honey out now with the machine, but then you take those frames back out of the machine and put them back into the hive and then manually put the hive back together again and then manually take it out to the field again. Yeah. I mean, from what I understand, honey production is still a family business across the whole of the United States, right? It is a,

both a small family business and intensely manual, intensely labor intensive. It hasn't been avoidable in any way that we can figure out yet. And that makes honey, has always made honey expensive. That's maybe why all meat is the beverage of kings.

Um, and it's, it's certainly from, for us, I mean, it's why, it's why our meat is so expensive because honey is just the most expensive thing you can frame it. It is expensive. I was making five gallon batches. I mean, it can cost over $200 for a single five gallon batch, right? Oh yeah. I mean, now, nowadays you're using fruit. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Nowadays it's, it's just an incredibly expensive, even on a home scale. Yeah. Um,

Which is not to say that you can't make something really delicious for a few dollars a bottle that would cost you a lot of dollars. That's what I was going to say. I mean, if you look at the cost per bottle, it's actually relatively cheap compared to even wine out at the grocery store. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But that said, that said.

The impediments to a really robust commercial mead trade in the U.S. have been substantial and remain substantial. Right now, the public doesn't even, because we didn't bring all that

Eastern European and Western European nobility culture to the United States, mead is still unknown, largely. I mean, I can go into a gourmet grocery store and find that eight out of 10 people that I talk to and try to get the taste of my mead still aren't aware of what mead is and what it should be like. Yeah. I mean, there's some people that also taste the mead and they get it. Some people don't, which I always find interesting, but I think that's true with any beverage.

Yeah. Ken, we are running a little below on time, but I want to ask you where you are with the, with the meadery right now. Is the tasting room open? Where can people purchase your amazing meads? They're, in my opinion, some of the finest ones in the world.

Well, we do direct-to-consumer sales in 26 states, and I would recommend that people go to Schrammsmead.com, S-C-H-R-A-M-M-S-M-E-A-D.com, and you can order the things that we have in stock. Because the production is cyclical and we've only got so many tanks and we've made far more labels than we have tanks, we don't always have everything all at the same time.

Sure. But, but yeah, you can go on there and we're into the, we're into the heat of the year. There will probably be a few weeks left before things really get boiling, but we try to ship in a safe temperature window. So if you're going to order right now, you may have to pay for expedited, expedited shipping or wait until it cools down in the fall before, before we're going to ship. I mean, expedited shipping on small orders can be, if you really want the mead, that'll work. Yeah.

Do you have a tasting room open yet or no? Well, there isn't a tasting room per se.

There is a tasting space at the production facility and you can go on Schrammsmead.com and you can book a tasting. Oh, okay. That's cool. You have to book ahead. We don't have a huge staff just sort of waiting there for you to show up. We have to put things on a schedule now. But we do have a tasting space and Sean and Kristen and Allison and James and I regularly go in and conduct tastings for people and show them through the lineup and give people an opportunity to buy what they love.

So that's a good thing. And if you're in the Detroit area at any point, you can always order and hold your order for pickup at the meadery and pick it up when you get the chance. Awesome.

Well, I wanted to ask you as a final question, what do you see as a future for homebrewing and home mead making? Where are we going next? It's a cyclical thing. And I think the bumps that we have to work out right now, like all of media is changing. How people learn about things is changing and how people have community is changing. And I think homebrewing is going to have to make some adaptations to get to that.

But I don't think it's going to go away. I really don't. I think it's too much fun and the products that you make are too delicious for it to go away any more than making bread at home is going to ever go away. People are going to make bread. People are going to make their own pizza. People are going to make their own beer because...

Just like making your own cookies, what you can make in a small batch will almost always exceed the quality of what you can get buying from some macro producer and some Mylar package. You know, you can really...

make great things and match them to your own tastes. And so I think that's going to help. I think there's going to have to be a change in the learning process. You know, things like TikTok and YouTube and Instagram,

are, are altering the way that information is shared. And I think the homebrewing community, the American Homebrewers Association is going to have to adapt quickly to, to stay in touch with all of that. But I think it should because the amount of information and the, and the

Really, the depth of really good information from those organizations needs to be in the mix, because if you just let a sort of unmoderated Internet happen and govern how the hobby is progressing, it's not going to turn out as well as if you have really good information.

really good information, you know, quality in and then quality out. Yeah. I mean, I did a presentation recently for a club on meat making and I was surprised, uh, the, the amount of bad information that was out there. And it's even worse would be, I mean, at least beer making, there is a body of knowledge now and it has been kind of codified and people, you know, people can agree on a lot of things, but, um, but, uh, meat making, it seems to be as, uh, still considered a bit of a black art.

People are still hashing over things like acid additions at the front of your mead making process and whether or not pH is important and whether or not nutrients are important. Which we know is important. I mean, there is science behind this and I know maybe science isn't all that cool these days, but how things actually work is kind of important if you're going to get

get on an airplane or get in a car and then also maybe ferment something that costs you $200 for a batch. Exactly. Well, Ken, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate you taking time to come on the show. Brad, it is always great to get a chance to talk to you. And I hope things are going really well for the Beersmith and that if there are rough seas that they smooth out for all of us shortly.

Well, thank you again. My guest today was Ken Schramm, founder of Schramm's Meadery near Detroit and author of the book, The Complete Meadmaker. Thank you again, Ken. Great to have you on. Thanks, Brad. A big thank you to Ken Schramm for joining me this week. Thanks also to this week's sponsors, Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They invite you to join their upcoming brewery workshop, September 14th to 17th in Fort Collins, Colorado.

If you're launching a brewery, you don't want to miss this four-day event featuring top professional brewers who help you explore, plan, and start your own brewery. To learn more, visit breweryworkshop.com. Again, that's breweryworkshop.com.

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