Things to do in Southern Maine, investigated personally and described by Shannon Bryan
(with only slight amounts of exaggeration, digression and references to ostraconophobia).
Maine Mead Works
May 05, 2009A tasting room of one's own: Maine Mead Works
Buyer's remorse. It isn't limited to large expenditures like houses, Vespas or battery-powered robots with human faces that supposedly bake like Julia Child and give great foot massages.
Regret exists after smaller purchases too.
Remember the time you ordered that crispy bluegill and cheddar sandwich at that questionable street meat stand in town? Your trusty pal had insisted it was "mind-blowing" and worth all 800 cents. Of course you quickly discovered it was a travesty on a Kaiser roll and passed it off to a grateful pigeon...who then died only two bites in.
Your $8 gone, your thoughts consumed by inescapable hunger (and accidental pigeon murder), you spent the afternoon gnawing your own thumbs and wishing ill of aforementioned "friend."
It was money poorly spent. And proof that you can never really take someone else's word for it when it comes to things "you're just gonna love, I swear!"
Thus it behooves you to get a sample before you put your money down. Try things out before you commit.
Take Maine Mead Works for example. Even though praises seem to follow the stuff like a band of complimentary and well-meaning celebrity stalkers, you still can't know that it's right for you.
I've grown quite fond of Maine Mead myself, but then I've been known to eat fried bologna. (We make choices, see. We're not necessarily proud of all of them.)
You need to decide for you. And you can, thanks to the Maine Mead Works tasting room.
The tasting counter opened a couple of months ago in the Maine Mead Works winery on Anderson Street in Portland's East Bayside neighborhood.
It's open Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings and on Saturdays - or by appointment. And in addition to getting a sample of the Dry, Semi-Sweet and Blueberry Meads, you can snag a tour of the joint too.
Making mead is an impressive process, so I learned when I took a tour back in January.
Even better, you may soon get to try the process first hand. Eli Cayer and Ben Alexander are hoping to offer mead-making classes in the not-too-distant future.
Until then, head over to the tasting room and give Maine Mead Works a try.
It may be the single thing you and your bluegill-eating friend can both agree is swell. Really swell.
Wine from honey: What it all meads
I had the happy opportunity to tour the Maine Mead Works winery this weekend. And no, I didn't drive two hours out of town to some 100-acre tree-lined vineyard.
The Maine Mead winery is tucked into a small corner of a Portland warehouse on Anderson Street in Bayside. That's right in our backyard.
Mead, you see, is made from honey rather than grapes. And while mead was around long before Jesus made wine out of anything, it's popularity dwindled a few hundred years ago.
Luckily, mead makers like Portland's Eli Cayer and Ben Alexander are helping mead get back to its rightful place at our daytime celebrations and late-night confabulations.
The mead-making process starts with the honey.
The fellows from Maine Mead get their honey locally - from Swans Honey in Albion, to be exact. Eli, who kept bees himself a few years ago, said Maine Mead might get into the beekeeping business in the future but would still need to acquire honey elsewhere. They simply wouldn't be able to produce enough honey on their own to meet their production needs.
These barrels are filled with honey and water - the foundation of mead - and that mixture is sent via tubes into the next room for a cleansing hot bath and some yeasty fermentation.
These wall-mounted tubes are filled with ginger, which the yeast latches onto. The honey/water/yeast mixture tumbles through the tube like an almost-alcoholic lava lamp. Eventually, the blend drains from the top and into 50-gallon barrels in the next room.
These barrels currently take about five days to fill - that's 10 gallons a day - but the speed is expected to increase in the near future.
Once filled, the mead gets up close and personal with some oak chips. But after three weeks that relationship is split and the mead sits chip-free for a few more weeks.
Maine Mead is hand bottled and hand labeled. That's a good deal of manual effort - and without a stock of employees to do the work, wives are likely to get involved.
Here, Ben Alexander's wife Carly peels and presses labels onto bottle after bottle. She was impressively neat and efficient about it. If it were me, a few bottles might've slipped into the boxes with sideways, backwards or missing labels. But then, that's why I don't own a company.
Maine Mead's HoneyMaker Dry Mead is currently on the shelves at Whole Foods, Aurora Provisions, Rosemont, Old Port Wine Merchants and Maine Beer & Beverage. HoneyMaker Semi Sweet Mead is expected to land at those locations the first week of February.
It's a fine concoction, smooth to drink and rather potent too with a 12.5% alcohol by volume. The alcohol content, I was told, is tested with a hydrometer.
It measures the gravity of a liquid both before and after fermentation. But I didn't need any hydrometer. My flushed face after a small sampling said it all (something to the effect of: "Hot damn, that's an effective mead.")
You can taste and decide for yourself starting today at the Great Lost Bear on Forest Ave, where Maine Mead is now available.
Or, check out Slow Food Portland's Writers Night on Thursday, Jan 29 at SPACE. Maine Mead will be hanging out and offering up some samples.
For all the background info on the endeavor, check out mainemeadworks.com
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