Heres a bee farm!

Its run by Al.

Hes got lots of bees.

Heres Will!

Co-founder of Black Rabbit Mead Company.

And this is the honey that the bees made.

The honey heads here to be turned into mead.

Guided by the other co-founder of Black Rabbit Mead Company, Jake.

Woah!

They used the mead to make these drinks.

Its the Bees Meads!

Jazzy theme music upbeat music The history of Black Rabbit rooted in the fact that its owners, its founders were two high school teachers we met his teachers down at the charter school in Carson City.

I taught social studies and Will taught science.

I actually had shared an office with the math teacher who happened to be one of the largest honey producers in the area, Al with Al bees.

I just one day said, Hey, I got some, some honey, it's part of my honey business.

he had a bunch of honey that it crystallized and we had a bunch of time on our hands, I guess you could say.

But my background is in microbial ecology study how microorganisms interact with their environment.

But I had never done any sort of homebrewing.

I got them some honey and I bought them a kit and, you know, that's all I did for me.

All I wanted was, to make some mead.

Al said, Hey, I got this, honey.

I'd be curious what it tastes like as a mead.

You seem to like microbes.

Yes, like, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure!

Whats mead?

* laughter * Yeah, but yeah, let's.

Let's try it.

mead is any alcohol fermented from honey.

So if you ferment grapes, you get wine, apples, you get cider.

If you ferment honey, you get mead.

most mead is made like a sweet wine.

It's like that higher abv a lot of residual sugar, The way we do it, it's a little different.

It's more like a ciders.

So they're all just under 7% alcohol carbonated.

And then we specialize in just a ton of different infusions.

Mead, also known as Honey wine, is one of the world's oldest alcoholic drinks and is traditionally made with just honey water and yeast.

Mead's history is hard to pin down, since it likely developed in many cultures independently, It has been found in multiple regions from Neolithic China to medieval Europe and ancient Ethiopia.

In fact, chemical analysis of pottery jars from the Jiahu Village in China shows that people were making a fermented rice wine with honey and fruit as far back as the seventh millennium B.C.

Mead has been referenced in many ancient stories.

It's called The Drink of the Gods in Greek Mythology and has been mentioned in Beowulf and the works of Aristotle.

Today, it's making a comeback as a sustainable, paleo friendly, gluten free alcoholic drink.

So with all this talk about Mead, let's go ahead and dive into some of the deliciousness that we have here in front of us.

We always like to start off with the Church of Roger.

So the Church of Roger is mead in its simplest and most humble form.

It's just honey water and yeast It's a very light.

It's a very delicate meat.

wow, I was surprised how light it was and not very sweet.

Yeah.

No, that is very light, with this I understand you lower the ABV, make it a lot easier to drink a lot smoother it has a very clean taste and a little bit of a tartness to it, which is very nice and unexpected.

This Mead took us years to figure out We call it the Church of Roger because this is kind of our church all the other meads come out of it.

It's named after my dad who helped build out the Meadery.

Black Rabbit Mead Company is the first meadery in Nevada and we got to go inside to see how the process works.

honey water, and yeast that's the base for any type of mead that you want to make.

we add about two barrels, 55 gallon barrels of honey into one of our tanks.

Here we ferment with a wine yeast to help eat through all of the honey that's in there.

We don't do any type of filtration.

What we do is rachet.

interesting term for taking it off of a dead yeast and leaves all the nutrients at the bottom.

So you have a layer of like thick stuff at the bottom.

You just take it off of that, put it in a new tank to take it off of that put it in a new tank Fermentation is a process where the sugars are used to create energy for microorganisms which produce byproducts that transform into new products for humans.

for example.

The microorganisms in yeast convert sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is key for making drinks like mead.

It's been used for many millennia as one of the simplest ways to preserve food, boost nutrition and improve taste.

There are several types of fermentation that creates a variety of products from alcohol and bread to vinegar and kimchi to fuel and penicillin.

But today we're focusing on how fermentation is used to make mead.

we grind up or food process, a bunch of freeze dried fruits or herbs and spices, and then they'll sit in the mead for anywhere from 8 hours to two weeks, From there, we pull everything out.

We let it age for another week or two, and then it will get pumped into this tank behind me.

it'll stay in here after it's carbonated overnight, and then we will pump it either through kegs into the bottling line like we got a Jon doing here or into our canning line.

music fades into rock music a black rabbit mead company we strictly use for mead production.

A very unique type of honey.

It's called rabbit brush and alfalfa honey.

particularly the pollen source for the bees is going to be rabbit brush, one of the most abundant native plants that we have here in Nevada along with alfalfa, because Nevada has a big alfalfa growing sector.

So this rabbit brush and alfalfa honey is a really rich, very flavorful honey, our style of mead is a lot lighter And so having a really rich, flavorful honey is important for those honey qualities to be able to still shine through honey is that sweet liquid gold made by our buzzing friends, the bees!!

Honey varies in color and flavor, depending on which plants.

The bees collect nectar from.

Meaning each hive has its own unique honey.

But how do they do it?

Once the bees collect nectar, they regurgitate it into each other's stomachs, where enzymes break it down and remove some water, That process turns it into simple sugars that are then deposited into honeycomb.

Inside the hive, the bees constant fanning of their wings evaporates water in the nectar and helps it thicken into honey.

A hive produces about 55 pounds of surplus honey each year.

which beekeepers like Al harvest and bottle.

Some people even use it to make mead.

we were like mad scientists for many years Jake and I just started making the mead together, and Al kept just giving us honey.

We would all just share the bottles And we never really used any honey other than what Al has provided for us.

it's a fun partnership that we've had over the years.

how do you decide on the flavor combinations you kind of have a sense of what you want to do beforehand or do you experiment how does that work?

we have an idea of kind of where we want to end up come up with a bunch of different recipe ideas and then we'll start playing with gallon batches of them we always want to take it like to the extreme of like, what's way too sour.

Okay, now how do we dial it back from that?

what's way too sweet?

How do we dial back from that?

So this is our Hawaiian ember.

It's a pineapple and jalapeno Mead I love pineapple and jalepeno pizza in particular.

And for some reason I had the idea of like, what would a mead taste like And it ended up tasting really nice.

It's actually not spicy at all.

The jalepeno is just there for flavor.

and then the pineapple gives it a nice light, sweet creaminess.

Wow.

the robustness of taste of the jalepeno , very present.

It's not overwhelming.

very earthy and kind of a shock, I was expecting more of like a kick of a jalepeno.

Its essentially like what you would have if you took a bite of a jalepeno, but minus the seeds and the caps.

And that would provide the burn you taste the undertone of the pineapple Let's dive in to the B.L.

bliss that our blueberry lemon Mead is named after D.L.

Bliss State Park and just southwestern Tahoe.

you can tell with just the color that, you know, there's something different than the meads that we've tried.

the entirety of that color comes from the blueberries that we use in there along with fresh lemon juice, When I go for a drink, the first thing I actually notice is the smell.

I get hit with the smell of the blueberries right away it's balance between the, blueberry flavor and the tartness of the lemon.

also again, surprising because I feel like the commonality of something that is a lemon drink would be just that.

It's very tart.

Yeah, very sour.

Maybe in that lemon is the stronger flavor of the two, but I'm actually finding the blueberry present itself first gentle, but not subtle.

Next up, a different style of mead cocktail style, which takes a cider style mead and uses spirits, liquors, Sirups and more to create stronger flavor profiles designed to be poured over ice like a cocktail.

is called Summer of 1864.

It takes the very first mead that we tried today.

The church of Rodger, we put some rye whiskey into it.

We put a couple of different types of bitters into it, a little bit of brown sugar and some water issues So kind of drinks like a whiskey punch, enjoy this.

the first sip, I get a hit of lychee flavor.

Yes.

Yeah.

Is that in here or.

And I only get excited because I love lychee so much.

the ingredients of things don't necessarily create the flavors that you would expect.

And you find that with a variety of our meads it's not just about the ingredients, but it's about the way that they work together and potentially new things that they can create as a result of it.

it kind of tastes like a very refreshing summer drink, catch a little bit of those bitters.

with that additional sweetness from like the orange juice, the Citrusy kind nuttiness of the mead Jake and I, we definitely enjoy some alcohol from time to time, but we like to mix it up too, along with provide our friends that are drinking alcohol, something still really tasty and interesting to drink.

coconut milk elixir as what we call it.

we work really closely with our good friends over at BlendBee, a local Reno-Sparks tea blending company with this drink in particular, we take her organic jasmine green tea with coconut and then we steep it, we do a cold brew and then we add a housemade mint sirup, and then we put a bit of lemon in it.

Yay!

cheers!

Very minty.

Very refreshing.

still subtle, Definitely a gentle sweetness from the coconut that that mint is really.

here to stay.

Hi.

It's easy to say the tea is presentable as well.

It's lightly floral, I assume that's why you went with the cold brew process was to make sure that it wasn't bitter.

Yeah, we've learned a lot about two years Teas themselves have a lot of diversity in their flavors, in the sensations that they bring, it's very crisp.

I want to say delicate you know, when you walk into a freezer, you breathe out the cold air.

It's kind of that feeling when I drink it.

and even with mint it doesn't feel like, you know, you're drinking toothpaste or something.

I would almost call it familiar.

I haven't experienced this flavor as focused as it is in this drink, but It's not anything that intimidates me I think that summarizes my experience with these pretty well, every drink is a little mini exploration of what flavors do I taste and when do I taste them, where do I find them?

It's fun.

there's a tremendous amount of love in everything that we do here.

we're passionate what we do, and we want to be able to share that passion with our community in a really enjoyable way.

Jake and I got into this not because we loved me to want something that's me by any means, we got into it because we were intrigued.

and we wanted to share that with a lot of our family and friends.

And it took us years to figure out how to do well.

Thank you so much for coming in and checking us out and enjoying what we're doing here.

Thank you to everyone at Black Rabbit Mead Company.

Until we MEAD again.

;)