Task 5 - Moonlight Meadery

(05) Visit a winery or brewery & take the tour

Activity: Moonlight Meadery
Location: 23 Londonderry Road Unit #17, Londonderry, NH 03053
Cost: $25.00 per 2 people (Groupon)
When: June 1, 2013
Rating: 5-Stars

Having learned how beer is brewed, wine is age, and alcohol fermented I thought I would learn how honey wine or mead is made. At Moonlight Meadery in Londonderry, NH, I learned from the son of the founder Michael Fairbrother that when you combine 1 part honey and 3 parts water with yeast mead is produced.

After a quick history lesson about the origin od mead he began the tour in their newly expanded Moonlight Meadery production facility. Here the tour guide explained the process of fermentation, filtering, aging, bottling, packaging and finally distribution of their various mead products. I found the tour both informative and enjoyable.

By the end of our tour at the meadery, we went through the nearly 64 different meads they produce and like father like son, our tour guide has a deep passion about their mead products. His experience and personal preferences guided our tasting session from the dry to the sweet offerings. 

During the tasting, I learned that you can affect the flavor by combining the mead with other ingredients and/or by aging it in oak barrel vs a regular fermentation tank. Mead that contains spices are referred to as metheglin, mead that contains fruit is called melomel, and meads that are fermented with grapes are called a pyment.

Moonlight Meadery calls their product Romance by the glass… and they name each of their different meads accordingly. First, I sampled Sensual, a traditional mead made from just wildflower honey. It was an excellent way to start as I learned how traditional mead should taste. Next I tasted some of their specialty meads. The meads I tried were: Red Dress, Kurt’s Apple Pie, Serenity, Sumptuous, Temerity, Admiration and finally their most premium mead Utopian. Utopian Mead is aged in Oak Barrels that had been used by Samuel Adams’s to age Utopias. These barrels impart a flavorful yet subtle fruity sweetness like a fine cognac or aged sherry without the bite.

I couldn’t leave without making a purchase and selected Kurt’s Apple Pie as my mead of choice. Made from local apple cider and Madagascar vanilla with a touch of Vietnamese cinnamon it tasted just like the apple pie my grandmother used to make in a liquid form. I can’t wait to try his suggestion to drizzle this over some fresh made vanilla ice cream.