Wine & Mead

Makgeolli became one of my favourite crossover projects because rice fermentation with nuruk is the fermentation tradition closest to beer in Asian brewing culture — nuruk (the traditional Korean fermentation agent) functions like a combination of a

Braggot is the mead style I find most interesting as a brewer because it genuinely sits at the overlap of beer and mead — you’re making decisions about malts, hops, and honey simultaneously, and the balance between these three character …

Bochet was the mead style that genuinely surprised me — I expected caramelised honey to produce a sticky, overly sweet result, but the controlled burning of honey before fermentation creates Maillard and caramelisation compounds that give bochet a ro

Pyment appealed to me as a brewer because it sits at the exact intersection of winemaking and meadmaking — you’re working with grape must and honey simultaneously, and the complexity that results from combining two of the world’s oldest fermented …

Cyser was a natural extension of mead for me once I started thinking seriously about Indian fruit fermentations — the combination of honey and apple produces a drink that sits between cider and mead in a way that’s more complex …

Metheglin was the mead style that most directly mirrored my spiced beer brewing instincts — the same logic of building a spice bill that complements rather than competes with the base character applies whether the base is a Witbier or …

Melomel was my second mead project, and what drew me to fruit mead was the same instinct that drives hop selection in brewing — fruit variety shapes the character as decisively as any ingredient decision in fermentation.

Wheat Wine is the most extreme wheat beer variant I’ve brewed, and the combination of very high gravity, complex wheat malt character, and hop intensity at barleywine scale produces something genuinely unique — it shares the strength and aging potent

Joe’s Ancient Orange Mead (JAOM) made with bread yeast is the recipe that has introduced more people to mead making than any other, because it works reliably with the cheapest, most accessible ingredients and produces a genuinely delicious result wit

Kilju is a Finnish sugar wine that represents the absolute floor of fermentation — water, sugar, and yeast, nothing else — and it produces a surprisingly clean, drinkable alcoholic beverage that costs essentially nothing to make.