Our Desert Blossom Mead Wine
We were on a summer vacation in Europe when we tasted mead for the first time. It was a Czech mead, which tend to be relatively sweet, and it was so deliciously refreshing on a warm summer's day. We looked at each other and telepathed the same thought: Why isn't this stuff available everywhere? If anything qualifies as a drink of the Gods, this is it.
When we returned home, we ordered a bunch of mead-making supplies and different types of honey and started fermenting and experimenting.
Our favorite by far is made from honey collected in the Sonoran Desert. On the surface it seems like desert honey might have strong flavors, but the opposite seems to be the case. Maybe desert flowers put fewer resources into their pollen – who knows? But the fact is that this desert honey is very mild and the mead that it makes is the cleanest and most refreshing we have ever tasted.
About Mead
In short, mead is honey and water fermented by yeast. It’s in a distinct category, somewhere between beer and wine. It is one of the oldest alcoholic beverages ever made – and has been called “the drink of the gods!”
Honey has strong antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. It can also help reduce allergy symptoms.
The rare and special honey used in this mead is sourced from beehives located in the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. A half pound of honey goes into each bottle! – most of which is fermented. Mead also contains probiotics. There are no sulfites and it’s gluten free.
A honeybee visits between 50 and 100 flowers during one collection flight from the hive. In order to produce the 1/2 pound of honey in each bottle of our mead, 1 million flowers must be visited. A hive of bees must fly 27,000 miles to produce a half a pound of honey!
Fruit or fruit juices can also be added during or after the mead fermentation process (such drinks are called “melomels”), it can be flavored with herbs or spices such as cinnamon, cloves, ginger or chamomile (such drinks are called “metheglins") or it can be fermented along with grains that are used in making beer (such drinks are called “braggots”) to name just a few.
Saving the Honey Bees
The importance of pollinators like honey bees for industrial agriculture cannot be understated. If all of the pollinators were to suddenly disappear, the effects on modern food production would be devastating.
The primary reasons for the declines in bee populations are all related to modern agricultural methods, with insecticides sprayed on crops being the most obvious contributing factor. Modern monoculture farming is another reason, since honey bees and other pollinators can only collect their food within a given range and they need a wide variety of plants that flower at different times of the year.
Many modern beekeepers have resorted to physically moving their hives around to different sites throughout the year when the respective crops are flowering, but this puts a lot of stress on bee colonies, weakening them and leaving them vulnerable to disease.
Drinking mead can actually help maintain healthy bee populations. Beekeepers can't stay in business without a strong market for quality honey, and when the demand for honey is great, they are more likely to work with local farmers to make sure they are using bee-friendly farming methods. Buying organic certainly helps, too.
The more organic farms there are, the more clean pollen there is for bees to collect and turn into honey. This fact alone is a great reason to grow whatever produce you can at home (provided you don't spray it with insecticides!) besides the fact that growing and eating your own produce is such a healthy and gratifying habit – and it doesn't need to take much time or work.
Find out what produce will grow well in your area and then get out in the sun and plant some seeds. You'll thank yourself for it – and so will the bees!
Purchase your bottles of our delicious desert blossom honey mead here – with quick three day delivery.
