Travel - Central Texas Weekend Part 2 - The Great Hill Country Alcohol Tour, Meads

Over the years, my wife and I have become drinkers.  Perhaps more importantly, we have a defined palate.  We have a preferred Washington bourbon provider (Heritage Distilling Company, for those who don't want to click through, in various spots in the Pacific Northwest), a preferred Washington cider provider (Finnriver Cider, in Chimacum, WA), a preferred Texas meadery (Dancing Bee, in Rogers, TX), have made elaborate side-trips to stop at a meadery we like (Redstone Meadery, Boulder, CO), and have even occasionally made borderline-dangerous U-turns in the rain to stop at meaderies we spotted from the road (The Meading Room, Sonoita, AZ).  We have a preferred import brand of mead (Dansk Mjød).  It's so far-gone that we currently have something along the lines of twenty stored gallons of homebrew and are considering getting a still.

Especially when it comes to mead, in other words, we have some idea what we're drinking.  It has gotten to the point where, after years of drinking cheap stuff or what was available, we can even distinguish good liquor from bad - as, for example, the striking difference between Lagavulin and Glenlivet, where, I regret to say, I can taste the technical superiority of the Lagavulin but prefer the flavor of the Glenlivet because it doesn't taste like a grass fire smells.

So, of course, for my wife's birthday, we went on a rather limited tasting tour of central Texas.  It turns out that the big-name meaderies of Texas are fairly scattered, and don't like being open in the mornings, so our number of stops was limited by geography.  Our start point was at the Emily Morgan, in San Antonio, which was also our end point, and our loop included four stops.  First, because they were about the same driving time from our start as was on the clock between us leaving and them opening, was Rohan Meadery in La Grange.  My planned second stop was Texas Mead Works in Seguin, but I changed my plan at the last minute because the other Texas Mead Works location offered other exciting possibilities.

This is because the other Texas Mead Works is in Hye, Texas.  If you have never been to or through Hye, this is a condition you should remedy: there is a stretch of highway running from Johnson City to Fredericksburg where wineries dominate agriculture.  Because wine qua wine isn't really something I enjoy - I like cheap, sweet wines that I can buy by the gallon, such as Gallo Brothers moscado or sangria - I cannot speak to the majority of them, but in the middle of that stretch of road is Hye.

Remember a few paragraphs ago where I said that we had a preferred Washington cider? Well, we also have a preferred Texas cider - Hye Cider Company.  Remember about the preferred Washington bourbon? Yeah, Garrison Brothers is in Hye, and Garrison Brothers was where I first realized I could taste a difference between mass-market and special-batch liquors.  Finally, albeit only briefly, as they are moving, Hye Rum Company is located in Hye.  There are a few other places along that corridor I would recommend, but nowhere else in my experience are there so many ways of quickly, efficiently, and pleasantly disposing of both budget and sobriety in such a small radius.

At this point, though not out of daylight, we were well out of budget, so we returned to San Antonio.

Now, having told of the tour as a whole, let's discuss things in detail.  First is Rohan.  Rohan has come a long way since last we were down there, which was six or seven years ago.  They have expanded into ciders and beers, and dramatically expanded their mead line.  Their cranberry mead remains some of the best cranberry mead I've ever had, and the tartness of the cranberry is one of the few times I prefer their generally drier Bohemian-style meads to an equivalent other flavor.  That is not to say their other meads are bad, quite the contrary.  They're just generally drier than I like.

However, they have a chai spice bochet that is incredible.  Bochet is a tricky beast - it's easy to over-caramelize the honey, and get just a little burnt flavor, and equally easy to under-caramelize and get just plain old mead, and it is difficult without experimentation to say how any steeping or flavoring agents are going to interact with the caramelized honey.  Rohan's Ember bochet hits it out of the park.  Trish and I each tasted it and commented immediately that we would be getting some.  It is one of the most subtly flavored bochets that I have ever had, and it balances the chai and tea flavors as well as I can imagine any mead anywhere doing so.

Rohan now stocks ciders, wines, and beers - which I provide here in the order of likelihood I'll drink them.  We got a growler of their Ida B cider, which I shamelessly admit we mostly got to get the insulated growler.  The cider is good, and since it's their semi-dry, it ran more into what our palates run to.  The first glass had a strangely banana-like flavor both new and after a day or two of exposure to air, but the second tasted much fruitier - appropriate, since Ida B is blueberry lemon.  Since we took the growler back to the room, we were able to try it in conjunction with a series of hot, humid days in San Antonio, and I can definitively tell you that after a day wandering around the Riverwalk, there are few things I'd recommend more than a cold glass of Rohan cider.

Rohan is also where I confirmed an important point I had sort-of figured out at other meaderies: professional mead brewers are generally just home-brewers with much better equipment.  We wound up engaged in conversation with their brewer, and mentioned both our own homebrew experiments and our general experience as consumers.  It wound up being a much more technical conversation than expected, ranging over everything from how to deal with batches that weren't quite to spec to their upcoming releases, but it was, top to bottom, a home-brew conversation and not a "professional" conversation.  It was a pleasure to talk shop with folks who clearly knew and loved their job - which, I should point out, is the same experience I've had at Dancing Bee, Meading Room, and any other meadery where we got to talk to the production folks.  Significantly, they were all generally brewers before they were professionals.

From La Grange to Hye is a couple hours, but the palatal difference between Texas Mead Works and Rohan is fairly substantial.  What TMW does best is what could best be described as "stunt meads," like, for instance, their varieties that taste like Girl Scout cookies.  That sounds absurd - who wants a Thin Mint mead? - but it's effective.  They also have an excellent bochet, the Necromancer, though theirs is substantially thicker and more syrupy than Rohan's Ember.  It is also considerably less subtle about what it does: where Rohan's makes you appreciate each of the flavors, TMW's grabs you by the tongue and screams into your liver with all the intensity and subtlety of an '80s cartoon villain.  This is generally true of TMW's flavors; their melomels, or fruited meads, tend to have their fruit added on the back end, which means that more of the fruit flavor comes through, and their purebred sweet, Minstrel's Mead, is both routinely strongest and sweetest of the purebred sweet meads you'll get.  Unfortunately, because their fruit meads are made with actual fruit, not concentrates or syrups, they can occasionally just vanish from stock - their pomegranate prickly pear, for instance, which was a revelation when we first visited several years ago, was, as of us hitting Hye, completely out.

Another area where TMW apparently read my mind is that I'm not a beer drinker.  Their solution to this problem? Beer-strength blackberry mead.  It's their St. Michael's on-tap mead, which we typically get a growler of, but we didn't have our TMW growler with us this time, so we contented ourselves with splitting a glass this time - still well worth the trouble, because it's beer-strength blackberry mead that tastes like blackberry mead, not hops and yeast.

I had planned to make this all one long post, but it turns out I have a great deal to say about each of these places, so I will continue later on the subjects of Hye Cider, Garrison Brothers, and Hye Rum, and then on to Tourism In San Antonio.  In a shocking turn of events, by the time I actually get that far I may actually be a tourist in San Antonio.