OnTap Magazine

AGAINST THE GRAIN number of PhDs” (not all his). e production is also technical and combines practices associated with both brewing and winemaking. Ernst continues to highlight the prohibitive costs associated with mead. “In a litre of wine, the costs of grapes would be less than R5, in a litre of mead the honey would cost R15”. His product is currently available at very high- end establishments like e Test Kitchen and Aubergine, as well as specialist wine stores. Time will tell whether mead can gain in popularity in South Africa and Ernst’s Melaurea is a pioneer in the latest pop culture- fuelled resurgence. However, Africa has a rich mead heritage with some arguing that the Khoisan were the very rst to discover the nectar of the gods. “Every single African culture has a word for mead” says Ernst. e Xhosa have been fermenting ‘iQhilika’ for centuries in the Eastern Cape with mead having purported fertility and strength enhancing qualities. So why the resurgence of mead in the States? Ernst attributes it to the modern trends of rediscovery of old world beverages and food, along with the fermenting techniques which produce the much sought-after complexity. He also notes that popular culture has once again had a hand in mead’s rise. e wildly popular series Game of rones repeatedly shows its characters drinking from horns and the beverage in those horns is indeed mead. Mead is also becoming a popular alternative to beer due to it being gluten free. Ernst’s MCC style mead also allows for greater drinkability as it has minimal unfermented sugars. Perhaps the biggest challenge to mead in South Africa is bureaucratic in nature. Brewers would naturally diversify and mead would become a focus, yet for a brewer to make mead they would need a separate licence - one which in Ernst’s case took almost 18 months to acquire. THE MASTER OF MEAD Rewind two decades and we meet Garth Cambray, a Rhodes student in Grahamstown who began working with a professor of microbiology. Garth fell in love with bees and honey production and would go on to patent state-of-the-art fermentation and ltration technology that would change the way mead was produced. He founded Makana Meadery in Grahamstown in 2000 and produced mead under the iQhilika brand. At its height they were producing 20 to 30 barrels per annum, with the mead available in 37 states in America. Two of their mead variants – African Herbal Blossom and African Bird’s Eye Chilli – won international awards, and modern American meaderies were founded using Garth’s patented technology. But despite all this success in the US, iQhilika’s range of meads never quite caught on at home, and today they’re all but impossible to nd in South Africa. Still the legacy lives on, not least at Melaurea where Ernst relies heavily on Garth’s extensive research. Mead’s American revival and the global interest in new fermented products is particularly encouraging for the likes of new pioneers like Ernst. If quality of product and drinkability combined with its heritage, incredible craftsmanship and decades of re ned academic research are anything to go by, this beverage deserves a spot at your table and perhaps in your honeymoon suitcase. "Every single African culture has a word for mead" It's nice to mead you To mead or not to mead? 38 | Winter 2019 | ontapmag.co.za