The people at the Artisan Beverage Cooperative, makers of mead, ginger beer and kombucha, have tapped into the fizzy zeitgeist. Fermentation is having its moment. Or, depending on how you look at it, maybe it’s having its epoch. Foods and drinks that are the product of fermentation — wine, beer, cheese, bread, coffee, chocolate, vanilla, miso, kimchi — are held up as some of the culinary pinnacles of civilization. What would we be without this stuff?

Artisan Beverage Cooperative came together in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 2013 after a brewing collaboration between the makers of Katalyst Kombucha and Green River Ambrosia, a maker of ginger beers and meads. Different qualities draw people to these beverages. Some are fascinated by the honey in mead, some simply love all things related to tea (leading them to kombucha), and some beer hounds are always eager to expand their palate. There are those are always looking to fold more fermentation into their diet. One of things that got General Manager Garth Shaneyfelt interested in mead was the fact that he played Dungeons and Dragons when he was a kid. He knew about mead, which is honey wine, from the popular fantasy role-playing game, but when he got older, Shaneyfelt, 45, started brewing his own beer, and so it made sense to revisit mead as a beverage in the real world.

On the one hand, you might think that the cooperative chose some very obscure beverages as the centerpiece of their operation. Plenty of consumers have never heard of kombucha, a tonic-like beverage made from fermented tea, but the drink is booming now, with every city having its own competing local brewer, and with mega chains like Target, Wal-Mart and (of course) Whole Foods selling cases and cases of the tangy stuff.

Mead might be a little less trendy, but its popularity is growing. Shaneyfelt says that it’s not impossible to experience 1000 percent growth in a market sector that was virtually non-existent a few years ago. If there were only a few dozen meaderies around the country at the start of the decade, now people are making the sweet wine in virtually every state. Artisan Beverage Cooperative is a member of the American Mead Makers Association, a group that tracks the growth in what it calls the “mead movement” and helps promote the fast-growing young industry selling an old beverage. “Some people are actually looking for it,” he says of the mini-mead boom.

As Shaneyfelt points out, mead may in fact be the oldest alcoholic beverage because the ingredients — wild honey and water — would have been on hand and plentiful before humans started farming. You may remember from reading Beowulf in 12th grade that mead figures pretty centrally in some of the foundational literature of England. Mead is mentioned in the Bible, in Hindu scripture and in Virgil. So, even after people settled down and started growing grapes and oats, our taste for the stuff didn’t evaporate.

Mead may be booming, but the honey wine is still only about five percent of ABC’s overall production, with half of its output devoted to kombucha and the remaining 45 percent being the ginger beer. Keeping track of the growth in the market will be a key challenge for ABC, since the mead fermentation process takes about a year, and the demand could conceivably triple or quadruple as the beverage gains fans.

Shaneyfelt and the other owner-operators at ABC partner with local beekeepers and use a variety of barrel-aging techniques, delicate floral infusions and other elements to flavor the mead, but the beverage is built around the honey, the taste of which is shaped by the types of pollen and nectar the bees collect. Part of the interest in mead is related to a growing concern about problems like colony collapse disorder, which devastate the pollinators vital to our agriculture.

While ABC’s Ginger Libation and Katalyst Kombucha are distributed around much of New England, the co-op’s meads are sold in shops mostly in Massachusetts. But, since the mead is technically a wine, ABC is able to ship bottles to 32 different states. And, like other wines, the mead can bring out or accent the flavors of food. “Our traditional meads go well with a fruit and cheese plate,” says Shaneyfelt.

And, also like other wines, mead tends to get better as it gets older. Shaneyfelt says he has bottles from the first batches they produced in his basement, and they improve over the months and years. “Depending on the style and how sweet it is, it will age differently,” he says. “In general mead just gets smoother and smoother as it ages.”

Garth Shaneyfelt, Artisan Beverage Cooperative
Greenfield, Massachusetts
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The post Making Mead appeared first on Take Magazine.

Surreal — that’s the word illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi uses to describe his new show at the Norman Rockwell Museum. DiTerlizzi says he was raised on Rockwell’s work, with a big coffee table book that he studied when younger. In high school, he copied Rockwell to hone his skills. His first two children’s books, he says, were strongly influenced by Rockwell’s style.

“I always learned from emulation and copying,” says DiTerlizzi. “I could learn more from that than doing anything any teacher could show me. The hope is that a young artist or a kid will come out of there seeing that copying another artist is okay for building your foundation as an illustrator.”

DiTerlizzi is best known for his works of fantasy like The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Holly Black) and says this interest stretches back to his childhood also. He was a fan of Jim Henson, especially movies like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, and Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s book Faeries had a major effect on his creative pursuits. DiTerlizzi says that he spent a lot of his time with his face buried in a drawing.

Goblin Warbuggy from Magic the Gathering. Photo courtesy of Tony DiTerlizzi

“I was a scrawny kid with glasses, your stereotypical nerd in the typical ’80s,” he says. “I grew up in South Florida, and it was a world of jocks, a world of surfers. In 8th grade, I looked like I was still in 5th grade. So, of course, I wanted to go to Middle Earth or a galaxy far far away or anywhere else but where I was. And I think that escapism had a tremendous effect on my developing the talent of drawing.”

The art of the Dungeons and Dragons books from the 1970s also had an impact on him, one that would eventually define his professional career. When DiTerlizzi finished art school and returned home, his goal was to do children’s books, but he still had some creative growing to do. He also hadn’t had any success in pursuing editorial art jobs. He spent time reconnecting with old friends and playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time since 7th grade. Those friends insisted he submit his work to the Dungeons and Dragons publisher.

Kenny and Dragon. Photo courtesy of Tony DiTerlizzi.

“I was certainly in a funk when I sent the stuff to Dungeons and Dragons, but it rekindled this thing that I loved when I was 12,” DiTerlizzi says. “I felt like this was within my grasp. I was relentless. I submitted samples of my work over and over and over again. I just wasn’t going to take no for an answer until finally, they said yes.”

His 10 years working for Dungeons and Dragons trained DiTerlizzi to think in more expansive terms as he began to shift from illustrating other people’s words to writing his own. “That was my internship,” DiTerlizzi says. “I realized it wasn’t about wizards zapping beholders. It was so much more than that. It was all about what is the philosophy, what are the artifacts, how do the artifacts inform what the character is, how does the wardrobe affect the character, how does the setting affect everything, all that. You start realizing that you’re setting a stage for the characters to interact on, and there’s so much more to a stage than just a knight with a sword and a monster.”

DiTerlizzi believes the key to successful creativity is encouragement — not just not discouraging, but actually taking the time to encourage creative kids rather than being passive. He says that is what made the difference for him, but today he sees too many kids receiving little support in their pursuits.

“I think about when I was a kid and liked to draw and come up with crazy stories, so, too, did a lot of other kids,” DiTerlizzi says. “There wasn’t anything exceptional about it. By the time I got to middle school, there was a still a group of people who liked to draw. But by the time I got to high school? There was a handful of kids who liked to draw. It whittles down through the years. When I look back at it as an adult, I realize there were definitely not necessarily adults who discouraged it, but there were adults that just didn’t necessarily encourage it.”

“You are who you are at a younger age, and if you’re lucky, you can really bring that spirit of who you are into focus at an older age.”

Tony DiTerlizzi, Illustrator and writer
Amherst, Massachusetts
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Top image: Poster created by Tony DiTerlizzi for Norman Rockwell Museum show. Photo courtesy of Tony DiTerlizzi.

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