So for obvious reasons, there has always been a unique affection for harvest beers. The Germans in Westphalia have a poem, “O harvest beer, you bountiful feast of freedom and desire. It is because of you that babies are weaned from the breast.” And even as the old ways fade, there is today a new appreciation of beer as an agricultural product, with all the seasonality and pride of place that comes along with this.

Today, you have to seek out ways to create excitement around the harvest, because your homebrew shop is not going to make a big deal out of the new malt coming in. Brewers in the United States are using freshly-harvested “wet hops,” sometimes from brewery gardens, as one way of celebrating. If you want to get creative, there are lots of different ways to put together a harvest beer.

Check out your local farmers’ market. Fall is a season of great bounty, and there are plenty of opportunities for incorporating the fruits of the harvest into a celebratory beer. Fruits, vegetables and honey all can be incorporated. Here’s few recipe outlines to get you started.

Pumpkin Potsdamer

Potsdamer was a wheat beer brewed in nineteenth century Germany. Not a lot of information is available, but it was described as “…luminously clear, tinged with amber” and seasoned with cinnamon, cloves and coriander. Sounds to me like the perfect base for a pumpkin beer, since our experience with that fruit is nearly always in the context of a certain amount of spicing.

There’s no need to limit your choice of squash to pumpkins, either. In fact, Hubbard, butternut or acorn squashes all may all produce more intense flavors than pumpkins proper. If you do go the pumpkin route, choose one of the smaller “pie” pumpkins, which are actually grown for eating, not carving.

The Elysian Brewpub in Seattle has taken pumpkin beers to an extreme, brewing five pumpkin beers last year—enough for their own festival. The highlight was a beer that was actually conditioned in and served from a giant hollowed-out pumpkin.

For a recipe, I would suggest using about one third wheat, and the remainder Munich malt. Extract brewers can use a similar proportion of wheat and amber extracts, perhaps supplemented by a small amount (half pound) of not-too-dark crystal malt, and steeped in the usual manner. As for gravity, you’re on your own, as the reference I have for Potsdamer bier gives no information on this, but I would think for a table beer that a target gravity of around 1055-60 would be appropriate. No reason why you couldn’t crank this one all the way up to a barley wine, though.

Hopping should be German and on the light side. Three-quarters of an ounce of Hallertau should give you 25 IBUs. For the spicing, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest a mix of an ounce of crushed coriander (Indian variety is best if you have access to an Indian grocery store), and perhaps half a teaspoon of ground cloves and a teaspoon or two of cinnamon, all of which should be added at the end of the boil. Potsdam is up north in Germany, which in the nineteenth century could have meant a top fermentation, but a lager yeast wouldn’t be out of the question, either. Either way, this beer is going to be scrumptious alongside the family turkey.

Persimmon Bock

The large, shiny orange Asian persimmons can be found in specialty grocery stores across the country. However, in parts of the Midwest, wild persimmons grow and can be harvested, usually in October, and are best after the first freeze. When sold commercially, it is most often in the form of a thick pulp. The flavor is rich and luscious, often with a fair amount of acidity. It seems to me this would balance and complement a dark bock-style beer. Recipes for those aren’t too hard to come by, but I would look for one with a high proportion of Munich malt for the richest, most traditional character. Add a pound or two of persimmon pulp to the secondary, and allow to macerate for two or more weeks, before racking to a clean carboy, allowing to settle clear, and then bottling or kegging.

Honey Imperial Oktoberfest

We live in an age of creeping imperialization, with just about every style being doubled up and turned into an imperial version. Historically, this is completely in line with the way the term was used in the United States a hundred years ago, when a brewery might add this designation to their top-of-the-line product.

So the recipe ought to be pretty obvious. You can make this anywhere between 1080 and 1100 and justify the imperial designation. A large proportion of Vienna malt is always a good place to start, and with a strong recipe, should produce a deep orange-amber beer.

Find some great honey. Local is always fun, but there is a world of choices available to you. I would suggest between 10 and 20 percent of the gravity. You can either dump it in toward the end of the boil, or if you want a little more honey aroma, add it to the secondary where it will restart fermentation.

Since this is a strong beer, observe the usual precautions when readying yeast: a strong, vigorous starter and well-oxygenated wort.

So there you have a few ideas to get you started, but the possibilities really are endless. Start picking those pumpkins!

Schramm encourages all levels of expertise, constantly reassuring the beginner of the ease of making mead while simultaneously tempting even the most experienced mead maker with the potentials awaiting those wishing to spend a little more time and care on the craft.

The book starts with well-researched and documented details of many of mankind’s most cherished beverages. The author explains the importance of mead and other potables in shaping human history and culture.

He gives us information on how to achieve the highest quality possible in mead, exploring the ingredients and their raw materials in depth. For instance, we learn about honey, mead’s essential ingredient; about various bees that collect honey, their life-cycle, and the multiple roles they play in their symbiotic relationship with humans. Schramm explains the different qualities and kinds of honey available in tabular form with information on various components such as sugar, acid, ash, and nitrogen. He uses text to describe the qualities less easily defined in percentage and weight and what characteristics they impart to the brew.

The author covers the basics of mead making—the importance of sanitation, the life cycle of the yeast as it metabolizes sugars to alcohol, bottling issues, and how to troubleshoot off-tasting meads, to name a few.

Schramm encourages both beginner and expert to create artistically with the many ingredients provided by nature, explaining the effects of different ingredients on the finished product. A nice cross-section of yeasts favorable to mead fermentation is listed along with the characteristics and likely outcomes associated with each choice.

Think about it. Honey bees, Apis mellifera, and related species are abundant worldwide. The honey they manufacture from the nectar of flowers consists mostly of simple sugars. Left in the rain, a forgotten pot of honey would accumulate wild yeasts and ferment rapidly. As the only known sweetener in pre-industrial times, honey was avidly sought, and accidental fermentation probably occurred many times.

Brewing is said to have hastened the development of civilization because people needed permanent settlements and agriculture to have enough grain for both beer and bread. Civilization, on the other hand, put a crimp in mead making. Farmers cut down acres and acres of woodland, driving the bees from their natural habitat. Wine and beer became the beverages of everyday life, while mead became a royal prerogative, a beverage for weddings and other major ceremonies.

In fact, the term “honeymoon” is said to derive from the old custom of giving the newlywed husband and wife mead to drink during their first month of marriage, in the belief that this heady libation would produce a male child.

Mead never disappeared, though it became a kind of a liquid anachronism, consumed mainly at medieval-themed feasts, Renaissance fairs and other historical reenactments. A handful of brands could be found on the market, including Bunratty from Ireland and Chaucer’s from the Bargetto Winery in Soquel, CA (the latter with a pouch of spices attached to the bottle for making a mulled wine).

Now, the movement toward traditional, all-natural foods and beverages—the same movement that gave us the microbrewing revolution—has discovered honey wine. Diverse publications such as Spin magazine, U.S. News and World Report and the Seattle Times all ran articles on mead, or were planning to, while this piece was being written. On November 8-9, the first-ever commercial mead festival in the United States—dubbed “Planet Buzz”—was set to take place in Chicago. Organizer Ray Daniels anticipated 30 to 50 meads, both domestic and imported, along with a smattering of ciders and perries. Check out www.meadfest.com for details.

The Year of Mead

The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) lumps mead in with grape wine for statistical purposes, so no one knows just how much mead is being made, or how many meaderies are out there. The sense is that production is growing.

“I call this the year of mead,” says Julie Herz, vice president of sales and marketing for the Redstone Meadery in Boulder, CO. She estimates there are 40 to 50 producers in the country, many of whom she lists on her website, www.honeywine.com, a superb compendium of mead information, legend and lore. “I hear about a new one every two months on average,” she adds.

Most businesses specializing in mead are of recent vintage, having popped up within the last five to seven years. Redstone Meadery is typical. Founded in 2001, it’s a truly artisanal operation, with an annual capacity of 9,000 liters. Sales are in-state only. “We’d like to be a player, but we don’t want to jump out of the gate too quickly,” says Herz. “We want to grow as the category picks up speed.”

Michael Faul, owner of Rabbits Foot Meadery in Sunnyvale, CA, received his license in 1994, and he might be considered one of the deans of the mead business. “Fourteen years ago I took my wife to a medieval festival at Bunratty Castle near Shannon Airport in Ireland,” he recalls. “She liked the local mead so much that we grabbed a bottle at the duty free. It’s totally different now, but at the time it was a heavy, syrupy dessert wine. Back home, we checked a couple of local liquor stores, but we couldn’t find it. I was a homebrewer, so I decided I could make it for her.”

That first batch turned into a new profession for the computer systems engineer. His main product is Pear Mead (12 percent alcohol by volume, or ABV), made from clover honey along with cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and well-ripened fruit.

Like Faul, most of the new generation of mead makers have a brewing, rather than a winemaking, background. Herz and David Myers, president of Redstone, learned mead making as members of Hop Barley and the Alers, a homebrew club in Boulder. Most of their equipment came from a defunct brewpub in Wyoming. Jon Hallberg, who runs the Smokehouse Winery in Sperryville, VA (a meadery with adjacent bed and breakfast inn), used to be head brewer at the Richbrau Brewpub in Richmond, VA.

Herz’s database includes a number of traditional wineries that make a mead on the side. Among these is the Bonair Winery in the Yakima Valley of Washington. “In 1996, we had a big freeze, and there weren’t many grapes to process,” explains owner Gail Puryear. Bonair markets several honey wines, including a cinnamon-clove mead called Winter Solstice, under the tongue-in-cheek slogan: “If it was good enough for ancient Druids, running naked through the woods, drinking strange fermented fluids, it’s good enough for me.”

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