Slate Point Meadery
Sonic Tasting
Queen's Crown (9%)
Besides adding things into our mead, we can use different techniques to manipulate the raw ingredients themselves. This mead, the Queen's Crown, is a wonderful dessert mead. It is considered it to be a "Bochet" (pronounced: Bow-Shay) due to the procedure of caramelizing the honey before starting the primary ferment. This creates deep caramelized notes, along the lines of brown sugar. Eric then adds maple syrup (from Crown Maple, another local NYS provider) to create this beautiful and deeply rich mead.
Tasting Notes:
-
Caramel
-
Brown Sugar
-
Maple Syrup
The Caramelization Process:
Musical Connotations:
Name alone, this mead presents a very "regal" picture. The queen bee, the queen. It would be impossible to write music for this mead without leaning into this, and its deep and rich flavors really play well with that idea. Musically, the cello brings out those regal vibes as well as the deep caramel and brown sugar notes. The sine wave synth and bells ring up high to enhance the sweetness of it all. And finally, the thick synth pads utilize rich overtones (harmonics) to really enhance the deep complexity of the flavors here. Under it all, is a beautiful ocean soundscape that brings us back to nature and reminds us how timeless this all is. Mead is our oldest alcoholic drink and making a huge comeback now. Mead can be enjoyable and mainstream again, and I hope tonight you found a new appreciation for it.
This is by far the most complex musically and technologically. We are utilizing a combination of horizontal and vertical resequencing (video game techniques) over an ambient bed, in another pandiatonic context. Each of these 50+ audio files are randomly triggered at random intervals to create this constant and deep texture. When a sample ends, it triggers an event that sets off the next random delay for another random sample, in a never ending random branching of musical experiences much like the buzzing of a beehive: chaotic yet organized chaos. A swarm of busy bees.
Thank you for attending the first ever public sonic tasting. I hope that like mead, this type of event also becomes more mainstream in the future.
Thank you most sincerely,
Joe Chris