We can take our traditional mead as a starting point and infuse it with many other flavors using fruits, berries, spices, vegetables and more! Depending on what we add to it, we end up with different varieties of meads such as a melomel (fruit), braggot (malted grain), or metheglyn (spices). There are many more varieties too! This currant rose is session mead/hydromel. "Mel" is latin word for honey, so a hyrdomel is a honey with water. As in this mead has a higher water content than usual, so it is lighter and less alcoholic. Eric adds carbonation in the secondary ferment to make this mead even more crisp and refreshing as well as to give it more body. This mead is also made with clover honey, which also helps with its lightness and crispness. 

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Tasting Notes​

• There's a tartnessand an earthiness to it.

• Like a hard cider but with black currants instead of apple

• Mild carbonation ​

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Fun fact about these black currants: They were illegal in the USA for a long time. The farm that Slate Point gets theirs from is local to NYS and one of the biggest providers of black currants to America. The owner, Greg Quinn, is actually one of the people responsible for getting these re-legalized. There is a wonderful ted talk - here - that I highly recommend watching when you get home tonight. 

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Musical Connotations:

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This is a very "light" and "refreshing" mead and with currants and roses in the name, I can't help but to place myself in some sort of castle in Europe at tea time sipping on this one in the garden at harvest time in some sort of dream fantasy. So I chose to create a constantly evolving texture utilizing an instrument associated with both modern summer and 18th century Europe. So we use the minimalist texture and harmony of music from the 20th Century (for the musically inclined based on "In C" by Terry Riley) with a piano to capture something of both the past and present and create something very modern. All parts play the same notes, just interlocked in different ways over time. This piece is very much more about the texture and interplay between rhythms much more than the melody. Let this hypnotize you as a sort of sound bath and get lost in the the musical flourishes of this stlye.

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Harmonically, this piece is based on the C major pentatonic scale and this creates the very "open" and "dreamy hypnotic" sounds.