So Michigan has (had) been doing a lot of film credits to attract the film industry to the area, and because of that, there had been requests for product placements in the Metro Detroit area for some upcoming films. I'm pleased to announce that B. Nektar Meadery is due to make cameos in both an upcoming motion picture and again in an HBO TV series.

First, a movie that's due to be released sometime in 2011 called Right Angle, starring Jeff Daniels and Aaron Paul (Jessie, from the Breaking Bad TV series). B. Nektar bottles of  mead, posters, and glassware were picked up by the prop crew to be used in various scenes. No more is known. We'll just have to see the movie.

Second. We just filmed part of the opening of HBO's TV series, Hung at the meadery last night. They were looking for local businesses that portrayed Detroit people picking themselves up and creating a rebirth of the city. They talked about a guy who makes coffee tables out of old engine blocks. An artist who turns abandoned houses into works of art. An out of work homebrewer that starts a brewery in his garage (HINT: that's US!). 

When I first heard that the location scout for Hung was looking for a location, I called him right away. He described a brewery in someone's garage. I explained to him that though we're not a brewery, our facility looks as close to a garage (read: small-time and low budget) as you'll get. He loved our story (you can read it here) and agreed to come and see the meadery for himself. We both arrived in the parking lot at the same time. As he stepped out of his car, he took one look at Ian (our assistant meadmaker) and asked, "does HE work here?" I said, "yes" and he immediately started taking pictures of a surprised Ian. Now, if you've never seen Ian, he's a 6' lumberjack looking dude with a knit skullcap, flannel shirt, and crazy neon palm tree slip on shoes. Apparently, he looked EXACTLY like the guy in the script the writers had imagined. After a couple months of back and forth with the writers, the location scout calls me up and said, "we'll be filming next week. Tell Ian not to change a thing about his look. Not to shave, shower, NOTHING!". He also told me that there was a picture of Ian hanging up in the writers room. Apparently they really liked his look.

So to make a long story short (TOO LATE!!), the film crew showed up last night and filmed us doing a bottling run. We had a lot of fun, and sold a lot of  mead and T-Shirts to a very receptive film crew. We're told that (assuming the piece doesn't get cut in editing) it will be part of the opening of Season 3, Episode 1. I think they said sometime in September 2011. Damn! Now I need to get cable and subscribe to HBO, or wait until it hits Netflix.

Every once in a while, someone will ask me, "where do you guys come up with all the ideas for your meads?" The truth is, we just don't know. They just pop into our heads sometimes. This is true of our latest Frankenstein creation, codenamed: The Darkness. So as some of you already know, we did our first collaboration mead with a local coffee roaster, Chazzano Coffee based here in Ferndale, MI. The coffee mead, named Ethiopian Harrar Mead was a smash hit with coffee drinkers, beer drinkers, wine drinkers, mead drinkers, and foodies. Rex Halfpenny of the Michigan Beer Guide said at a recent beer festival that it was one of his favorite three beverages at the event. We just love Frank, owner, founder, and coffee nut, at Chazzano so we just HAD to make another coffee mead. But this time, we pulled out all the stops

We had recently acquired a couple of bourbon barrels and were wondering what to put in them. We all are big fans of bourbon barrel aged imperial stouts, and we thought that doing a coffee mead (because of the coffee and chocolate flavors in imperial stouts) in the barrel would be a super nifty idea. So... we all piled into the B. Nektar mobile and drove the 2 whole blocks to Chazzano Coffee to taste honeys and coffees with our good friend, Frank. We brought with us three different honeys, all from Michigan. First was a light colored and flavored star thistle from Sleeping Bear Farms. The next was a earthy and floral wildflower honey from Windmill Hill farms. And last, but certainly not least was a deep, funky and earthy buckwheat honey from T.M. Klein. Frank brought out the largest selection of coffees I ever thought possible. We sat there for over 2 hours contemplating the honey, coffee, and combination upon combination of both.

Back in April of 2010, B. Nektar did a collaboration project with local rockstar coffee roaster Frank, at Ferndale's Chazzano Coffee Roasters. This small, and Xtra Limited batch (only a bout 140 bottles were produced) was released at B. Nektar's friday night tastings, and eventually a few trickled out to a handful of stores. Well, it has caught the attention of an internationally read beer review blog called Hoptopia.

Unfortunately, this coffee mead sold out over a month before the review was published. The $20 375ml bottle was snached up by both mead lovers, and coffee lovers. The rate at which these flew out the door has convinced us to produce another batch. This one is much larger (about 90 gallons). The cost savings of doing a larger batch will be passed on to the customer, and the next release is expected to hit store shelves at about $13 for a 375ml bottle.

We at the meadery are all fans of funky, sour, belgian inspired beers. Due to our licensing restrictions, we're not (YET) allowed to make them commercially. But we've also been curious about making sour meads that are inspired by our favorite beers. We thought that batch 100 was a pretty significant number, and we should do an equally significant mead. So we hit the books and the Internet to find out as much as we could about making a mead of this kind. The problem we found, was that there isn't really anything like this out there. Some people have made sour braggots, but none appear to post their results, methods, or lessons learned. The purpose of this blog is to document our attempt at one of these meads. We will post our methods, numbers, and opinions. We'll also include images and videos for you all to follow along in this funky experiment.

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