Superstition Meadery, Finest in the Field

How did a humble fireman from Maryland via Prescott in Arizona go from a chance encounter on holiday in Borneo in 2007 to pouring some of the best booze I’ve ever tried into my tiny tasting glass at the 2018 Beavertown Extravaganza in London? Well, seeing as you ask so nicely, I will tell you: He did it by embracing one of human kind’s oldest fermented beverages.

Jeff Herbert travelled to Borneo in 2007 for a bit of time away. In a brilliant example of how very tiny this small world is, this is where he met and made friends with a gentleman who was raised just a few miles down the road from where Jeff was living in Arizona. Back in the US, Jeff and his new mate caught up every now and again and when they did they exchanged gifts. It was one of these gifts that would change Jeff’s life forever: a bottle of home-brewed beer. Jeff couldn’t believe how good the beer tasted, he’d never had anything like it. He was so visibly happy that a few months later, his wife, Jen, bought him a home-brew kit for Father’s Day. After the generic beer that had come with the kit went down a treat, Jeff immediately ran to his local home-brew shop and said “I want to make a Belgian Ale and a Mead!” A Belgian Ale because Chimay Bleue was one of his favourite beers at the time, and a Mead because… why not?

Fast forward a minute to 2012. On one hot idle day, Jeff wandered over to the nearest winery with Jen for a brief visit. You know as well as I do that booze people love to chat about booze – specifically in this case, the Mead that Jeff had been passionately brewing for five years – and before Jeff and Jen had left Juniper Well Ranch – the winery in question – they had been offered some space and support to make Mead on a bigger scale. Of course, they took JWR up on their offer… But not before proving themselves by helping out at the winery as volunteers for a season in all manner of jobs including racking, bottling, tasting, blending, events etc. This work experience later proved crucial to the founding of their very own business. Needless to say, the good people at Juniper Well Ranch Winery were more than happy with Jeff and Jen’s work and together they entered into Arizona’s very first Alternating Proprietorship. “What’s that?” you ask. No idea mate, google it. Jeff and Jen were given a corner of the winery along with access to an additional fermenter and bottling equipment. Here they thrived and grew into full time Mead producers.

In 2014, the owners of Juniper Well Ranch Winery decided to retire. So Jeff and Jen – who at this point had been selling a fair bit of Mead – moved on. They found an excellent space in nearby Prescott to set up shop, and this is where Superstition Meadery can be found to this day.

The first Superstition Mead I tried was actually not a Mead, but a Cider. In Arizona, the law says you can either be a winery, a brewery or a distillery. The difference is that wineries ferment fruit, breweries ferment grains and distilleries do whatever they like as long as they’re distilling. So Superstition technically qualifies as a winery… Happy days, apples are a fruit, let’s make cider! And so Blueberry Spaceship Box was born. Named after the Herbert kid’s favourite pre-Xbox toy: the cardboard box spaceship. This cider is the perfect blend of apples and blueberries. Tart fruitiness coats the mouth, then gives gently way to subtle sweetness and delicious blueberry flavours. I love this Cider, it is definitely the best Cider I have had.

Jeff and Jen have always loved travelling, so what better excuse to nip across the planet than to pick up a bit of sexy saffron or some delicious fruit. Using fine international ingredients paired with Arizona honey has always been part of the Superstition ethos.

Fascinated by new and different flavours and always wanting to learn, Jeff and Jen have indulged in a huge number of collaborations with breweries from across the world including the likes of Bottle Logic, Cycle Brewery and very importantly, Mikkeller who import Superstition products for their bars and the Mikkeller Webshop in Europe. This relationship has also helped to open markets in Asia such as Taiwan and Thailand. Mikkel Borg Bjergsø has long been a great supporter of Superstition, and late last year helped them to create the mother of all unicorns, the one Mead I most want to try but will most likely never get a chance to: Natürlich. Mikkel sent Jeff and Jen some Riesling juice from his vines at Weingut Meierer in Mosel which they co-fermented with Arizona wildflower honey and Nelson Sauvin hops, they then dry hopped it with some more Nelson Sauvin and bottled fewer than two one hundred bottles never to be released, only to be presented to collaborators as a gift… It looks like I need to start a brewery, get really good really quick and do a collaboration!

Another aspect of Superstition’s output is barrel ageing. They buy all types of barrels from various different alcohol producers all over the world as well as some fresh oak barrels and age Meads in them. Which brings me neatly to the next of their drinks I tried: the Bourbon Barrel Aged Country Pumpkin. This is a delicious Mead made with pumpkins and a selection of Autumnal spices then chucked in Bourbon barrels for four months. This is a good opportunity to dispel the myth that Mead is always too sweet: In Jeff’s own words “I remember the first time I made grape wine, and the fruit was so delicious. I remember thinking that wine grapes taste almost nothing like wine when fermented dry, so I wanted to focus our production on meads that would be semi-sweet so that you can taste much of the character of the ingredients going in on the front end.” When you ferment anything, you’re transforming natural sugars into alcohol therefore removing the sweetness. Superstition makes a range of Meads from very dry to very sweet… Having said that, the BBA Country Pumpkin does have some sweetness to it, in particular that sexy sweet flavour you get from pumpkin pie. The Bourbon and vanilla note from the barrels kick in at the end to round off what is a beautiful drink.

Superstition’s bottles are adorned with a mad old range of colourful labels, some reflecting the liquid inside, some reflecting the name of the Mead or Cider, some just looking cool, but they all have one thing in common: an ominous looking stylised bull’s head. Who is he? The Minotaur? Zeus trying to seduce Europa? A friendly local Arizonian cow? The answer is far more interesting: It is fairly widely acknowledged the oldest booze known to man is Mead. Therefore, Mead was often used in sacrificial ceremonies throughout history. The ancient Greeks and – specifically in this instance – Minoans used rhytons to purify their Mead and shower it over lavish ceremonial banquets as a libation to the gods. A rhyton is a receptacle usually shaped like an animal’s head in which various ancient cultures purified their drinks then poured them out of the animal’s mouth and into their own. Jeff and Jen were inspired by a particularly cool rhyton housed in a museum in Greece. Loving the story behind it, the mythological element and the great tie in with their narrative of “reintroducing the world’s oldest fermented beverage to mankind,” they decided to base their logo on it.

My final and favourite Mead was Grand Cru Berry. All types of madness here! Buckle in. Superstition have a range of four Meads called the White Series one raspberry, one blueberry, one strawberry and one blackberry. Using a proprietary white chocolate ingredient, whole vanilla beans and new American oak barrels, all four fruit juices are used in the respective meads in the White Series. Each year these four Meads are released on the now legendary Berry White Day, a big event at the tap room a bit like Zwanze Day for Cantillon (but in far less poor taste than 2018’s edition – Google it…). So that’s all fine and dandy, but what’s Grand Cru Berry? It is an equal blend of the four Berry Whites which has then been popped into three types of barrel: new American oak and two barrels previously used for two of the most prestigious beers in the world, Fundamental Observation and Iridium Flare by Bottle Logic... and... take a deep breath! I warned you it was mad. The taste is out of this world, it’s like a rich berry coulis but with complexity to which mere words will never do justice. You can pick out each berry as well as the chocolate but there are a hundred other flavours all dancing around fighting to get noticed, but never relinquishing the extreme elegance with which they initially presented themselves. A true treat and a true delight.

Jeff and Jen started out with a passion for travel and home brewing and a work ethic that puts me to shame. They started with next to no knowledge of alcohol and became one of the world’s most respected producers in their field which has helped them bring exposure as well as tourism and economical help economic benefits to Arizona, an area very close to their hearts and a source of a lot of local pride.

Jeff started as a firemen and… oh, he’s actually still a full time fireman as well as running a full time Mead empire and raising two kids with Jen. Inspirational. As his mantra dictates: “You better love what you do and you better have a story to tell.”