Happy hour mead musings with Bløm Meadworks' Lauren Bloom
Lauren Bloom and her husband, Matt Ritchey, are the team behind Bløm Meadworks, an Ann Arbor-based meadery that produces meads, ciders and cysers that are deeply tied to Michigan’s agricultural community. Sourcing honey from regional apiaries and working in concert with farmers to source locally-grown produce and herbs, Bløm is crafting beverages that speak of the Michigan’s seasonal harvest. Their beverages are sessionable, carbonated and flavors rotate throughout the year, from rhubarb mead in spring to pear-ginger cider in fall.
Lauren and Matt are innovative entrepreneurs, and after the initial shock of the restrictions that came with the pandemic, they looked at each other and said, "All right, well now what are we going to do?"
“It's kind of sad, but it was a really fortunate time to feel comfortable using the internet,” says Lauren. “Building an online ordering page and figuring out how to do all of that stuff. It took a lot of time, but I feel like we were able to adjust. Things aren't pretty, they're not great, but we're going to get through it. We'll come out the other side and dust ourselves off and start again.”
Here we present a condensed version of Cat’s interview with Lauren. For the full conversation and to see Lauren’s cocktail demo, just watch the video above.
Catherine Neville: Give us a snapshot of what this past year has been like for you and how you guys have stayed afloat.
Lauren Bloom: I would say, in some ways we're fortunate. We're still here. We're still open and it's seeming like we're going to get through this, which I'm just feeling really good about. I know not everybody's in that position. And it certainly is kind of dicey week to week, month to month. Like everybody else, we've done some major pivots. So what was our bustling taproom and tons of in-person conversations and talking about meads, talking about ciders, talking about the farmers we work with, has really turned into, for the most part, a contactless way of distributing mead and ciders.
So here in Ann Arbor, folks can do curbside pickup. We do local delivery once a week. We have a patio with some heated huts. Fortunately, Michiganders seemed to be pretty hardy. We've had a lot of people come out in like full snow suits and sit on the patio during snowstorms.
We've been selling groceries from local farmers, lots of kits and packages to just try and send a little joy home with people. We launched some subscription kits where every month you get a little bundle and it has like a surprise selection of Bløm drinks. The little things matter right now and food and drink are a good way to bring a little joy.
CN: The heart of your business is collaborating with people in your community and this whole COVID period has opened people's eyes to the importance of those local connections. The fact that you can rely on those farmers, your neighbors, and that you have a regional food system that is healthy is something I think that is more important now than ever.
LB: It has put such an incredible spotlight on the strength and the important redundancies within our local food shed. At times when other things weren't available or manufacturing was down or shipping was down, our local farmers in the Ann Arbor area, and really throughout Michigan, stepped up in ways that were — I actually have goosebumps talking about this — that was so inspiring, so incredible.
CN: You really pride yourself on partnering with a lot of local apiaries, but aren't you doing some beekeeping of your own?
LB: There are three main beekeepers that we work with in Michigan. One lives on the east side of the state, one's on the west side of the state and one has hives in a corridor that runs north of us up to about mid-state.
And so that beekeeper that's kind of in the middle, he took maybe 40 or 50 hives and put them on Matt's farm in an area where we have a small orchard. One, it's really cool to learn from him. But two, just what an opportunity for us, because it's such an important ingredient for us to really be in tune with – that rhythm that beekeepers are going through throughout the year. So, if he gives us a call and lets us know he's going to be out there getting the hives ready for winter, we'll usually try and hop over there and at least see what that looks like for him, maybe help out a little bit if we can.
CN: So actually, I have your standard mead right here with me. And then I also have the cyser. Now tell me what the cyser is. Remind me.
LB: Being this ancient beverage, mead has all of this language around it that's developed and there are specific words to describe types of meads. So a cyser, it's a generic term for mead and cider fermented together. The ratio might be a little different, but roughly half of your fermentable sugars are coming from honey and half of them are coming from pressed apples, and they actually get fermented together in one vessel. So rather than fermenting a mead, fermenting a cider, and blending them, you're putting it all together, fermenting it into one.
CN: For the folks at home, I'm sure that you watched the episode that we did on Bløm, but in case you missed it, Bløm approaches mead in this wonderfully modern way where it's sessionable. So it's not highly alcoholic. You keep the alcohol level kind of close to beer, but then you also carbonate it.
LB: So traditional mead, like you said, at its most basic level is just honey, yeast and water fermented together. Traditional mead tends to be quite sweet and/or high in alcohol. So maybe 12 to 14% and sweet. It almost sometimes has like a thick texture to it because there's so much honey added during fermentation. We add less honey per batch and ferment it out, so it comes up between 5 and 7% alcohol. It's carbonated. And we usually ferment it completely dry, and then sometimes back sweeten a little bit depending on the flavor. But we don't have anything that really gets past maybe medium in terms of sweetness.
The cyser is kind of interesting because you just have a light cider note to it. [And our standare mead] is just honey, yeast and water, back sweetened a tiny bit with honey. It's really light and kind of floral. Honey itself doesn't have any natural acidity to it. It's so sweet. If you're thinking about honey, it's really weird to imagine it without the sweetness, because that's really what we taste, right. Maybe we get some floral elements of flavor notes, but it's so much about that sweetness, so that drying it out is really interesting. When we ferment the cider and the mead together, we get a little bit more acidity to it from the apples. So it adds a little bit more complexity, but keeps it really light, really kind of delicate.
CN: It's lovely. I'm sure that you are sourcing your apples locally as well. Michigan is kind of apple central, isn't it, in the fall?
LB: We have lot of apple production here. So far we've been able to find as much cider as we need here in Michigan. And we use a couple of different orchards, apple growers, that we work with. One of them is upstate in the northern part of Michigan. And they do an interesting blend of apples and they press and blend it into totes, and then we freeze it and use it throughout the year. Spring is coming and we're so excited because it's the growing season. But because we source everything from Michigan, we do spend a lot of our time thinking about what we're going to do over winter. We have this long period where not much is growing.
Some of the batches where we really want this intense focus on the apples, we're not adding any other flavors. Maybe we're not adding any sweetness back to it. We would just want this like really incredible highlight on the apples. There are a couple of orchards that we work with who will do a custom blend of apples. And those orchards are trying really hard to grow some cider specific varieties of apples. So apples that have a lot of tannins, maybe more acidity. They're usually ones that are terrible for eating. You'd take a bite and, so there's not a lot of sweetness to them. They're maybe like super tannic in the skin, but they make really interesting cider.
CN: This is a perfect segue. So we're just at the beginning of spring, we're heading into rhubarb season. Kind of tell me what you have on tap for your spring flavors, and also talk about how you infuse flavor into your meads and your cysers.
LB: Spring is an interesting time, especially in Michigan, because there are some early harbingers of spring. We have rhubarb here. You don't eat rhubarb if it's not in the spring. And when it comes in, you eat it in everything, right. You're making pies and galettes and crisps and everything else with rhubarb. It is one of my favorite flavors.
We get our rhubarb from a grower up on the Leelanau Peninsula, which is north of Traverse City in the lower peninsula. His name is Alex. I don't even think his farm has a name. But he's tending to his grandpa's rhubarb patch that's a hundred years old and is so productive. I don't know how he does it. I don't know what kind of magic he works into those fields, but it's just these super long rows of just abundant rhubarb.
He just harvests it, throws it in the bed of his truck, brings it down here and then we chop it, freeze it, so it breaks down a little bit and is easier to juice. We juice it and add it into one of our meads. It's kind of minerally, kind of earthy, and really tart, which is right up my alley. The other things that are coming in spring here, scapes. There's some other things coming up, but they're pretty savory.
CN: How do you incorporate that into mead?
LB: I don't know. We haven't done that yet. I think this is true with how we're eating, trying to follow the seasons. One of the batches that we're putting together, we foraged some sumac last fall and let it dry – we're working on a sumac cider. We have some chokecherries from last fall that we're drying out and pressing for a batch. So we're still working some of those things that we prepared from last year. And then we'll start to get into heavy summer season here as well. Strawberries and basil.
CN: So fun. Lauren, that's the thing that I love about the work that you do – you have this wonderful base product, that just by itself, plain is perfect. But then, like an artist, you get to say, "Ooh, we can access this or we can access that. And who knows what we might do with these garlic scapes. I’m going to have to come up to Ann Arbor and taste that if you guys make a garlic mead. I think that's pretty interesting.
LB: I will be curious, too, if we decide to venture that way. We made a Gose mead this year, which has salt in it. We had been trying for a long time to get our hands on Michigan-mined salt. Most of it is used for industrial purposes and has additives in it that you wouldn't necessarily want to drink, but we were finally able to. And so we started making some Gose meads which are really interesting. Like you said, it's kind of fun. Because we have this dry product that you can really paint over with a lot of flavors or add things to, to really kind of bring that out.
So you're asking a little bit of how we impart flavors, how we infuse them in, and it really depends on what it is. Things that don't have any sugar content to them like spices, we'll usually add in post-fermentation. We'll let that mead or that cider ferment out completely, and then we'll add in those spices maybe in a mesh bag or in a basket and let it infuse flavors. Things that have some sweetness to them or some sugar content through them – like berries and apples – we're often pressing them and adding it. And we want to do that during fermentation so that that fermentation can pull out that sugar as well. And then depending on the fruit, we decide whether we also want to add in the pulp or the skins of it or the peels or things like that, if they have flavors or color that we want to impart as well.
CN: I love it. Okay. You also can make cocktails with these meads and ciders. What are you going to make for us today? Because, it looks like we're going to have something citrusy.
LB: Yeah we are. So for our cocktails, we don't stick to all Michigan ingredients, just so we can mix it up a little bit. I opted for this to make one of our shandy style cocktail. I wanted to make a cocktail that could be made just with our four-pack, so that if people are not in the Ann Arbor area and you do want to order a four-pack online, you could do that and still make this cocktail at home.
See the recipe for the Bløm Julius following the interview and to watch Lauren make the cocktail start to finish, watch the video at the top of this article.
CN: Before we sign off, please tell me how people can get their hands on your meads and your cysers, because you do ship.
LB: We do. If you're outside of Michigan, go to drinkblom.com/orders. It has the list of all the ways you can purchase our products, whether you're in town, out of town, around Michigan. And there are, I think, 32 states right now that we can ship four packs to. So if you go there, it'll take you to VinoShipper, and that's who processes those orders and verifies all the requirements for state-to-state shipping. And then we package it up and send it out to you. And it usually arrives within two days or so.
CN: Fantastic. Lauren, it is great to see you and I am really thrilled that you and Matt have navigated this past year successfully. I'm thrilled to know that you guys are doing well. And it's good to see you.
LB: You, too. I hate to say it, but there are some small silver-linings. Without this, who knows if we would have decided to do a Zoom reunion. And it is really nice to see people that we don't get to see in person all the time. This is wonderful.
BLØM JULIUS
Makes 1 cocktail
0.5 oz vanilla simple syrup
water
sugar
vanilla extract
orange bitters
0.5 oz lemon juice
1.5 oz fresh orange juice
10 oz Bløm Standard Mead
Make a vanilla simple syrup by combining equal parts water and white sugar in a small saucepan and bringing to a low simmer. Stir while still hot to dissolve sugar, then remove from heat. Add 1 tsp vanilla extract for every 8oz of simple syrup. Let cool.
To a 14 oz glass, add 2 dashes of orange bitters, lemon juice, orange juice and vanilla simple syrup. Stir the ingredients to combine, then top with 10 oz of Bløm Standard Mead. Enjoy!
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