Drinking Horn Meadcast

We return with the brewers for a conversation about the second Dragon Tea mead, Elliott! This mead uses Matcha Green Tea with Pineapple and Jalapeno for a sweet and spicy treat that fits perfectly with Elliott's character.
Did you get a chance to try this mead? Are you on a journey to collect all four dragons?
Well, sit back and listen in as we dive into this mead release on the Drinking Horn Meadcast!

Creators & Guests

Host
Nick Irvine
Ambassador of Buzz
Guest
Charlie Felkins
Head Mead Maker at Drinking Horn Meadery
Guest
Clint Birkland
Mead Maker at Drinking Horn Meadery
Guest
Nick Perez
Mead Maker and Sales at Drinking Horn Meadery

What is Drinking Horn Meadcast ?

A light-hearted show featuring talks on Mead History, Meadery Events and all types of honey fun!

Elliott Meadcast Transcript

00:05
Coming to you from beautiful Flagstaff, Arizona, this is the Drinking Horn Meadcast. Join us as we take a deeper dive into mead and mead culture.

00:27
And we're back! All right, we're here, Drinking Horn Meadcast. Meadcast, meadcast, meadcast, meadcast. Weird cast. Nice, nailed it. We're here, episode number 33 of the Drinking Horn Meadcast, and we are going to be talking about series, I keep saying series first.

00:46
We're going to be talking about the Dragon Tea Mead Series number two, which is, well, we'll get into it once we pop the bottle. You want to pop that bottle? Let's pop that bottle. Pop the bottles. Oh, nice. That was a good one. That was very good. So my question right off the bat then, is this a carbonated mead or no? No, this is still. Okay, it didn't sound like it. I mean, there's always going to be that little... Little bit of pressure. Yeah. Under pressure.

01:15
Oh man, passing it around.

01:22
That right there was the sniff test from Charlie. And I'm gonna walk over and grab mine. {Laughing} Your headphone cushion made a nice fart noise as you fell in. Oh dear! Oh, I can't wait to hear that.

01:42
Oh man, I won't almost stop it and listen to it now. So that was, those are my headphones guys. That's my shoe. Like yeah, those are my shoe, I'll edit that out. Usually it's that was the chair. That was my shoe. Like no one says that was my headphone. But I promise it was. Oh, all right. I'm going to put the.

02:07
Okay, so what we've got in our glass right now is series number two. I keep saying series first. Dragon Tea Mead series number two, which Clint, what did we end up calling this one? Oh yeah, this one's the Elliott. Nice. Nailed it. Yeah, Elliott. So what color is Elliott the dragon? Green.

02:36
Green green green like Kermie green That was a terrible Kermit. I went miss piggy Yeah, sorry wow we're off to an awesome start we haven't even had a sip of this mead yet just the aroma

02:51
Oh wow, like for a split second my brain forgot the ingredients that we'll talk about in a second But that you know how I feel yeah that inhale. Yeah, that's where you were at. Yep. Yeah that inhale Just reminded me of what we were drinking here So alright welcome everybody if you know Elliott which you might already if you did listening to this meadcast episode it is the second in our series and What are?

03:18
Describe for us, Perez, what we're smelling on this. What are the ingredients we used here? I think jalapenos, probably the first thing you get on the aroma. Yeah. Then as it kind of opens up a little bit more, you'll get a little bit of that fruitiness from the pineapple and then that earthiness from the matcha. Nice. So those three ingredients right there. Falcor had two ingredients. We have three ingredients in this one.

03:41
Matcha green tea, pineapple, and jalapeno. Little spiciness to it. Awesome. Sweet. And the green dragon, Elliott, is obviously, people know now our series. We match the color of the tea to the color of the dragon. And some people out there might be thinking, Elliott? What dragon is that? Charlie, where in the world does Elliott come from? That is Pete's dragon. It is.

04:11
70s Disney film or the 2000s Disney film? Yeah they remade it and made Elliott all CGI. CGI is that the right term? Yeah. Yeah computer generated image. Yeah I had to remember that for a second. Yeah or the 70s. So I think our demographic probably mostly listening remembers the 70s one which was

04:38
From my memory, quite a big leap in the use of CGI. I guess he was CGI too, right? Because it was like a cartoon written on top of film or something like that. Yeah, how the heck did they do that? Still like hand drawn, I believe. And then like putting it over. Superimposed, I think, yeah. Yeah, but then probably like the same way they did Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where like they actually had the little puppet that would go around and then they would draw over it. Later on in post. Yeah.

05:08
What are they drawing on? That's the magic of Disney you'd never know. It is. That's right. I can imagine the twinkling stars over it right now, the magic of Disney. Yeah, that's for another podcast episode. Someone else does the magic of filmmaking, but somehow they made a cartoon dragon interacting with humans in that movie. And I remember as a kid, I was like, that's awesome. I want this in my life right now. I want my own Elliott.

05:38
I want it to be Nick's dragon. And then, yeah, I never saw it. Did any of you guys see the newer one? I watched the new one when we were coming out with this mead. Oh, you did? Yeah. Oh. I thought it was cool. I mean, it's a cool concept. I tried watching the old one. I just couldn't get past the musical aspect of it. It is a musical, right? It's one of those, it's like, just like Mary Poppins kind of style or bed knobs and broomsticks, that kind of thing. I forgot about that. It is a musical. They're like dancing and sweeping the streets and stuff. So, yeah, okay.

06:08
in the last episode, if you didn't listen to the last episode, we talked about the kind of the birth of this series, so you'll want to go back and listen to how we came up, how we, I wasn't really, it's these guys. By the way, we're with the three brewers, the three creators of all of the meads, but in particular this dragon tea series meads, Charlie Clint and Perez, Nick Perez, Nick or Perez? I mean, my name is Nick, so that's why I just say Perez. Whichever. Okay, so

06:37
We are passing around the bottle. Nice. So the ingredients I listed, we listed there was matcha green tea, pineapple and jalapeno. But there is another nice ingredient that we use in all of our mead and that is our orange blossom honey. Orange blossom honey. Yeah. Straight out of straight out of Arizona. Yo. Yeah. Good old Dennis Arp there at Mountaintop Honey. Shout out to him and his hard work beekeeping. Man, I feel like it's

07:05
It's very romanticized as it should be, but it is hard work. I mean, that is a physical labor where you in the warehouse and picking up those giant buckets. I don't know. It's tough. Yeah. Weren't you just out there yesterday? I was out. Oh, well, we went out to our hive, which is one single hive. Right. And yes, I was sweating and complaining and I wasn't even lifting anything. Yeah. When it's over a hundred degrees and you got your suit on.

07:34
Yeah, yeah, it was 92 I think down with our hives and which is still it's it'll get hotter And it was I was just working the camera and I was still sweaty and yeah You don't want to be doing that very often. So he's out there in the low desert which can be over a hundred degrees Dealing with lifting those boxes checking them All that stuff. So anyway, those those little ladies do a lot of work But so does Dennis to get us his orange blossom honey into the bottle and to you

08:04
everybody appreciates that i know you do well says not carbonated but i got a little burples uh...

08:13
So can you guys describe kind of the, was there anything special about this, this process of, of creating this mead since it had three ingredients instead of usually, usually most of our things only have one additional ingredient. So this is mixing three of them up. How'd that go? So this was one that I had brought in as like a homebrew recipe. And I got kind of inspired from a juice smoothie that I got where it was pineapple and matcha.

08:43
I had figured, well, you know, trying to mix a couple different things, get some different profiles going, plus I love spice. Tried mixing some jalapeno in it, made one at home, and brought it in and figured out, hey, this is a great combination. Can we, you know, source these ingredients and figure out how to make it a full-scale batch?

09:05
So it was kind of the starting point of, hey, try this thing I made, you guys like it. Can we make it into a much bigger scale? Cool, Charlie, what were you thinking when he came to everybody with this thought? Oh, we all really liked it when he brought his homebrew in. It didn't last very long. I think we drank most of it real quick. So it definitely hit us all right.

09:32
Nice. Clint, what about you? You're a little bit of a spice fan, I think. Yes. He gave me a look like, duh. So what was your thought when you brought that homebrew in?

09:46
I thought it was pretty good. I was just kind of wondering like how he was, we were gonna clarify it later on mostly. But as soon as we got the actual homebrew in and I tasted it, I was like, use more. Yes, more please, more, more. Nice, cool. And so when you, did you make any other iterations of that besides matcha, pineapple and jalapeno? At home, you mean? Oh, I guess, yeah. I was thinking, did you bring in any to try here? But yeah, at home.

10:16
Nothing special with that one. I just made that first batch on a small scale to figure out if it was going to even work. I mean, especially with matcha that can be a pretty gunky powder if you're trying to dissolve it and it settles out to the bottom. Yeah, Charlie, in the brewing process, thinking about coming up with some kind of system to deal with that powder. How did that process of figuring that out go? We had recently kind of introduced a... We've got multiple stages of filter.

10:46
and we kind of introduced a new stage zero filter. Wow. It's a little secret of ours, I can't go too into it, but the stage zero helped us out quite a bit and it ended up going through just fine. Nice and the amount of matcha green tea that came through in the final product, Clint how's that to you?

11:09
Well, I was surprised how much flavor is still there. There's quite a bit of the original matcha flavor still there that actually works very well with the jalapeno. Nice. That's perfectly the answer, because that was my thought. I was like, well, if we introduced more filtration or stricter filtration, did it come through? But it sounds like it did. Yep. Yeah, and I think we only used half of the matcha that we bought, kind of to Charlie's point from the last episode, where we talked about how we incorporate these flavors.

11:39
and trying to start small, that way we don't overdo it. You can always add more, but you can't necessarily take it out once it's in there. And yeah, after that first taste test, we were like, wow, this is pretty much already where it needs to be. I don't think we need to add any more. Cool, so you nailed the matcha on that part with a little bit of a new technique and stuff. I'm interested in the jalapeno because, like you said, you can't take it back.

12:05
How did you guys introduce a spice? Cause when I drink this, and everyone probably has a different, you know, um, has a different tolerance interaction tolerance. Yeah. With this, when I drink this, I get jalapeno flavor, but I am not hit with like, I'm not like, Ooh, this is spicy, you know, kind of thing, which I mean, I'm anyone who knows of jalapeno, that's kind of what it is. It's more flavor than spice, but there is spice. And so was there any challenges to introducing?

12:35
both the spiciness of the jalapeno and the amount of jalapeno you needed to use. Was there any, like, I don't know, any special challenges with that? I don't know about challenges. I mean, when I did this at a homebrew scale, when I tried to incorporate these ingredients, I also want to make sure everything's sanitary going in there. So I just got a bunch of fresh pineapples and fresh jalapenos, cut them up and roasted them, just because I figured that's going to do, you know, a bit in flavor, bringing out some more complex character,

13:05
that it's sanitary. So when we did this in the full scale batch, same thing. I want to say I had something like 20 pounds to start with. Had to cut them all up, had to roast them. That took quite a while just going tray by tray in the oven to get them nice and charred. Put them in some freezer bags, froze them and brought them back in so that we could make sure that it was all sterile and ready to go and soaking them into our mead to get that flavor incorporated. It's just kind of a waiting game, checking on it every day to make sure

13:34
we've got that flavor that we want and it doesn't go too far. Yeah absolutely. Okay so you didn't add it all in at once, you didn't do like a ratio of the homebrew and just go for it, you added a little bit of the time Charlie? Yeah yeah just a little bit at a time and I think the roast was really key. It was right on point but to me that really just kind of mellowed out the jalapeno. You can still taste it, it's really prevalent but

14:02
you know, that roasting just brings forth a flavor that I wasn't expecting, you know? It's really good. Yeah, I think one of those off flavors that we always want to avoid using, like, fresh...

14:13
probably more vegetables than anything, is that bell pepper taste. Trying to avoid that. So obviously roasting it, it helps get some of that moisture out, get some of that off flavor so that you're not just having like a bell pepper drink. Yeah, yeah, that vegetative, almost kind of flavor to it. That's a great point. And I am ashamed to say, I didn't know that we roasted those jalapenos before putting them in. I need to- Brewer's secrets. I, yeah, not anymore. Yeah, so I could be using that as my description as well. So roasted jalapeno.

14:43
And then you know when you think jalapeno or any kind of pepper It is it's pretty natural to go with a fruit to pair it with that sweet with that spicy Was pineapple the instant thought and I guess this comes from your your homebrew Perez But was that the instant thought for us or did we kind of play in our minds with another another fruit? That was my instant thought. I mean, I've had plenty of you know, it's going to that commonality I see a lot of like hot sauces and a lot of combinations that already use that

15:13
So it's like if that's tried and true it works well people have already kind of made those blends and it works

15:20
You know, we've already got a hot mead. I don't think we needed to try to find like a ghost pepper or scorpion pepper or some bird's-eye pepper that needs to go in there because Yeah, just you know keeping it balanced I think that was always the struggle that I brought from home brewing was that usually when I make stuff I try to make it really weird so trying to bring it to a commercial level and figuring out what the balance is so that You know people want to drink more than just one glass of it before being like oh

15:49
too hot. I don't want anymore. Yep, I agree with that. I know there's there's what would you call them hotheads out there or something like that that you know I say like well it's not spicy enough for me or this isn't even spicy but yeah we're slinging it across the bar and across the state you know you can't you know our mango Reaper I think is spicy enough. In fact I think you brought in a cider that had and we won't name what it is or who it is but it

16:19
I'm trying to think of what the other fruit was. I want to say it was peach in there as well. You probably can't remember because you can't taste anything but once that spiciness. At least for me it was just pure capsaicin in a jar. Yeah, yeah. And so that's a cool experience and all, but we're trying to, yeah, like create a pleasurable experience over one glass or two or three. You order that at the bar and it's like, okay, now I don't want to have anything else because either my taste buds are ruined or I don't trust that anything else is going to, you know, work out taste-wise.

16:49
Yeah, what's worse is like anything else you have from that point on is just gonna taste like pepper because it's still in your mouth Yeah, yeah, yeah, it comes with a glass of milk or something Yeah, so the matcha green tea Was there ever a thought of a different green tea or was it always gonna be why why matcha? I guess is what I'm wondering

17:11
I think blend-wise it was just what I had started with. I guess we could have tried some different green teas and tried some brewing, but I thought it was just an easy way to get it in there. It's already powderized and ready to mix and ready to dissolve.

17:26
Powderized right? Yeah Yeah, just simplicity sake we were able to get it in a bulk size and you know, why break it if it's or is that the same way why fix it if it's not broken? There we go Yeah, why break it if it's not broken things break it's already broken fix broken break fixing things. Clint, over at the mead hall have you heard anything what are the reactions that you've heard to Elliott?

17:56
to the jalapeño have you have you kind of listened in to people at the bar talk about the spiciness level are there people that Are saying it's it's too much. It's too little. I mean considering Arizona most people when they tasted they're like, huh

18:09
Where's the spice? Yeah, so more people have kind of been saying it's on the... Whoa! Pardon me! Charlie reaching for the bottle. Reaching for mead. Yeah. Goes after it's like, brrk! Yeah. Yeah, let me fix it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's kind of hard to say where, you know, we get a lot of people that are traveling. Obviously we're like gateway to the Grand Canyon here where some people think ketchup is too spicy, so. Yeah, you get a lot of that sort of Midwestern person that like really cannot handle spice, so it's like...

18:39
We'll be cautious. Yeah.

18:43
Yep, I'm right there. That's me too. I mean I enjoy like experiencing some of the spicy and but like yeah I definitely we went to a hot chicken place yesterday on our way home and they had the the zero on there and I ordered that so I'm right there but but this we say don't fear the reaper but definitely don't fear this it it really is jalapeno flavor and not spice for sure. It's pretty mellow. Yeah yeah but the flavors and the aroma the aroma that was the first thing when you

19:13
There's something there's a pepper in here And so I wonder if that maybe scares people at first and then they take that drink they're like, oh never mind Yeah, cool. So looking at the label which I don't have in front of me, but the bottle is over there We have again. It's our dragon tea series. So We have our our in-house not in-house our our resident. No, he's not a resident either. He's actually out of state He's in Missouri? Iowa. Oh, Iowa. Okay, but you know him from Missouri. Yep. Okay, so

19:43
And what was his moniker? Benjamin Black. Benjamin Black, yes. Does all of our labels and he created another banger with this one, our second in the series with Elliott. And he used the 70s cartoon Elliott for this one. Yeah, I figured it was a tough choice between the two, but the CG, like later Elliott, was just...

20:08
little bland as far as dragons go. It just kind of looked like every other dragon. Whereas the 70s version one, like very cartoony of course.

20:21
just kind of looks dumb and happy. Way more recognizable. Someone sees that they're more likely to know where it comes from. They see the 2010s version and they're like, I don't know what that is. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. It is. He's got that big old schnoz and the big old pink fluffy hair on this one. And yeah, yeah. Kind of doofy. I do remember in the movie, uh, he was, he was super kind and friendly, but I remember when someone messed with Pete in one of the scenes, like he, he had it out.

20:51
He just I don't remember if he like burned down the building or something But he was very protective and very fierce and I think that kind of goes with this this me too It's it's got it's very friendly and very gentle, but it does have that jalapeno on there With a little bit a little bit of spiciness to it. So it kind of fits that dragon was that I don't know if it Was at all but was that a thought when coming up with them? Yeah, you know it all it all comes together Yeah, it's a it's a unique mead and he's a unique character

21:21
It makes me want to go try to find that. I wonder if you can even see that movie anymore like streaming wise or if you have to get those I'm reminded of those plastic clam shells with the VHS's in them that were like super sharp around the edge Disney Plus Disney Plus. Oh, yeah, Disney Plus has them both. There we go right there Disney Plus So if anyone wants to pay for my subscription just send me the information at nick at drin

21:50
Cool. Anything else about Elliott, about this series, the matcha green tea pineapple jalapeno? It's one that I'd say normally if I went someplace and...

22:01
saw a drink with jalapeno in it. I love eating jalapenos, but I don't know if I would go for a drink right off the bat, but this is one that was really surprising to me on how much I like it. Nice, nice. Well, I think everybody likes it because it is going pretty fast. It had a slower start because Falcor overlapped it, I think, the initial one. So there was two Dragon Teas

22:31
to this anytime in the near present around June, July 2023 and you want this you might want to grab it now before it is gone. Gotta catch them all right? Gotta catch them all, that's right and we will have four in the series so honestly if you've got a Falkor grab an Elliott and then collect all four that would be pretty cool I know I'm doing that. So did you guys get your bottles? I did they're gonna look nice all four of them on a shelf next to each other. Right? Yeah, absolutely.

23:01
be so rad, so cool. Alright cool, well thanks again for joining me on the Meadcast guys, it's always a pleasure to have the people who have their actual like you know myths in the process and hear about the stories behind the Meads and will you guys come back for our third release?

23:21
was like maybe like me oh man all right well while I sit here and try to convince them to come back for the number three and number four series thank you again for joining us on the Drinking Horn Meadcast cast

23:36
And as usual, please just word of mouth is the best way to get this mead cast out if you enjoyed it or you know someone who loves bees, mead, or cool Viking stuff. Let them know about the mead cast and spread the word so we can spread the awesome word of mead to everybody. And yeah, that's it. Well, cheers guys. Thank you so much. Oh, these are all available online, right?

23:57
That is right. Yes. Thank you for reminding me. Well, Falkor's not. True, that one's out. Yeah, but if you are out of state in one of our states, I think we're at around 38 states now, we distribute to go online drinkinghornmeadery.com and grab some of these and some of our other, I don't know, what 20 different flavors that we have available. And they make great gifts. It ages perfectly well, so you can grab them now and save them for later.

24:25
Make sure you grab them, thank you Perez, online at the MeadHall Hall or at select bottle shops around the state. And with that, Skål! Skål!