The Blackberry Maple Mead is a semi-sweet seasonal offering from Sap House Meadery. Sap House is a New Hampshire meadery that takes a lot of pride in the careful craft of their beverages. Their lineup includes many unique flavors and ingredients, a lot of which use maple, including a peach maple and hopped blueberry maple. They explain their Blackberry Maple like this:
Made with local, native blackberries. Aged with Hungarian oak, giving this mead brilliant notes of vanilla, roasted coffee and light black pepper characters.
It has a wonderful light mahogany color – deep tone yet still translucent. The aroma isn’t super powerful, though oak and berry notes come through on the top with milder undertones of floral honey and maple. This is how it drinks as well – toasted woody rustic blackberry upfront – bringing to mind an real old growth blackberry patch with thick gnarly plants.
There is a little maple that comes through as well, but not much of the delicate honey flavors. Those seem to get overtaken by the sharpness from the alcohol. Though their website has this mead coming in at 14% ABV, the bottle says 18%. Which I think makes a big difference in the aroma and taste profiles of this mead.
Coming in at around $20 for a 375ml bottle, it is definitely worth the try due to its uniqueness in the marketplace – but its probably not one I’ll be going back to. Their Vanilla Bean Mead was much more enjoyable.
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