Bah HoneyBug Mulled / Spiced Mead

We knew we wanted to make a spiced mead for the holidays. What we didn’t know is how popular it would be.

We started by interrogating our neighbor to extract her German family’s secret “gluhwein” recipe. It turns out it wasn’t a secret at all and we spent all that money on torture devices for nothing.

Once we procured the not-so-secret blend of spices we set out to adapt the recipe for use with a traditional mead instead of the red wine it would normally be made with. We performed several experiments with different proportions of spices, orange juice, cranberry juice, orange peel, etc until we found the perfect combination. I looked up to the sky and let out my best mad scientist laugh for I knew we had something special.

Then in not-so-mad-scientist fashion we waited for the government to approve our secret recipe. Then we waited some more. I bet they were making it for themselves to see how it tasted and forgot to approve our formula. I had originally come up with a name that nobody liked, so I changed the name on the label to “BAH HUMBUG” and sent it to “the committee” who said it was better. How can it be better when I was kidding/pouting about them not liking the other name? I decided to change it a bit and Humbug became Honeybug. I slapped a candy cane and santa hat on the bee and called it a day.

We made small batch because I wanted to “ensure it was gone before the end of the year” (this was at the beginning of November). We sold half of it in 2 days. I’m no mathematician but even I knew that it wasn’t going to last 2 months. We quickly started spicing up a 2nd batch and had it ready just in time. Even that proved to be insufficient. It was completely gone a couple days into December. It was just too damn tasty when warmed up. Everybody knew, even if they were buying it at the farmer’s market where we weren’t doing samples.
The worst part is we didn’t even stash any bottles for ourselves. It was just gone. None left.

Next time we’ll make a 4x or 8x bigger batch, and have it ready to sell in October instead. If we don’t sell it all by the end of December? It’ll taste just as good in January, especially if it’s cold. I have often said “I’ll drink it myself if nobody wants it!” In this case that won’t happen, but hopefully I’m smart enough to save a personal stash next time.

In typical evil genius style, we did get the neighbor to buy some of the finished product though. MWUHAHAHA!