Mead: Excellence and Quality Assurance is lining up to be a most outstanding and educational program to be held this coming June 1-4, 2023.

Join the Honey and Pollination Center, the Mead Institute, faculty from UC Davis's Departments of Food Science and Technology and Viticulture and Enology, as well as experts in their chosen fields.

Interactive sessions will guide you through tastings and evaluations. Meadmakers will discuss their process from idea through initial testing and final ingredient selection before things ever get to the bottle. Attendees will play ‘guess the honey’ when tasting meads. Attendees will ‘be the judge’ when it comes to evaluation.

This four-day short course is designed to educate mead makers to achieve excellence by ensuring quality assurance at each step, from ingredient sourcing, through processing, to evaluation. This course is created in partnership with the recently formed Mead Institute. Presenters include Ken Schramm, Billy Beltz, Carvin Wilson, Pete Bakulic, Ray Daniels, Linda Bisson, Amina Harris, Glen Fox and many others. Once finalized, the full agenda will be posted for your perusal – but don’t wait too long.

Thursday evening opens with a panel on excellence in the world of food and beverage moderated by mead maker and author, Ken Schramm, the stage will be set for how each mead maker can up their game and help bring mead onto a world class stage.  Panelists include Ray Daniels, creator of the Cicerone program, Dr. Andrew Waterhouse, Professor of chemistry in the Department of Viticulture and Enology and others to be finalized.

Friday attendees will learn all about honey – sensory evaluation, sourcing, production and testing.

Saturday is ingredient day with a focus on fruit with Ken Schramm, Yeast with Dr. Linda Bisson and The Importance of Water with Dr. Glen Fox, both of the Food Science and Technology Department. Billy Beltz will discuss ‘Mead out of the Box’ including how he gets an idea, sources ingredients, runs bench trials and finally gets very excited about his finished product. Along the way, attendees will be tasting and discussing meads from a critical standpoint.

Sunday is a grand culmination with a unique understanding of excellence by tasting fine wine, great beer and outstanding distillates. Ray Daniels will share his expertise and insights into how and why he established the Cicerone program to elevate the understanding of beer and how best to pair it, Other presentations will follow this lead talking about communication, service, packaging and wrapping up with a ‘Mead Judging Experience’ in which trained judges and attendees will taste and discuss some of the best meads available.

Registration: Early Bee Special of $1099 will go up to $1500 on March 20th.