5-29-18 Tonight we're getting with Billy Beltz, award-winning mead maker.
Billy Beltz is the Co-Founder of Lost Cause Meadery located in in San Diego, CA. Billy and his wife Suzanna opened the doors to Lost Cause in November of 2017. After only six months of being open they have already amassed several national awards for their meads including medals at the Mazer Cup International, the San Diego International Beer Competition, and the CA State Fair Wine Competition.

Prior to opening the meadery Billy was an award-winning home mead maker with over 34 medals for his mead including four Mazer Cup awards. He also had his research on ale yeast strains for mead making published in American Mead Maker and Zymurgy, and is a BJCP Certified Mead Judge.

Lost Cause takes pride in crafting delicious, complex and slightly carbonated meads that showcase unique honey varietals and a passion for experimentation. The meadery is located in a shared space with a cidery (Serpentine Cider) and a scratch kitchen (The Good Seed Food Co.).



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Show links and notes
Billy had a couple questions he asked in the AMMA group before the show. Here are the questions and what people had to say:

What, if anything, is or should be sacred in mead making? (think use of certain ingredients or processes to make mead, is there anything you feel you'll never do, or does it just matter what the final product tastes like)

Meads made for for mass appeal (sales) vs competitions (win awards) vs hype/ratings (like Untappd). Are these often the same or different meads? Why or why not?

Carvin Wilson:  

1 – Beside using a certain percentage of honey, I feel nothing should be sacred. You should not limit your palate, recipe design, or exploration based upon what others say. Exploration is one of the main components to innovation, so break rules and never stop asking what if or why.
Item 2 - It’s nice when a mead can cover all three categories, but from talking with a lot of professional mead makers it seems what sells is not always what wins awards or carries a lot of hype. As a business owner, it’s important to keep your target audience in mind and that’s not always judges or hype buyers.  
One of the reason I think a mead that sells well does not do good in competitions is it does not fit nicely into style guidelines. Another reason is judging will always be subjective, you must have a good mead on the right day in front on the right judges.  With a hype mead, not only do you need a solid mead, but you really need to have your social media and fan base game going strong to pull something of that nature off. There are a lot of meaderies making solid mead, but they are not paying attention to the social media aspect; thinking that their mead is good enough on it’s on to get hype.


Alex Gonzalez:

#2 - I think there is a lot of gray area there, and most of the time at least 2 of those will over lap. I personally pull from all 3 categories, though "mass appeal" & "untapped rating" are hard to separate for reasons that Sean mentioned. I pull inspiration locally from our surroundings, which includes produce/honey, cultural (both the communities and my own), as well as the local brewing community. What works and sells locally may very well be a mead in the low to mid-80s at Mazer,