Welcome to the July eighteenth edition of Beer in Front. I'm your host,
Dave's Allatorus and Beer in Front is a proud member of the Odd Pods Media
Network. Maybe I should call this show Mead in Front because on this episode
I talked to Peter Schultz. He's one of the owners over at Second City
Metery. They're located on Elston Avenue in Chicago. Going into this, I
did not know a lot about Mead. I've had it before, and if
you look on untapped, like some of the highest rated check ins that they
have are for Mead, so I know there's a good following. People really
love it, but I didn't know a lot about it. So I would
drive by and see this really cool logo on my way to work and I'm
like, what's that? And then I saw a sign it's a meterary.
So I reached out to them and Peter happily invited me over and we discussed
Mead, So stay tuned for that. I also later on in the show
had one that I picked up there and sampled that. So if you're looking
for something a little different, I would suggest Mead because I thought that was
excellent over on YouTube I've put out a new series called Chicago Eating. I
don't know how often I'm going to update it, but I'm going to have
periodically some great spots in Chicago. I'll talk about the food that they have
there. So I put one out last week from the Hotdog Stand, but
Daki's in Chicago and had their fabulous Korean steak bowl. So if you follow
me from the city, head over and subscribe over on YouTube and you could
catch It's all going to be under the Beer in Front banner. I'm not
making multiple channels, but it'll all be under the Beer in Front page there.
But I'll have a Chicago Eating segment that's going to come out from time
to time over there. I want to thank everyone that supports the show over
on Patreon. If you're interested in helping out, you could go to patreon
dot com slash Beer in Front for more details. I also want to thank
everyone that listens to this show every week or watches the videos over on various
social media accounts. It means a lot, so I thank you as well.
I also mentioned on the show maybe a month or so ago that I
was kicking around the idea of doing like a spinoff podcast from time to time,
and I had one all set to go on the Oakland A's and their
impending move, and I had a good portion of it written and ready to
go. But now there's like a last minute effort from the mayor to try
to save the team. So I don't know if that's the show is going
to be coming out anytime soon. I mean, hopefully it doesn't, because
I want the A's to stay in Oakland, but I think it's funny.
I put out cover art and everything. I solicited feedback, like which of
these do you like better? I wrote a good portion of this I was
getting ready to record, and then the mayor just throws a wrench into the
whole plan. So hopefully I don't need to record this episode, and I'll
come up with another topic, all right. Welcome Back Meat is a beverage
that has been around for thousands of years. That's right, thousands. It's
an alcoholic beverage made by Fermenting honey find many meads, topping the list of
the highest rated check ins on Untapped. Second City Metery is located at forty
four sixty five North Elston Avenue in the Mayfair neighborhood of Chicago and it is
the place to go to for mead in Chicago. Today, I'm talking to
Peter Schultz from Second City. Peter, thanks for coming out, man,
I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. This is awesome. I
first found you driving down Elston and seeing that phenomenal logo the signpace for itself.
Yeah, that has to be probably maybe up with Maplewood is the top
logos in beer and beverage in Chicago. What a great logo? Did you
come up with that? So I came up with the Chicago flag with bees
instead of stars, and then my previous graphic designer came up with the drip
logo as we call it. Okay, she was a friend of mine from
college, super super talented, so much so she got a promotion at her
day job and it doesn't help with us anymore, but she helped us get
off the ground, and we're really appreciative. Yeah, I saw when I
walked in, I saw a hat out front. I'll have to be buying
that on my way out. As the logos killer. You'll see that on
an upcoming video. But or drive down Elston Avenue and stop in yourself.
Can you tell us about second city mead read sure, Sure, So I
got into mead. My wife and I were dating in undergrad at UIC here
in Chicago. We'd go up to Haymarker for day night. She found out
pretty quickly she wasn't into beer, but she loved their food and they offer
you know, wine cocktails, and eventually she tries a mead. Big red
lights are going off in her head like this is it, this is the
thing for me. So back in twenty twenty fourteen, there's not a lot
of meat around, like Wild Blossom had been in Chicago, and like Shrams
had just opened towards the end of twenty thirteen. So we start driving around
the Midwest, spending way too much money on mead for twenty three and twenty
four year olds. So then I start making it at home in order to
you know, save money and thinking it will be easy. Both of those
things are not true. But I found out I really enjoyed fermentation, and
how awful the batches were really motivated me to get better at it. Back
in the twenty thirteen twenty fourteen, there wasn't this huge online database of information,
so I basically had Ken Schram's book the complete meadmaker, and I had
trial and error, and so about eighteen months into brewing, I finally make
a decent one and that's when things really got exciting. From So, the
first good batch was in twenty fifteen. In twenty sixteen, we start entering
competitions, getting really good feedback, a couple of medals, but mostly for
the feedback. Twenty seventeen we start actually thinking could this be a business?
Twenty eighteen we incorporate the business. Twenty nineteen we signed on our location.
Twenty we start brewing. Something else happens in twenty twenty, the complicated things,
and then Black Friday of twenty twenty one we finally opened our doors.
Okay, cool, Like you've mentioned you started it from home. How much
different is it like? Then? Brewing a beer is a brown, very
very different. So we don't boil any water, all right. Brewing takes
a week for mead, where for beer it's more like one day. But
there's no day that's as intense as a beer brewing daylight. So you do
your yeast starter, give that twenty four hours brew day or what I just
call pitch day. Yeah, you just mix your fruit, honey water.
If you're gonna use water for that recipe and pitch your yeast and then you
basically just have to punch down fruit caps for the next six days. So
it's a little more long than of making a beer, but it's not quite
as intense. Okay, do you like use normal brewers yacht like Omega or
is it like? Are there special mead yeast you'd use? So when we
started, we use seventy one B, which is a white wine yeast.
Now we use DD ten, which is kind of a hybrid mead wine champagneys.
So I like that one because it's really good at low pH we don't
really get stalled batches, which is really important. Yeah, is since it's
made with honey? Is this something for people with gluten apergies? Can they
enjoy meat without any problem? Okay? All of our recipes are gluten free,
with the only exception of barrel aged meads. Okay, cool, so
yeah, anyone can enjoy it. Well, we're both looking at some mead
here, so why don't we try this? And can you tell us about
the mead we're trying? So this is somewhere in the City's pineapple, peach
and coconut and so all of those are added post fermentation. Pineapple really messes
with your pH so I don't want to get that in while the easts are
doing its thing. And peaches a delicate flavor that can get blown off if
you throw it into primary. So cheapest, Yeah, you really get for
me, I get the peach right up front and the aroma peach on the
nose, juicy pineapple, smooth coconut on the end. Yeah, this is
the first one I had About a month ago. I went to Friday Night
Lights and they have them around the city in the summer, and the first
one was outside Wrigley Field and I saw you there, so I'm like,
okay, I'm looking at you know, the different offerings. I'm like,
let me try this one. And I was hooked. This one's excellent.
I'm really happy like it. You have a lot of stuff on tap and
some in bottles. What are some of the other different varieties or styles of
meat that you have? Sure? Sure, we really specialize in dark berry,
sweet fruit forward meat. Black currants are big for us. I have
recently, within the past twelve months, really got enamored with a fruit called
honey berries, which comes from honeysuckle plants. They're just so rich and dark
and complex and they're really tart, so they pay really well with honey on
top of that, you know your basic vanilla's, cinnamon, maple, like
all those are really fun to work with as well. Yeah, we've started
incorporating more barrels, started doing gin barrels, which I have found an affinity
for. So yeah, check us out a phobab. Yeah, there's as
we're talking, there's a ton of barrels behind me. I would like jealous
walking in like, oh, yeah, those are good. You're Do you
have a base recipe that you use for meat and then add all of the
flavors the fruits or does it vary between the honey you use and the fruits.
Sure? So, really we only have a base for our sessions.
Our sessions are all fruited post ferment. Some of our higher strength ones are
doing post ferment, a lot of them are done free ferment. It's interesting
how a raspberry ferment meat compared to a honey ferment and then raspberry after we'll
taste so so different, And it's easier to convince a wine drinker to drink
a raspberry fermented meat because it's going to come off more like wine that they're
used to, but it'll still be unique enough that if you don't like wine,
it won't come off as off putting. Okay, so we do almost
all of our dark berry fruit. Actually, now that I think about it,
every berry is primary fermented and it's only some tropical fruits that we do
post ferment. You mentioned before you have sessions and also barrel age, so
it seems like you have something for every little bit out there. Absolutely.
How long do you age the barrel age? One I have found cutting corners
on barrel aging does it never helps. So the shortest barrel age we've ever
releases ten and a half months. Just this past year, we released a
thirteen month meade that I thought was fantastic. Within the next month, we'll
be releasing our first ever double barrel mead I'm very excited about. So that's
been in various barrels for eighteen months, so that'll be a lot of fun.
We start a Solera project this year that I plan on going for five
years or longer, so that'll be a lot of fun. We're really just
scratching the surface as far as our own data points for barrel aging, but
generally patients pays. Yeah, I mean yeah, there's definitely mentioned. There's
no way you could cut corners right aging something is just impossible to do.
Absolutely, let's have another sit here. The honey that you use and the
fruits are any of that, like locally sourced or from the Midwest. Absolutely,
So we get sixty five percent of our honey from Michigan and apple farm
called Schweiler's. Okay, we have thirty percent of our honey from Hawaii Wakli
honey in Hawaii, and then the other five percent is kind of from all
over the world. There's a guy named Brian Warner who's started the World Honey
Collective. So he'll go to like third world countries and set up like apiaries
and have local people work the apiaries and then he buys honey from them and
then we can start using some of that honey. So we've gotten honey from
Chile, from Ethiopia, from Wahaca, Mexico. So it's been really fun
to taste honey from around the world. Any from the guys at Park outside
of the Chicago Park District parks yet not yet. Chicago honey is very expensive
and yes, how much how much honey like pounds wise goes into a typical
you know, batch of meat. Sure, for sessions it's about one and
a half pounds per gallon, and then for the other stuff it can be
up to five or six if we want either really highbb really sweet. We're
both. So it depends on what the final products. But I mean,
there's kind of no wrong answer. I guess six would be the max.
We've never gone over six. Okay, has there been i mean late Leason's
a pandemic, there's been supply change issues. Has that affected you at all?
Absolutely? Labels are more expensive, quarks are more expensive. It's been
a lot of packaging material like glass bottles have been a huge issue for us
to source. Yeah, So, as you can see, I'm almost like
two full palettes back there because when we do find a decent deal, we
have to stock up because we never know when that deal is going to come
around again and everything is in bottles or nothing that's can not At this moment,
I want to start fine tuning our sessions and then once I have some
recipes I'm really really happy with, Well, we'll go down the canning route
because most of the needs are the ones that I looked at on your website.
There are a lot higher in ab extent of beers. So you're not
going to put a fourteen percent. You could, but you're not going to
put a fourteen percenter and can right right? It would It would be an
interesting signal to customers because at the moment for mead, what sells it is
clear glass showing you the color of what you're drinking. Okay, and there's
no with was or you don't use hops so you don't have any issues with
skunking or anything like that in a clear glass correct talking, What was the
first mead that you had that was like, oh wow, this is for
me, this is what I wanted. You remember the first brand or style
that really like this is it? Sure? So the first meat I ever
had was Zombie Killer from ben Nectar, and I thought it was very good,
but it wasn't quite enough for me to be like this is my future.
Yeah. The statement from Trams it was the one all right where I
was like, holy cow, I didn't know something could taste like this.
I need to try more of these. Yeah, So that the statement was
probably my lightbulb mead. You know, we're in your back office here recording
this, and I see a lot of local beers. Are you a beer
person? Absolutely, I've been in the craft beer since twenty eleven. Okay,
so yes, are you have any thoughts or plans on maybe doing a
beer down the road or like even something like you know, you talk about
Haymarket before they have that Harold eighty three Honey Yale, Like, maybe a
beer with Honey. I'm more than happy to collaborate with other brewers around the
city. We currently are working with Tyler from Dunier Fermenta Okay to do some
cold ferments because that's kind of already what he does. Yeah, so it's
kind of a natural fit to do some collabs with him. As far as
making my own beer, Chicago has two hundred breweries. They're all amazing.
I don't need to put my hat in that ring. Yeah there's I mean,
even in the area you're in now, you could go down to Old
Irving, ok you could walk to and yep, you know others Old Irving,
JBF, Winner, Alarmist, GABF. I don't need to compete even
a little further down Aras is one some gcpfs too. Yeah, absolutely,
so Yeah, this this area. We're blessed to be an alcohols rinker.
Yes, yeah, it's a great area. There's beer geeks out there.
What's the difference between a mead enthusiast and a beer geek nerd enthusiast. There's
a lot fewer of them, Yeah, at least at the moment. Yeah,
And a lot of the like mead enthusiasts right now are homebrewers. Okay,
so that's some of my favorite customers to have because we'll just start talking
about yeast and about fitsourcing and like, those are fun conversations for me.
Yeah, mead homebrewers really are pushing the envelope. And somebody bringing a super
savory mead. He listed off like a dozen spices that were in it,
things I would have never thought to use. So it's always fun to try
stuff that I would have never thought to do, and maybe that specifically wouldn't
be commercially viable, but there's always bits you can take. Yeah, you
mentioned like before we started recording and you had a D and D event here
the other night. Do you have other types of like meat people can come
in and do like bottle shares or what do you have else here? So
as far as bottle shares go, we kind of do, kind of don't.
If someone brings in something to share, I'll open something or pull something
from a tank to share back with them, but I don't advertise bottle shares
per se. We do have a Bottle Club membership and we have two parties
a year, one in April and one in November, and I allow people
to bring bottles to that if they want to share. As far as D
and D goes, we do play every Thursday, and I was looking for
new people there. You go Thursday nights, head over to forty four sixty
five North Elston. What about the membership? What you have like a yearly
sign up for the members so it runs calendar year, So normally around October
November we start taking names in our tap room. Right now we have just
short of one hundred Bottle Club members, So how many new people we add
depends on how many people were new and they given year. Yeah, one
thing I do want to start doing, so that I guess I should say
that Bottle Club membership is very manual, where I email everyone, they email
me back with their order, and then we get all of that situated.
I also want to start a side bottle club. That's more like if you
went to NAPA and signed up at a winery where they just ship you something
quarterly. And it's a lot less labor intensive for the consumer really because it's
you know, a couple of emails a month that they need to be responding
to and saying on top of pickups. And I do want to kind of
streamline that for some people that like mead but aren't your top you know,
yeah, they don't want to they might not be doing a few bottles a
month exactly. Yeah, now all of the bottles, I'm looking at the
bottle here, that is what three fives? Do all of the bottles come
out in three seventy five? Yes, so right now we do all three
seven fives. We do some magnums just for fun. I've done like six
of those ever Oka, but no. Three seven five, thanks to Shrams,
has kind of become the ustry standard, and I'm here for it.
I like how it looks. It's not that much like if it was a
seven fifty. That's kind of a lot like you couldn't split that between two
people. You could, But once you open a bottle of mead is there
a time frame where you have to finish it. Do you have to finish
it within a day or so? So if you're just throwing the corkback in
it, I'd recommend fridge and don't keep it more than a week. Okay.
If you have these beautiful vacuum sealers, yeah, you can go up
to three months. Okay, still recommend refrigerating it. But sucking all the
oxygen out really really helps the longevity of an open bottle since the alcohol percentage
is a lot higher when someone comes to the hive here, what's like the
normal serving side? So we do two ounce pores and five ounce pores.
We do flights, which are four two ounce pores. So that's I mean
ninety percent of customers get flights. Okay, do you have anything new coming
down the road that you're excited about? Any new men? Oh? Yeah,
like a lot thing. I've got enough on this battery and chip here.
All right, let's hear it. I really want to start hitting more
banana meds. I really like banana meds. We have a strawberry banana cocoa
nib, like a banana split me that we did with a colab with hacks
metery they're out of Wisconsin. Then we have a banana cinnamon maple vanilla almost
like banana pancake cold that I'm super super excited about coming out here soon.
Beyond that, passion fruit has been a really fun ingredient. So we've got
a black Current raspberry passion fruity and in addition, half of that batch is
currently in a gin barrel and that will be entered into fabab this year.
Oh yeah, so that will be fun. I love gin barrel stuff.
It's so good. I know, like I think the guy I'll had some
stuff out before, and another couple of local craft places did gin age stuff
that I just thought was phenomenal. So I'm looking forward to trying that.
But yeah, more filling, more barrels, more passion fruit, more banana.
Sechuan peppercorn is like a personal love of mine. There's that numbing sensation,
so we're gonna incorporate that in some more recipes, while at the same
time we'll keep doing our black currents our raspberries. We're not going to get
away from the things our consumers like just because we want to do these really
edgy Yeah, do you have one that's like you would consider your flagship.
That's the go to for a lot of people. So it's called Existence is
pain because Black Current in Vanilla we really see for the first time in twenty
twenty and the name just kind of made sense. And then we do in
April this year we did our first ever Existence Day, so we had a
bunch of variants of it, which was a lot of fun. But I'd
say that's probably our flagship. Okay, now the hive here, you don't
serve food. Can people bring in their own food? Absolutely? Biof and
we have tons of recommendations if okay, I'm sure what's in the area.
You ever have like food trucks to come by? Because you're only open Thursday
through Sunday, correct, just Thursday to Saturday, Thursday through Saturday. Yeah,
No, we haven't worked with food trucks yet. Not to say that
I never would. It just hasn't come up at this point. Well as
blocking the street and stuff might be an issue on its having a busy street.
Yeah, Peter, I thank you so much. This has been a
lot of fun learning about Mead. I really appreciate it. Anything else you
want to tell people about Second City, you know, can they find you
on the internet. Where can they find you online? Any socials, So
we've got Instagram and Facebook. We can ship to forty two different states through
Veno Shipper, which is you can find that through our website, so if
you're not in the Chicagoland area, you can get some of our products that
way. We're at as many festivals as I can feasibly be at, so
keep a lookout for us the summer's festival season. Do you distribute anywhere else?
Can like people go to a Binny's or a promiscuous and pick you up
there. So in the city we don't too much because a lot of people
just come to the tap room. We're in a handful of stores in the
suburbs. Orange and Grew Flight Beer and now Beer Seller Beer on the Wall,
Arlington Heights. We're in a handful of stores on the burbs Excellent.
We'll definitely check them out. If it's anything like the one that I'm having
right now, you're gonna lie I, So please head over to Second City
Metery. They're at forty four sixty five North Elston Avenue in the city.
The closest major busy street is Montrose, so figure if you could get to
Montrose and Elston. You can get here, Peter, Thank you again,
sir, thank you, hey Man, ask me Kevin Smith. Everybody knows
at the root of any good relationship, any relationship worth anything, is the
only thing that matters between two people. And I'm talking about television. That's
right. That's why you should listen to Married with Television Man, which is
a podcast by my friends Shannon and Jamie. I call it kettis about movies
and TV that they have loved for decades. Man. You listen at Married
with tv dot com or anywhere you get your podcasts. They are proud members
of the Odd Pods Media Network. Man. Married with Television. All right,
I'm going to have another mead right now from Second City Metery. This
one is called Dale. This is a traditional mead that's semi sweet, and
it's a cork, so I can't give you the fancy can't open sound,
but I'm going to try to open this cork. Here smells very nice.
I really like the aroma. Here smells just sweet, but it smells really
really good. That's delicious. Like this has nothing else in it, Like
you're not getting some of the fruits that you know we talked about earlier.
I just wanted to try something that was more on the traditional side. But
this is I think really good. I enjoy this one. You could pick
it up at Second City Metery. It's excellent. The couple that I had
now, the one that I had when we were talking earlier. If you
follow me on YouTube, I did a review of another one that I had
there and this. So this is three different meads that I've had from them.
They're all really good. If you're looking for something different outside of beer,
you want to change it up a bit, I would suggest mead,
and please head over to Second City Metery. All right, that's going to
wrap things up for this week's edition of Beer in Front. I thank you
very much for listening. The person that won the Beer in Front T shirt,
you'll be getting it out this week. The person emailed me and said
I'd rather stay anonymous. I'm going to respect their wishes, but that T
shirt will be on its way to you this week. I have a couple
left. I have one that's in gray, which is an extra large,
and a black medium. So if you're interested, you need to get a
hold of me. Dave at beer in Front dot com. I'll get one
out to you. Figure twenty bucks, we'll call it even that. I'll
cover the cost of the shirt and the shipping. But yeah, if you're
an extra larger medium and you'd like a beer in front T shirt, by
all means, email me or get a hold of me on socials and I
will get one out to you. Next week going to be a good show.
I have Pops on Hops, Barry and Abigail. They're gonna come on.
We're gonna talk about their podcast. We're gonna have some great beers from
Chicago, beers from Florida that Barry sent out to me. And then I'm
gonna be on their show that's gonna come out a little bit after that,
and we're going to talk about one of my favorite bands, the Smithereen.
So stay tuned for that next week. You're saying yourself, Dave, where's
the beer in? You forgot a segment? No, there really wasn't much
to report after the whole Anchor brewing news that came out last week, so
there was really nothing to talk about on the news front. So but I
want to think again, Second City Meterary that was really fun. You need
to go check them out. If you want something that's different to change a
pace besides beer, I would recommend Second City Meterary. All Right, everyone,
have a good week. I will see you next week. And remember
sometimes the beer in front of you is the best one yet. All Right,
we'll talk to you next week.