5-7-24 Christopher Clarke – Four Fires Meadery in Maumee, Ohio

5-7-24 Tonight at 9PM ET we will be talking with Christopher Clarke, Owner/Meadmaker at Four Fires Meadery and Head Brewer at HEAVY Beer Co. in Toledo, Ohio.  Chris got into making mead after first getting into homebrewing.  In late 2014  he took up homebrewing, a short half a year after first getting into craft beer. His brewing buddy at the time, Mack Garton, and he would brew every single Monday for a year and a half, and somewhere halfway through that they made their first meads. In the next few months he would meet a new friend group and eventually went in on a mead together. Of that group, 4 of them continued further and began making meads as a collective, to share amongst the group as a whole. The 4, Andrew Lynch, Athreya Rajan, Josh Kirk, and Chris would go on to form Four Fires Meadery! In 2015, Chris had his first mead, B. Nektar’s Episode 13, and was in love. He jumped in and made his first mead just a month later. That same year, he met the other Four Fires guys at a local craft hideout called the Local. They kept meeting at Chris’s place, and continued their confederation of mead makers who wanted to create a meadery. Their first group project that year was Hail Satin. In 2016, they made meads, and homebrew beers, and enter contests, taking some awards and started forming the base business plan, and reaching out to angel investors, and worked on looking for a location.  Chris’s enjoyment of craft beer, and meads intertwined with the fun he was having homebrewing, and eventually professionally brewing, seemed to have been accelerants for one another, so in the time between making his first mead, the meadery opening, and now, a LOT has changed.  In 2017, Chris was hired as a production brewer at Maumee Bay Brewing Co. with the intent of revitalizing the portfolio. Later that year, Four Fires signed a lease on their building, and work began immediately on converting the space into a production facility. And the first mead found its way into the tanks in early 2018. As they neared their first release, Four Fires gained visibility amongst mead lovers with them getting some of their pre-production mead out there for people to try.  Join us to check in with Chris and see what Four Fires is up to! This player will show the most recent show, and when we're live, will play the live feed. If you are calling in, please turn off the player sound, so we don't get feedback.[break] Sponsor: Honnibrook Craft Meadery. Rated the very best winery in Colorado! Visit our state-of-the-art meadery and tasting room south of downtown Castle Rock, Colorado, in a converted man cave. Mention the Got Mead Podcast this month for a free draft taster!  Google H-O-N-N-I Brook for hours and directions. They love visitors!  www.honnibrook.com If you want to ask your mead making questions, you can call us at 803-443-MEAD (6323) or send us a question via email, or via Twitter @realGotMead and we'll tackle it online! 9PM EDT/6PM PDT Join us on live chat during the show Upcoming Shows May 21 - Minnesota Mead Mafia Show links and notes Let There Be Melomels by Rob Ratliff The Big Book of Mead Recipes by Rob Ratliff Let There Be Session Meads by Rob Ratliff Monin liqeuer concentrates Upcoming Events May 9 - Kingview Mead and Winery, Mt. Lebanon, PA - Good Brother Earl live music May 11 - Hickory Tree Farms Apiaries, Kent City, MI - Mead Make and Take class May 11 - Maniacal Mead Company, Ypsilanti, MI - Wax Kings / Echo labs light industries presents Krystal Palace electronic event May 11 - Bløm Mead and Cider, Ann Arbor, MI - 6th Birthday Party! May 11 - Four Brothers Mead, Festus, MO - saint chuck live May 12 - Mikkeller Beer Festival at Warpigs Brewpub,  Copenhagen, Denmark - Chicken Maple Brunch and Mead Pairing May 12 - Artifice Ales and Meadery, Manheim, PA - Session 2: Mothers Day - Pottery class May 17 - Mead Meander, Scandanavia,