Ken Schramm
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Ken Schramm (born July 15, 1959) is the author of “The Compleat Meadmaker,”[1] a leading English language reference text on meadmaking, and the founder of the Mazer Cup Mead Competition.[2] He has served on the Board of Advisors of the American Homebrewers Association, and the Board of Directors of the American Mead Makers Association. Schramm is the majority owner of Schramm's Mead, located in Ferndale Michigan, and Schramm's Orchards, in Rochester Hills, Michigan. As a result of his contributions to the hobby and the profession, he has been dubbed “the Godfather of Mead” by members of the mead community.[3]
Career[edit]
Schramm's career began in television production. While working at Maclean Hunter Cable TV in Taylor, MI in the mid-80s, he began working as a free lance camera operator for NCAA and professional sports broadcasts. After a brief one-year stint at Mobile Images, a contract broadcast and industrial video production firm in Southfield, MI, Schramm accepted the position of television production supervisor at the Palace of Auburn Hills. There, he supervised NBA and other pro sports broadcasts, image magnification for concert video, and produced and directed corporate videos for Guardian Industries.
At the close of the 1994-95 NBA season, Schramm accepted a position at Wayne RESA, the service agency supporting educators in Detroit and the surrounding county. At Wayne RESA, Schramm helped found REMC MIStreamnet, a pioneering live and on-demand educational video streaming service of the REMC Association of Michigan, that began operating almost 18 months before YouTube registered its domain name.[4][5] Schramm retired from his educational position in July of 2015, and began working as a full time team member at Schramm's Mead.
Amateur brewing and meadmaking[edit]
In 1988, Schramm began brewing beer and making mead as a hobby. He became deeply involved in the hobby, joining the American Homebrewers Association and the Ann Arbor Brewers Guild. He passed the test to become a judge with the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP), and quickly began judging competitions to accumulate experience points in the program.
In 1991, Schramm noticed the lack of mead-only competition opportunities for amateur mead makers. He proposed the creation of a mead competition with Dan McConnell, PhD, and Mike O’Brien of the Ann Arbor Brewers Guild. Schramm agreed to act as Competition Director, recommended the name “The Mazer Cup” for the competition, then applied for and was granted American Homebrewers Association sanctioning of the competition. First round judging of the first Mazer Cup was held on the weekend of July 12, 1992.
Between 1992 and 1994, Schramm and McConnell conducted a mead making experiment involving the production of 12 meads from one recipe with the same honey/water/yeast ratios: six from the same honey with different yeast strains, and six from the same yeast strain with six different varietal honeys.[6] They presented the meads for evaluation at a presentation at the 1994 American Homebrewers Association National Conference in Denver, CO. The presentation was seminal in raising awareness for mead and mead making technique and ingredients.
Schramm and McConnell repeated the process with beer for the 1995 AHA Conference in New Orleans, LA, presenting fruit beers made from a single base recipe and nine different fruits. They also made and bottled the conference commemorative mead. Over the ensuing years the two hobbyists, each experiencing success in their vocations as well as their avocations, saw a spike in demand for appearances, and for the authoring of magazine articles.
Authorship[edit]
Schramm and McConnell contributed articles to Zymurgy throughout the 1990s.[6] In 2001, Schramm accepted a request from publisher Ray Daniels (Brewers Publications, Boulder, CO) to author a reference work on mead making. “The Compleat Meadmaker” was released in June 2003.[7] The book has helped propel the growth of mead in the burgeoning homebrewing, craft beer and winemaking cultures in the US and abroad.
Commercial meadmaking[edit]
In 2007, Schramm entered into an agreement to act as a contract fruit grower and mead maker for B. Nektar Meadery in Ferndale, Michigan. Utilizing fruit from the 2018 growing season at Schramm's small orchard, in 2009 B. Nektar released 110 bottles of Schramm's “The Heart of Darkness,” the first commercial batch under the “Schramm’s Signature” series.[8] Schramm handled all aspects of the meadmaking except packaging. B. Nektar subsequently released a batch of Schramm's “Ginger” recipe in 2010, and another 140 hand-crafted bottles of “The Heart of Darkness” in 2011.
Schramm and his daughter, Alyson, founded Schramm's Mead in 2012. The meadery in Ferndale, MI opened its doors to the public in September 2013.[9]
Education and industry support[edit]
Schramm has continued to support the industry. He has made instructional speaking appearances at homebrew clubs, beekeeping clubs and regional beekeeping associations in the US and Canada, the Great American Beer Festival, and at conferences of the Craft Beverage Expo,[10] American Meadmakers Association,[11] the American Homebrewers Association,[12] and the Robert Mondavi Institute at the University of California, Davis.[13]
Awards[edit]
The Governing Committee of the American Homebrewers Association annually issues its Recognition Award, which “honors outstanding service to the community of homebrewers.”[14] In 2014, Schramm was awarded this distinction at the Annual conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan.[15] Schramm was also been awarded the American Mead Makers Association “Roger Morse Lifetime Achievement Award” in 2018.
Schramm's Orchards[edit]
On September 25, 2018, Schramm purchased the former Shades of Green Nursery, a 6.1 acre property in Rochester Hills, Michigan. The site is being planted with a variety of fruit crops intended to be used in mead production. Schramm's goal in starting an orchard is to apply the same quality-minded techniques used to grow premium grapes for top-tier wine production to fruit used to make mead. The orchard is cultivating tart cherries, apples, peaches, plums, red and black currants, brambles, white wine grape varieties and other berries.
References[edit]
- ↑ Schramm, Ken (2003). The Compleat Meadmaker: Home Production of Honey Wine From Your First Batch to Award-winning Fruit and Herb Variations. Brewers Publications. ISBN 978-0-937381-80-9 Search this book on
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- ↑ "Competition - Mazer Cup International 2009". HomeBrewTalk.com - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Community.
- ↑ Columnist, Brendon Cho Daily Food. "Schramm's Mead: The Seductive Alternative Alcohol". The Michigan Daily.
- ↑ "Whois mistreamnet.com". www.whois.com.
- ↑ "Whois youtube.com". www.whois.com.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Mead Success" (PDF). www.homebrewersassociation.org. Retrieved 2021-03-22.
- ↑ "The Compleat Meadmaker: Home Production of Honey Wine From Your First Batch to Award-winning..." Brewers Publications.
- ↑ "Rate Beer Listing" (PDF). www.ratebeer.com. Retrieved 2021-03-22.
- ↑ "More mead to flow in Ferndale with opening of Schramm's Mead". Metromode.
- ↑ "Ken Schramm". Craft Beverage Expo.
- ↑ "AMMA". Accidentalis Brewing.
- ↑ "Mead making" (PDF). www.ahaconference.org. Retrieved 2021-03-22.
- ↑ Luu, Elizabeth (2018-12-05). "Mead Making 301". UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center. Retrieved 2021-03-22.
- ↑ "Recognition Award". American Homebrewers Association.
- ↑ "Ken Schramm Wins Prestigious AHA Governing Committee Recognition Award". UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center. 2014-07-07. Retrieved 2021-03-22.
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