Description

The Rookery is a rare Scottish meadery. Focusing on purity as well as historical accuracy, their meads are made using ingredients that would have been available to people in medieval times, where possible using locally sourced and foraged ingredients.
A strong Scottish heather honey is tempered by a milder polyfloral honey before being diluted with water and fermented along with selected additional ingredients up to 17%. This yields a warming beverage with only a mild sweetness, and one that allows all the flavours of the added fruits, plants, herbs and spices to be clearly tasted without being overwhelming. The clean flavours and aromatics make these meads quite popular among whisky-drinkers and as a lighter alternative for a post-meal tipple.

The Cask Reserve Mead is a limited edition mead, produced by maturing The Rookery’s classic mead in charred oak casks for one year. This process imparts a huge number of woody aromas and flavours to the mead, much like a whisky. The flavours imparted by each barrel will change over the course of its lifetime, so each yearly bottling will be subtly different. Occasionally a barrel will be retired, and its replacement will bring a new set of flavours to the year’s bottling.

In this most recent bottling (2023), the oak sits slightly more on the tongue than on the nose compared to previous years. This woody note cuts the sweetness of the honey somewhat without being too sharp, and gives the mead a fresh bite while preserving the sweet finish.