Been drafting and doodling a logo for a while and spent some time today on an excellent candidate. Love how the (A) looks a lot like a stylized bottle top. May play with that background a bit more... thinking more in a swirly direction than a woodcut look.
Let me know what you think! Will be working this into a label design soon.
Barley breeding has spent the last half-century optimizing for agronomics first and malting quality second. The malting industry, in turn, has spent that same half-century getting extremely good at compensating for whatever tradeoffs that optimization created.
Honey is generous. It gives you sugar; it gives you aroma; it gives you that ineffable floral complexity that makes mead worth making. What it doesn't give you is structure. No tannins. None. Zip.
There's a moment in every barrel-aged batch where something clicks. The harsh, tannic edge softens. The fruit comes forward. A faint vanilla warmth settles into the background like it was always there. You didn't add vanilla. You didn't add anything — you just waited, and the wood did the work.
In the "Lab-First" brewery, efficiency is not a high score to brag about. It is a diagnostic tool for variable isolation. If you do not know exactly where your sugars are being lost, you cannot reliably replicate a recipe — and replication, not bragging rights, is the entire point.
