Black Locust Mead
Tales of Robinia pseudoacacia and how its history entwines with gold.
Over the last several years I’ve experimented extensively with fermentation, playing with all kinds of foraged ingredients in beers, wines, ciders, meads, and sodas. Eventually Bernadette and I hope to start a hyper-local fermentory, and I thought it might be worthwhile to document some of the interesting experiments as I try them, while telling stories of the plants themselves.
When Appalachian miners traveled west after 1849 to rake out the gold hearts of mountains, they brought black locust with them. The trees grew fast and thrived on the disturbed ground, fed the growth of the railroads as rot resistant ties and scaffolded mine shafts, shouldering the weight of the rock that bore down from above.
The cries of riches that remade Northern California did not sound in San Diego county until a couple decades later. Former slave Fred Coleman wound his way south after panning in the Sierras and found work as a cattle herder in the pastures north of the Cuyamaca mountains. Cuyamaca (kwee-a-MAK-a), derived from the Kumeyaay language, means the place above the clouds or the place where it rains. It doesn’t rain so much anymore, but in the 1860s it was a different world, one in which myths and yarns more easily wove into the mundane. One could marry a Kumeyaay woman, as Fred did, have eleven children, and spot the glint of gold while watering a horse in a creek.
Coleman’s 1869 find kicked off a frenzy of gold-hunting in the surrounding mountains. Having hauled his family out from Tennessee by mule train, legend has it that William Skidmore stumbled across a thick vein looking for a lost mule in the Cuyamacas in 1870. The old Confederate prospector staked his claim and named it the Stonewall Jackson mine, which eventually became one of the richest in Southern California.
The mine soon fell into the hands of pro-Union men who chopped Jackson from its name, and it spewed wealth and a town grew up around it. In 1888 Lake Cuyamaca sprang into existence with the completion of an earthen dam. The second in California, it stored water that channeled thirty five miles down redwood flumes to quench the burgeoning city of San Diego.
The fate of Cuyamaca City rose and fell on the back of the mining bonanza, which lasted only thirty years or so. But the nearby town of Julian continued to prosper. And 120 years later in early May the scraggly gray trees1 that line Coleman Creek and downtown still explode in clusters of white flowers that hang low and perfume the streets with a flavor that smacks of jasmine. They are survivors, relics of greed and utility, and they smell fantastic.
Settlers at Jamestown stumbled across the tree in the early 1600s. They named it locust for its resemblance to the middle eastern carob tree that fed John the Baptist, often called old world locust. The trees hardly resemble each other, but the British colonists may have recalled seeing the leguminous pods on the signs of goldsmiths back home and jumped to conclusions. The history of carob also entangles that of gold — jewelers used the beans as counterweights in their scales, as they supposedly varied little in mass.2 From this emerges the carat measurement, which stems from the Greek word meaning the fruit of the carob.
Native Americans prized the wood, building bows and houses from it and bringing seed from its natural range in the mountains to the coastal plain. The settlers noticed, and forged their crude outpost with black locust poles. It would serve as a tenuous foothold during Jamestown’s grim early years, the starving time, when they gnawed shoe leather and turned to cannibalism to survive. Accounts from the period call it the “toughest wood in all the world”.
Black locust is an anomaly, growing three to four feet a season while constructing an incredibly dense wood able to resist rotting underground for a hundred years. It fixes nitrogen in the soil and burns as hot as coal. It can be coppiced and stabilizes slopes prone to erosion. It provides nutritious fodder for livestock (except horses — it makes horses depressed and anorexic). Beloved of bees, it supports a commercial honey industry in Hungary, where it now makes up a fifth of the forest.
George Washington planted locust at Mount Vernon, and it gained popularity in Europe as a landscape tree soon after. Some say it helped the United States win the War of 1812, as the black locust nails used by the US Navy held their ships together under cannon fire, while the oak nails of the British did not.
But as black locust spread across the globe from its fairly limited native range in the Ozarks and Appalachians, public opinion gradually changed — once prized for its tenacity, today many disparage it for its success and label it an invasive weed tree. Several states forbid importing it. Which, to me, says more about our inability to recognize a good thing than anything inherent in the tree itself.
And the flowers, which hang on the tree for a brief two weeks in Spring, taste like floral peas. When eaten in quantity — in other words, stuffed in your mouth right off the tree — you can tell they pack some substance. They take salads and pancakes to the next level. The forager Steve Brill suggests a black locust flower ice cream. But mead — they must be good in mead.
My approach to mead differs from how I treat beer and wine. I view it as a canvas for throwing all kinds of ingredients together that I happen to find in the immediate vicinity and noticing what flavors present themselves. The downside of mead is that you really shouldn’t bother trying it before a year passes. The flavors mix and mellow over time, and for awhile it retains that hot alcohol taste more characteristic of liquor. Session meads are an exception — made with less honey and therefore a lower alcohol content, they seem to mature earlier.
This particular mead fits the bill there, so hopefully I’ll be drinking it by late summer. I’ll report back on the results then.
Ingredients
For one gallon.
1.75 lbs honey
7 oz black locust flowers
1 sprig California mugwort
Juice from 2 lemons
Lalvin D47 yeast
Initial Notes
Strained flowers and racked to secondary after four days. Had a bit extra after racking (it had fermented about halfway) and drank like a soda, which was delicious. You could add less honey and ferment for just a couple days if you were looking for a low-alcohol soda.
Initial sugars — 16 Brix (will end up with an ABV around 7.5%).
Yes, I know it’s called black locust, but they mostly look gray to me.
Turns out they have about as much variation as any other bean, but here we are…