Mead and Cigars

[MaxTheSpy]

If your like me you enjoy a fine cigar once and a blue moon, but Lately Ive found myself drawn to more and more different types of cigars and enjoying them with not only myself but friends and family. Often times the conversation of making mead comes up because It seems like im the only one around here who brews mead. This got me thinking, Could you purchase aged cigar leaves and add them to a mead along some vanilla, caramel and oak chips to make a dark earthy mead?

Does anyone know if this has been done before? Let me know, Please and thanks.

~Maxwell

 

[viking1984]

I have enjoyed cigars and certain pipe tobaccos before, but I think making a tobacco "tea" to try to brew bit your mead with or adding tobacco leaves to mead is a really bad idea. I had read in a farmers almanac many many years ago how a tobacco tea can be used as an insecticide, and I think that the natural chemicals in it that would be leeched out by the alcohol could end up in a best case scenario making you feel a bit sick. I am far from a doctor or scientist, but I wouldn't think this could turn out good at all. I would just continue enjoying a good cigar with your glass of mead (maybe even a vanilla caramel aged on oak) and leave it at that.

 

[MaxTheSpy]

I have enjoyed cigars and certain pipe tobaccos before, but I think making a tobacco "tea" to try to brew bit your mead with or adding tobacco leaves to mead is a really bad idea. I had read in a farmers almanac many many years ago how a tobacco tea can be used as an insecticide, and I think that the natural chemicals in it that would be leeched out by the alcohol could end up in a best case scenario making you feel a bit sick. I am far from a doctor or scientist, but I wouldn't think this could turn out good at all. I would just continue enjoying a good cigar with your glass of mead (maybe even a vanilla caramel aged on oak) and leave it at that.

I gave it quite a bit of thought and came up to the same conclusion that using tobacco leaves would be an awful idea. I talked to a brewery and they would roast their barley to get that tobacco flavor and while I don't use grain in my mead, I was also thinking of getting some cedar chips and laying all my cigars down on them in my humidor for a few years to get that tobacco flavor, though every box of cigars has a thin layer of cedar in it already.

I talked to my Tobacconist and he said that when they sell out of a box in their humidor he would have no problem giving me the box and in turn the cedar layer, So I think I might kill 2 birds with that stone, getting the cedar flavor and the tobacco flavor a I dont really want to wait years for my own oak chips to age.

 

[Cascadegan]

Cigar City Brewing makes a Maduro Brown Ale which I believe uses Spanish Cedar like you would get from a cigar box. Def avoid using actual tobacco as it is poison, just 1 cigarette dissolved in water and consumed can kill you.