I know you've tasted mead. Sweet and syrupy and completely revolting. You mean the Geats in their great Meadhall were sipping this swill when Grendel attacked? We beg to differ. Make it yourself folks. (Preferably wearing horns and weilding a battle axe.) Crank up the Zep too. Seriously, it is the oldest and simplest of fermented drinks. One big jar of honey. If you want it to taste like something, use wildflower. Add 8 times the amount of water, stir well. Add a packet of wine yeast. (I've tried wild yeast many times, and it just has never tasted that good. And don't even think of bread yeast!) And here's the secret: a simple airlock. Costs about 2 bucks on line. I used two big old bourbon bottles, an arilock fitted in each, just stuck into an old champagne cork with a hole drilled down the middle. All it does is let the gas bubble out and no air in. Next put it on a shelf and go to England. Looking at portraits of Sir Kenelm Digby will definitely serve as inspiration. and while you are gone, drink unspeakably good ale and farmhouse cider. So when you get home, after about 2 weeks' fermentation, siphon it into bottles, and you will be very happy to drink flat warm, extremely flavorful and DRY delicious mead. By the mugful. It will make you ready to slay monsters. And I have to admit, I'm sorely tempted to distill the next three bottles. What would I call it? Dragonslayer?
11 comments:
Sir,you inspire me. As always. I shall order an airlock and a battle axe forthwith.
I haven't tasted mead, should I have? Am I living in a bubble?
I am with you. I was so disappointed with mead. It was gruesome stuff. I have seen a lot of artisanal mead out there now and had thought to try it again. Would be nice to see what all the fuss was about. Doesn't Kenhelm have about 8000 recipes for mead? Must have like it ALOT>
I love Mead. Whenever we visit a new winery I look for mead. Not many local wineries here in the tri-state area make them. The Mount Hope Winery in Manheim Pa, make two aged meads. The Blueberry Honey Wine is my favorite. DRY mead seems like heresy.
Folks, the only downside is that real honey is quite expensive now. I think I paid about 20 bucks for a jar. Exquisite stuff and I guess that comes to only $5 a bottle.
And Kryssie, please don't tell me you're drinking sweet Pennsylvanian mead. Please!
Hey, now, some of us LIKE sweet meads, thank you very much! And no, I don't mean the brand named after some Middle English writer, but a nicely homebrewed sweeter mead. Fortunately, my boss' father rents bees out to the local farmers for pollination purposes, then sells the resulting honey (My goodness, the orange blossom honey!), for only $20 per GALLON of honey, so I can make gallons of mead at a shot.
I did try freeze-distilling some mead that didn't turn out quite the way I'd hoped, and it works pretty well, though you'll want to re-introduce flavoring agents after distilling (most the water-soluble flavors go with the water). In my case it just meant adding a little more lemon and orange zest, a bit more sliced ginger root, and a dollop of honey, and letting it age a bit longer after it came out of the freezer. I kept it around to perk up tired cooks :)
Many years ago, I did in fact drink mead out of an ox-horn in the Swedish university town of Uppsala, at once feeling every inch the viking and the bookish medieval scholar, especially given the sweetness of it, my teeth took on that brownish medieval feel immediately. Only two weeks fermentation, eh? There's a project for the weekend. And, you should call it "sword of the eotens".
Glen, Chaucer's and the like is exactly what I was thinking of. But if you made it yourself, some residual sweetness would be nice. I like to think of it more as akin to cider and beer though. Dry, about 4 percent or so, and yes ideally drunk from a horn. After a few pints, though, I'm certain I'm going to distill the rest.
I'm tempted to tell you that if honey is too expensive to buy you need to set yourself up with your own hives...but then I remembered how much it costs to get set up with beehives. Still, it's like forgetting the pain of having a baby - when you're harvesting honey it seems so incredible and miraculous that it's totally worth it!
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I'd love to hear more about your distilling adventures. I recently bottled some meads of my own, but am sure they can't compare to my favorite commercially obtained varieties...
Up your alley might be "Water of Time for the Passions of the Heart", from the Compleat Cook. I made a batch the other day, and with limited distilling know-how and equipment, got just a small amount of some really incredible beverage. Highly recommended!
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