•
CONTENTS •
Preface Introduction
1: The Mythological Origins of the Magic Mead of Poetry
ix xiii
1
2: Mead in the Viking Age
17
3: Honey and the Bees We Have to Thank for It
35
4: Preparing for Battle: Basic Equipment, Ingredients, and Planning Strategies
50
5: Brewing the Drink of the Gods: Techniques for Making Wildcrafted Mead
67
6: Basic Mead Recipes and Some Variations
102
7: Herbal, Vegetable, Floral, Fruit, and Cooking Meads
121
8: Bragots, Herbal Honey Beers, Grogs, and Other Oddities
146
9: How to Drink Mead Like a Viking: Viking-Era Games and Rituals
174
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Acknowled gments
195
Trouble sho oting
197
Brewing Glos sary
201
Re s ource s and Inspiration
205
Note s
209
Index
214
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Preparing for Battle of the stuff. Be frugal and be a Viking. Reuse, recycle, and plunder—but be sure to ask first.
Essential Equipment The equipment you need for making mead varies greatly depending on your needs, resources, and time. What you really need to get started with mead boils down to these essentials: glass, ceramic, or food-grade plastic fermentation vessel. • A A stick of the appropriate length and diameter to reach • thestirbottom of the vessel. A length of or other porous cloth (for open • fermentationcheesecloth only). As a modern person accustomed to drinking mead, wine, and beer that has been aged to some extent, you will likely want to age your
The essential equipment for creating 1- to 3-gallon (4- to 12-L) batches of mead.
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Make Mead Like a Viking mead to bring out subtle flavors and tame any initial sweetness or harshness. I encourage you to do this, although you can make perfectly flavorful mead that has never been bottled. There are a number of options for procuring or making your own long-term aging materials. The basics you will need are: carboy (a 1- to 5-gallon [4- to 20-L] glass or plastic container with a • Anarrow neck to minimize contact with outer air for long-term aging). siphoning tube. • A of varying sizes. • Funnels A funnel strainer, or nylon mesh bag for filtering sediment. • An airlock,screen, purchased or homemade (to place in the opening • of your carboy), or alternatives such as a drilled stopper with a siphoning tube inserted into the hole, or simply a balloon or condom placed over the opening. Whatever you use should fit snugly in (or over) the opening of the carboy to keep out external air that can cause souring.
The essential equipment for making 5-gallon (20-L) batches of mead.
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Make Mead Like a Viking When first trying out mead making after some experience with beer, I was too eager to bottle. In one instance, I was woken up at four in the morning by corks popping in my kitchen. Other times I walked into my cellar only to find that it smelled suspiciously delicious, subsequently noticing a cork or two—and in some instances bits of glass—on the floor. Cyser (or any mead with fruit) requires even more patience because you’re adding additional sugars to the mix. I once let a cyser sit in the carboy (after a couple of rackings) for nearly a year. It seemed to have finished fermenting, so I bottled it. After a couple of weeks, I opened a bottle to test it and was met with a geyser of cyser. Not wanting to let this hard-earned batch of cyser turn my cellar into a war zone, I took the bottles and sat down in the living room, planning on opening them slowly and pouring them into a fermentation bucket. After making a mess of the living room—and getting some looks from my wife—I decided to move to the back porch, considering that it was a nice summer evening anyway. After a couple more months, it was finally ready for bottling. My cyser was saved, and who knows what else was.
The author demonstrates bottling mead from a bucket with a spigot.
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•
RECIPE LIST •
Ginger Bug Semi-Sweet/Medium Show Mead Sack/Dessert Show Mead Dry Show Mead Basic Small Mead Spiced Orange Mead Traditional T’ej Banana-Coffee T’ej Ethiopian Fire Mead/T’ej Appalachian Viking T’ej Mushroom and Garlic Mead Squashed Pumpkin Mead Medieval Metheglin Chai Metheglin Cinnamon-Vanilla Metheglin Peach Horehound Mead Berry Melomel Cabin Fever Cyser Flower Mead Simple, Hoppy Extract Bragot All-Grain Beer and Bragot Big Yeti and Little Yeti Bragots Booby Bragot: A Lactilicious Bragot Herbal Sorghum Beer Horehound Ale Sima: Finnish May Day “Mead”
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77 104 105 105 106 107 109 112 114 117 122 124 128 129 131 133 136 139 143 147 151 161 164 167 170 172
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