#mead making

[boissonsaumiel]

LOVE how every mead brewer in the youtube comments is just straight up screaming in pain watching this video.

Pliny the Elder's 2000 Year Old Two Ingredient Mead Recipe: Let water sit for 5 years until it turns into a complex microbiome full of wild yeast, then add honey, which also contains wild yeast, and let it sit in the sun for 40 days in a non-air-tight vessel exposed to environmental wild yeast so it has time to thoroughly ferment. This youtuber: Take distilled water, which is completely sterile and void of minerals yeast need to thrive, and then boil it, so any wild yeast that might have somehow made it in after the distillation process are definitely, definitely dead, then add honey to the boiling water and boil it some more, so the raw honey is now cooked honey, and all the wild yeast in the honey are also definitely, definitely dead, then put it in a sterile container while it is still hot enough to kill yeast, and immediately seal it airtight, preventing any environmental wild yeast from entering the brew. Do not add yeast at any point during this process. This youtuber: It's so weird how my version didn't seem to ferment at all. I swear I followed the directions exactly.

#home brewing #what not to do #mead making #mead unmaking #Youtube #I am screaming in pain watching this video

[fayeandknight]

I got impatient siphoning my mead yesterday and accidentally carbonated it. Fizzy mead is delightful. Good job me.

#not dog related #this has been an inane post #mead making #homemade mead

[calystarose]

Mom's Herbal Tea Mead 2024-02-17 1 quart herbal tea: lemongrass, red raspberry leaf, peppermint leaf, catnip leaf, hibiscus flowers 1 tea bag black tea 6 inches (broken up) black seedless grape stems 1 packet of dead yeast, poured into a cup of boiling water 1/2 packet live yeast, mixed into a 1/2 cup of luke warm water water filled up to middle of the One Gallon text

this tea is so damn good, and well-balanced, so hopefully it'll impart some of those qualities to the mead. I did strain the tea, so the only 'bits' in there are the leaf particles that made it through the strainer and the little bit of grape stems that I put in there on a whim because we got the best fucking grapes at the store last week

#home brewing #mead #herbal tea #mead making #potions!

[its-yashas-strong-arms]

my first ever mead + baby's first bubble! check back in a couple months for the results 😊

#it's a lime/lemon jaom variant just using bread yeast and no added acids or nutrients bc i figured I'd get started with something simple #mead making #I'm using this and the dope french onion mac n cheese I'm making to cope with getting rejected from my dream job ✌️

[smalltowngnoll]

This is my Grave Miscalculation mead! It’s an accidental blend between 3 gallons of my blackberry mead aged with oak and 1 gallon of blueberry mead that was not labeled. Nice berry flavor, and the blueberry mead mellowed out the tannins in the oak in a good way.

Also! I picked the blackberries from our local graveyard!

#mead #mead making #homebrewing #learn to label your carboys #blackberry #blueberries #accidental creation

[eleanor-arroway]

times, places, and practices that I want to learn from to imagine a hopeful future for humanity 🍃

the three sisters (squash, beans, maize) stock photo - alamy // anecdote by Ira Byock about Margaret Mead // art by Amanda Key // always coming home by Ursula K. Le Guin // Yup'ik basket weaver Lucille Westlock photographed by John Rowley // the left hand of darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin // photo by Jacob Klassen // the carrier bag theory of fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin // article in national geographic // the dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow // braiding sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer // the birchbark house by Louise Erdrich // photo by John Noltner

I'm looking for more content and book recs in this vein, so please send them my way!

#solarpunk #hopepunk #braiding sweetgrass #just a collection of books and pictures that make me hopeful for the future #margaret mead #robin wall kimmerer #nature #ursula k le guin #ursula k. le guin #the left hand of darkness #the carrier bag theory of fiction #the dawn of everything #anthropology #future #hopecore #native plants #biodiversity #sustainability #eco #eco friendly #louise erdrich #civilization

[chaotic-scared]

Frist try at blueberry and raspberry mead. I wanted to add blackberries but i didnt have time to buy them.

#mead #mead making #kitchen magick #cottage witch #kitchen witch #San Juan

[spocktaculartea]

daniel meade really fired someone for being a lil rude to his assistant about the amount of sun-dried tomatoes she wanted on her sandwich

#ugly betty #daniel meade #betty suarez #gio rossi #america ferrera #freddy rodriguez #eric mabius #i understand her anger #but wow daniel meade will to ANYTHING to make betty happy #simp

[julesnichols]

Hey guys can we talk about where Nat's hand is in this BTS photo/different angle of that scene

#yellowjackets #yellowjackets spoilers #lottie matthews #natalie scatorccio #lottienat #i noticed it in the actual scene too but i thought i was going nuts #anyways the bts photo at a diff angle brightened made me know i was not crazy #also the cult makes mead from their honey too looks like

[a-loose-collection-of-ants]

The Boys

#I want to start making comics about them #with the free time I totally have #anyway these tags are going clockwise #tench tilghman #john fitzgerald #robert hanson harrison #richard kidder meade #alexander hamilton #john laurens #amrev #art tag

[maniculum]

Meadmaking

Hey all, Zoe here - the other half of this blog, and I decided to try my hand at posting - particularly my little mead-making project. Even though Mac is the medieval drinks expert, I just like mead as a drink and I feel like a potion-brewing witch when I make it. Beer was the more popular drink during the middle ages, as it was cheaper and more widely available, but I think it's nasty and who doesn't want to feel like Early English royalty?

As I dug into mead-making, I fell into a SUPER deep medieval-mead-making rabbit hole. I'm not a mead expert, and I'd highly recommend Susan Varberg's blog, Medieval Mead & Beer, for a very, very in-depth look at how to make medieval mead. HOWEVER, all that said, I did collect some research and played with it myself. Plus, I made some of my own recipes.

So. Mead. What is it? Fermented honey water, in its most basic form. Honey-wine, it can be called to those who aren't familiar. There's a lot of other names mead has when it's mixed with other things:

Mead – water, honey and yeast

Sack Mead – mead made with extra honey

Short Mead – low honey and low alcohol yeast to be drunk quickly

Hydromel – watered down mead (in period, another word for mead)

Braggot – (period) ale refermented with honey; (modern) malted mead

Melomel – mead made with fruit

Mulsum – mead made with fruit

Cyser – mead made with apples

Metheglin – mead with spices

Pyment, Clar – mead made with grape juice

Hippocras – spiced wine, sweetened (but not fermented) with honey

Botchet — caramelized honey mead

Really, though, when you see it on the shelf, a pumpkin melomel will be marketed as "Pumpkin Mead," so really only the brewmasters get into the weeds on the names. I was really curious as to how the ingredients were sourced in the middle ages - nowadays, brewers get really into where they source their ingredients (there's a bazillion different yeasts you can use!), but after doing some research, turns out the medievals were too!

Honey.

The medievals categorized honey in different ways. The best quality honey was called "life honey" and was the honey that dripped freely from the wax when pierced. Grades of honey diminished as the honey became harder to get out of the hive. The dregs of honey (collected by heating the frame in water to blend the honey but not melt the wax) was given to servants and was not preferred. Honey was also categorized by location - Egyptian honeys were very popular and expensive. Honey from different regions in Spain were considered of different quality - one merchant got particularly fussy when one of his batches was "spoiled" by mixing honey from a better region with that from a worse region. Finally, honey was categorized by flower type. One monetary requested honey made only from lavender. Since hives were highly mobile frames or skeps, it would have been possible for apiarists to move their hives to lavender fields.

Water.

Water is, well, water. Right? Not quite. Medieval recipes do specify using fine, spring water. The water and honey were often boiled together - likely to kill bacteria. However, the wording on "boille" is not super clear. Mead-masters knew that honey shouldn't be boiled (it kills natural yeast), so whether or not the must (the water/honey mix) was boiled in the modern sense or just warmed is unclear. Perhaps the need for "fine, spring, fresh water."

Yeast.

While modern brewers and vintners have a wide variety of yeasts to choose from, medieval brewmasters didn't have as many options. There were a few different options, however. Baking yeast (like a sourdough starter) was one option, while other recipes call for the leftover lees of wine/mead batches. Hops were also used. Of course, yeast is also naturally occurring, so brewers could fairly reliably rely on the natural yeast to kick-start itself.

I'll dump my own mead pics here and then get into the details of a Middle English mead recipe in part two, I guess. I'll talk a bit about the mead-making process, too. Mead is made by mixing honey and water into a must. Then, yeast is added. Modern mead-makers also add yeast nutrients and other additions to ensure their batch doesn't get infected.

A newly made bottle of mead. Notice the cloudy colour characteristic of new mead. As the yeast eats the sugars, they'll create a bottom layer of debris and the mead will clear, as seen below.

After the primary fermentation has occurred (you can tell when the bubbles of gas, telling you the yeast is eating, have stopped), mead-makers will re-reack their mead. This involves moving it from one jug to the next.

At this point, the mead can be put into a closet and age for a while. The best meads have high clarity - that is, they're clear! The example below is only about 2 months old. It has a way to go, but has good clarity already. Notably, the sagas state that the best, oldest, clearest meads were served to Odin and the gods.

Anyway - that's the basics of mead-making. I'll make a part two about older recipes! Sources:

Beekeeping in late medieval Europe: A survey of its ecological settings and social impacts. Llu.s SALES I FAVÀ, Alexandra SAPOZNIK y Mark WHELAN

Trade, taste and ecology: honey in late medieval Europe. Alexandra Sapoznik, Lluís Sales i Favà & Mark Whelan

Of Boyling and Seething: A re-evaluation of these common cooking terms in connection with brewing. Susan Verberg.

#bees #beekeeping #mead #mead-making #mediveal #medieval literature #witches #cottagecore #potions #i feel like a witch #maniculum

[boissonsaumiel]

Note: These are not flavor infused honeys. These are honeys made by bees that primarily use nectar from these plants as a food source.

ETA: I haven’t tried any of these honeys before, but I did a web search to see what each of them tasted like and I've copy-pasted some descriptions I found:

Gallberry honey: Mild but distinctive, with a mild sorghum or molasses flavor. It is known to have a thick but smooth and creamy texture and a delicate flavour with a fruity finish.

Blackberry honey: The taste of this honey is a delicate berry flavor with a slightly fruity finish. Its unique taste is not exactly a blackberry flavor. Nonetheless, it is closer in more ways than one, crisp and sweet, with a slight berry tang.

Blueberry honey: Well-rounded with rich earthy undertones, this honey varietal finishes on a playful, buttery-sweet note. It has a delicate tangy hint as an aftertaste.

Eucalyptus honey: It's an interesting mix of sweet and herbal. Raw eucalyptus honey includes subtle notes of menthol, caramel, and butterscotch.

Black Mangrove honey: Rich sweet and savory flavor. Highly recommend in BBQ sauces and marinades. Black mangrove trees are one of the few saltwater plants bees forage nectar from.

Saw Palmetto: It is full-bodied, citrusy, and smoky, with woody overtones. You might even taste a little caramel in there.

#home brewing #mead making #fermentation #honey

[guildtree]

Playing through Path of Fire on an alt character and I am constantly reminded of how ridiculous the team you have for that expansion is. Canach, Rytlock, and Kasmeer. These people are not friends. At best they hang out in the same general circle. They're the ones in the friend group who sit in awkward silence at the table when the person who ties them all together leaves to get water.

But they're all here, and they do wind up with this weird sort of frenemies bond going on. Canach and Rytlock begin a rivalry over who can kill Forged the best. Rytlock won't stop grumbling about the gods, but he also won't kill the ghosts in Kormir's sanctuary because "then Kas will get mad at me." Nobody likes the Awakened illusions, and you know - you just know - that Kasmeer is making them worse on purpose just because people are making fun of her magic. And yet despite all that, they still bind together when things get tough... to pick on you for getting a little too into character as Archon Iberu, because apparently even literally dying doesn't make your Commander immune from teasing.

I don't think they become die-hard friends or anything, but I do think they have this weird shared experience that nobody else is privy to. They don't seek each other out, but leave them alone in a room together and they'll suddenly start complaining about sand sharks and calling Rytlock "Cuddles" and a million other in-jokes that nobody else understands. At some point Logan or Marjory or somebody walks in with a smoothie and stands in confused silence, wondering what in the actual hell they missed out on.

#gw2 #guild wars 2 #canach #rytlock brimstone #kasmeer meade #path of fire #laurel rambles #<- making this the tag for all my textpost ideas #dragon's watch dynamics

[hatepotion]

@dickggansey and i went to a VICTORIAN BALL

#my face #my dress fell apart lol but it makes sense since it's barely a dress #we learnt dances! we drank mead! we clumsily stepped on people!

[its-yashas-strong-arms]

nobody told me that a carboy full of fermenting mead would make noise. it's calming, i like it

#the airlock bubbles every two seconds or so and it's much less annoying than a clock #i have a 14 m2 / 150 sqft studio apartment so the carboy is in my bedroom sort of by definition #mead making

[rocksanddeadflowers]

Kvasir messes me up so so so fucking much you guys. Like I understand the vikings had a different approach to death and yada yada so forth whatever arguments you wanna make they're reasonable but still it. I just.

You mean this beloved man, known for his wisdom and poem and song, and who went around helping people with his wisdom and poem and song and was dearly beloved by the gods just. You guys he was straight up murdered and his blood stolen for magic fucking mead. There's no revenge for his murder or anything it's just that Odin saved his mead.

"Folk declares that every skald (poet) has a drop of Kvasir's blood in him. ... because a world without it's poets would be too dreadful a place to image."

Messed up or not, he lives on in poets, storytellers, and songwriters alike- all those with the understanding of the power of word, the wisdom to yield it.

In The Bifrost Incident it's still the same. His blood pumping and fueling the machine, running through arcane glyphs. He's always just been used for his blood, and even more irony drawn from it likely being Odin gaining the most use from his blood.

And yet, no matter how miniscule it may seem, Kvasir still lives on in his universe there too, in poets and songwriters and storytellers- somehow, The Mechanisms carry a piece of him in their travels ever since his death and Yddrasil's fall, just as you and I may have his blood in our veins.

#RAAAAAAA KVASIR!!!!!!! HE WAS THE FIRST POET I'M PUNCHING AIR!!!!!! #as someone who feels drawn to the power of word (i like writing heehoo) he messes me UP #also to clarify my books say that Odin wanted a draught of the mead bc the mead gives the drinker the powers of kvair #and Odin didn't need kavsir's wisdom odin already got that from the well he wanted kavsir's tongue #his ability and fluidity of speech #honestly the Myths really jump around from “Odin is a mystical all knowing otherworldly wise being to be respected” #to “heehoo big smart eye patch man” #which is what happens when you choose to study a religion long since mixed up by cultural changes and views #aka ppl making shit up for personal biases or compromises #the mechanisms #the bifrost incident #the mechanisms tbi