Mead
The Drink of the Gods

"... As it is in Valhalla, so may it be in your garage ..."

The tasting of the mead: Hand me my broadaxe!

    First of all, I had no idea that so few people knew what mead was, but when I mention I've made it, I'm met with blank stares. 

   The fact is that hardly anyone has actually tasted it, but certainly the name pops up in everything from Jethro Tull songs to Norse myths and (where I probably learned about it first) in Thor comic books and Dungeons and Dragons (the old version with a half-dozen books and way too much graph paper and odd-shaped dice).

Who the hell is this guy, and what is he doing toasting to Ragnarok? Meet Master Meadmeister Clay from across the street. 

Odin was rumored to have been nursed by a divine goat that produced mead instead of milk. Mead was flowing quite freely in the heavens and earth of the northern Europeans up until the middle ages, when they discovered it was easier to lop down an acre of barley and brew it into beer in a couple of weeks, than to go getting hundreds of beestings by poking around in wild hives, then waiting around forever for their honey-water to ferment, owing to the fact that these people had no concept of yeast, so they just waited for the magic to happen (which it did, thanks to yeast-saturated barrels and various other contaminated vessels, plus the dangerous "airborne yeasts" that homebrew books warn against. Whatever. What a random time that must have been, and one it might behoove us to honor. 

Mead is not something you sit around and sip. It is also not a beverage you would forcibly imbibe at a party with a funnel, two-dozen frat boys and a yard of plastic tubing. Mead is the story-teller's drink. A bit of mead, acting similar to wine, but better, brings out a sort of sprightly yarn-spinner in the imbiber. My observations tell me that it also leaves you with very spotty -- or blank -- memory the next day, combined with no hangover whatsoever. There are no impurities in the stuff. Not that you should drink this or anything else to excess. Especially not mead. Three bottles will have you banging giant ox bones on the table, creating some kind of hour-long melodic sing-song autobiographical epic, which may include dwarves and frost giants.

Please note that among mead-drinking cultures, the Scandinavians left us a huge legacy of epics that feature all kinds of ridiculous ogres, giants, gods, dwarves and whatnot. Thousand upon thousand of pages. Does the fact that they put down a lot of mead have anything to do with their output of fanciful literature? With absolutely no evidence other than the tank of the stuff we whipped up, let me say, unequivocally, YES.

At our last New Years Party, one mead-drinking lady guest, who shall remain nameless, ended up dancing solo polkas in our living room and then out in the street, overcome by the honeyed inspiration. Veronika once discovered me singing and dancing to old records in the garage after a routine "quality control" mead-tasting. And after just two or three meads, I once expounded to Ron Davidson in colorful Homeric fashion every subtlety and poetic significance of our expatriate experience ten years ago, and could barely keep up with my own storytelling. (Ron, unfortunately initiated too hastily into meadhood, entered into a merry half-hour laughing spell after one mead and was impelled by the unusual sensations into a kneeling position before the kitchen trash can -- but it was not to be -- mead doesn't do that to a man. Nothing came up and no ill effects were noticed).

    Mead is a drink made from fermented honey. It's the oldest known intoxicant to civilization -- pre-dating wine and beer -- owing to its simplicity. Mix up some honey and water and leave it for a while. It can almost occur naturally, which is why almost everyone from the Vikings to African bushmen to the Mayas had some version. I've brewed mead twice -- the first time was kind of random and turned out great. The second time I really planned it out and I'm disappointed. So much for preparation.

1. You can actually buy mead (I got a bottle at World Market) but it's more like novelty wine and just not the same. I was nonplussed. The mead I made, however, was effervescent like champagne, but was served in thick glass chalices. I looked around for a ram's horn or pewter chalice, but no luck.

2. You can get mead recipes all over the place -- on the Internet, out of a lot of homebrewing books, etc. I've got a simple basic one below. Of course you should probably already be familiar with the stuff you need for basic homebrewing, which you can get at any homebrew supplier (at exorbitant prices) or gather up here and there. There's really nothing that specialized, and unless you're the perfectionist engineer type, all you really have to do is make sure things are about as clean as you can get them, and that you follow some real simple concepts of temperature. I've broken every rule of sanitation and storage and still come up with some great stuff. I've also followed the rules and screwed up. 

If you go to a brewshop and tell them you're making mead, they'll have anything I've listed right on hand. And they'll probably tell you a lot of other stuff about this and that, and how it takes many months. Maybe so, but I just nodded a lot and got what I needed. 

Anyway, I've boiled the basics down to:

• A 7-gallon carboy (glass water bottle)
• A big 20-gallon plastic bucket with a plastic spigot on the bottom
• A whole bunch of bottles (I'm almost exclusively Grolsch and Marinelli's cider now -- look for them to come on sale and think of the investment
• About 5 or 6 feet of plastic tubing, frequently replaced
• A cheap plastic airlock and rubber stopper
• A brewing thermometer (you know, I just never got used to measuring "gravity" and all that, so I stick with what I know -- temperature and time)
• A plastic bottling tube (it has a special spring lock at the bottom and makes bottling really easy)
• Big old soup pots from the kitchen (those really tall enameled ones are nice)
• The rest of the stuff I just find around the kitchen. I use bleach solutions for sanitizing, and also some TSP, the world's cheapest and best cleaner. 

HONEY: I went over to Whole Earth Foods and took home about 12 pounds at a time from the bulk food section in my own big plastic jugs. The honey has to be natural and unfiltered, so don't be using Sue Bee -- try to get the farm fresh stuff. The stuff over at Whole Earth is in a big tank over low heat so it doesn't crystallize. (I tapped the keg pretty fast, and the hippie girl working there was nonplussed about how to refill it, so I made up the difference with some packaged stuff that was still unfiltered and natural). 

YEAST: Use champagne yeast from a beer/winemaking supply guy. Honey doesn't have the nutrients, I've read, to kick into a fast fermentation like beer, so you probably have to add some "yeast food" to your mix, or else it'll take many months before bottling and many months after. 

An easy recipe for
Bubbly, Epic-Telling, 
Hammer-Throwing, 
FrostGiant-Slaying Mead

Adapted from a recipe in The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian -- definitely the best first book you should get if you're a beginner at making beer or mead

• At least five gallons of bottled "spring water" (buy extra just in case)
• 15 lbs. light honey (the right kind! read above)
• 1 Tbsp gypsum
• 4 tsp acid blend 
• 1/2 oz. yeast extract (or "yeast food" -- check your beer-making supplier)
• 1/4 tsp. Irish moss powder
• 1/2 oz (or a package or two) of champagne yeast or "Pris de Mousse" wine yeast

1. Boil about 2 gallons of water with the gypsum and irish moss, then add the honey and acid blend. The boil should stop abruptly, and the honey should be dissolved. Stop. Turn off the flame (and skim the any gunk off the top). That's it -- way easier than beer at this stage. Be careful it doesn't boil over or you could have a big mess. Everything sticky, honey all over the drainboard and burned into a black carbon crust all over your stove. I used baking soda and water to get it off, but there was still some on the floor.
2. Take a (clean) coffee cup or glass and scoop out some of the hot stuff and let it cool while you're running around with the bucket....
3. Pour everything  into a big clean bucket with the rest of the water, which should be chilled in the refrigerator or freezer beforehand till it's ice-cold. 
4. Check the temperature of that cupful of "wort" you pulled out. If it's warm, go ahead and pour in your yeast and let it do its thing for about ten minutes. 
5. When your mead is about 80 degrees (which it should be if you poured it into really cold water) add the yeast nutrients and pour in that cup of foaming yeast.
6. Siphon or somehow get it all into a clean glass carboy (big 5-7 gallon glass water bottle) and put in an airlock. Put a black trash bag around it to keep light out. Unlike beer, mead can sit in a warmer place, e.g. my garage.
7. Wait until it stops bubbling (this one took me a few weeks, thanks to the yeast food. Another one took me a couple of months. I don't know why). Then let it sit for a little while more just to make sure. Actually, it should "clear", which sometimes takes a while. And it makes hardly any sediment in the fermenter or in the bottles.
8. Add between 1/3 and 1/2 cup of corn sugar and start bottling as you would beer. Put all the bottles somewhere where it's dark. It doesn't have to be as cool as for beer, because that yeast is having a hard enough time already trying to convert honey. If you didn't use the yeast nutrient, it could take 6 months for the first ferment and another 6 in the bottles (with the taste improving after that).
9. Don't open your first bottle for about three weeks -- absolute minimum. The stuff definitely improves with age. I tasted some overlooked bottles of my first mead after 6 months or more and it was much smoother. If you've got the time, go ahead and leave it for a couple of months, or set some aside for later. Of course, you'll want to start right in on your next brewing project right away, since mead is such a drawn-out affair.
10. Get down to the thrift store or Ross and start looking for giant chalices. You don't want to be drinking this stuff from pansy-ass wine glasses or dixie cups. Back in the day, these big mead glasses (actually made of horn or metal) were passed down from generation to generation, and it was considered appropriate to drink a lot of mead in the first month of marriage. The mead was not only considered an aphrodisiac (In the first month of marriage? Whatever for?), but was supposed to predispose your Nordic bride to conceive some sons. So that first month became known as the "honey moon." Get it?

(Incidentally, according to the book, there may be some truth in the sons part, since something about a woman's bodily pH balance around conception that increases the likelihood of sons, and drinking mead (or anything), I guess, does that. Who knows. Just think of the stories you'll tell!