The quest to recreate a lost and ‘terrifying’ medieval mead
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour?
They would be pretty noticable in the finished flavor, I imagine. Mead flavor is often best described as "delicate", especially in lower abv meads. The carmellization and yeasts are probably going to be the most notable flavors here.
No, they do have an impact on the final flavor. I don't know what long pepper or grains of paradise taste like, or what the yeast will do with the flavor compounds. In my experience, the quantity of spices in that volume will come through. I honestly feel like 20 cardamom pods will come through quite strongly, in my few years of experience of meads.
I've now found a site that sells them in my country and lo! Oh dear, so many other things I've never heard of to try too.
'Thanks?' :)
Which I would say is besides the point, the article was about recreating an ancient mead based on a recipe, which called for those ingredients.
Sometimes it's impossible to source the historical ingredients because they themselves have been lost (to memory or possibly entirely e.g. silphium), but that's not the case here. Both grains of paradise and long pepper are in active use, even if not in european cuisines.
"I used a pepper blend that included grains of paradise" sounds like they did have grains of paradise in there?
Going through so much effort to match the source material but not the minimal additional step to source the proper ingredients (which have not at all disappeared and are easily obtainable) is weird.
I call it the artistic dilettante last 5% laziness effect. As an artistic dilettante you make it mainly all done to your satisfaction but you don't sweat the final details which is for the small people to do, because, while you are totally focused and energetic until nearly done that last little bit makes you extremely lazy.
It's possible that the proportions suggested were something the brewer knew would be nasty. It's also possible the proportions for spice weren't given, instead being "to taste".
You should be able to get a water report from your municipality, listing any treatments they perform. Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store. I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product. I know plenty of breweries that just use fluoridated city water.
Note the special lid on that mason jar for allowing off-gassing. Fermenting in a mason jar with a standard lid is a recipe for exploding glass.
I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes.
If you don't want to play the guessing game on fermentation time, buy a hydrometer or refractometer.
Never heard of this. I've googled a bit around, and I think I'll try this in the future.
> I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes.
The caramelization process does slow the process down a good bit. I've made a few bochets, and I notice they go slower than other meads.
I've heard of people having issues using Ale yeasts with meads. The temperature of the house could have an impact. The lack of available nutrients (raisins a hotly debated topic in the mead community).
I would expect the Kveik yeast, the Lalvin D47, and maybe the "yeast party" to be faster than the S-04 and Saison yeast.
Temperature cycles. The barn wort batches are always more complicated flavors than the steady temperature basement batches.
Kveik has extreme Nutrient requirements compared to other yeasts. Likely also why the sample of that batched tasted off.
Distilled water minimizes variables of course, but it by itself indeed very non-historic.
I've never done a comparison myself, but I've seen this mentioned many times as a consideration when fermenting foods. A cursory search indicates that floride can have detrimental effects in wine yeasts as well.
Distilled water is no good, it lacks the minerals, and without minerals water has no flavor (and it's actually harmful to drink distilled water for too long).
I'm just glad our water is not fluoridated or chlorinated. There's evidence (citation needed) that drinking fluoridated water impacts neurological development, mood, behaviour, etc.
Chlorine can be removed just by leaving the water uncovered over night before brewing, but chloramine can't. Chloramine is common. Not treating for it risks chlorophenol creation in the finished product.
Citation definitely needed. General Ripper notwithstanding, the science doesn't seem to support the conclusion that the amount of fluoride that is intentionally added to drinking water is detrimental to health. (https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-study-show...)
Mead in current Russian is "medovuha" and that's it.
It sticks to you. It stays hot enough to burn you, while burning you, for an unintuitively long time. I've burned myself blacksmithing a few times and accidentally brushed red metal with a finger.
None of those burns have ever came close to the brilliant white hot, long lasting agony of molten sugar.
I’ve burned the shit out of myself making or eating mash potatoes before. Now I just take my time. No hurry to go from stove to bowl.
I think I went too far on the caramelisation though, and the finished product was a bit ashy.
Some yeast strains keep fermenting to (tolerate) a much higher ethanol percent than others, and the result of these more 'vigorous' yeasts is generally a 'dryer' result in brewing terms: A less 'sweet' result because all the sugars have been 'dried' out (ie roughly, consumed and converted to ethanol). This is not the only axis to think about here though! For mead to be 'sweet' in the end it either has to use a yeast that gives-up (for that much sugar) and hope that nothing else can live in there (not a bad bet for partially-fermented-honey actually), or to be sweetened after-the-fact (probably more common in modern 'Mead' products).
Fermentation involving a community of microorganisms (not just yeast) can often end up far dryer (especially given the time-frames they talk about in the article)! Many bugs can consume the 'waste' products that each other makes, and this variety can create enzymatically-linked cascades of molecular conversion-in-phases that can result in all sorts of unexpected "processing" of the "raw" molecules in the brew, including the hops components (if beer) and I'd think all those spices in traditional mead-recipes were probably undergoing some transformations too! Fascinating!
https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator
It calculates based on volume of the combined ingredients. I assume dissolving 1 pint of honey in 9 pints of water will result in less than 10 pints of total volume. I don't know exactly how much, but guessing 9.5 pints total, and using raw honey and raisins as the fermentables, I get 11% ABV with the high attenuation D47 yeast, and 8.7% with the low attenuation S-04.
Caramelization will reduce the fermentability of the honey, but I am not sure by how much. My guess is that it's a small effect.
EDIT: I grossly miscalculated the weight oz to lbs. This is only 1.5 lbs, which would be ~5-6%, making it more akin the ABV of a beer. Same caveat that it would have probably been lower due to the unfermentable sugars.
I cannot speak for how authentic is the modern day recipe compared to what the author found. But it’s a mead. It’s sweet and contains alcohol :)
Btw (bitter) beer mixed with mead makes for one delicious drink!
Mead is common, the specific "bochet" style mead (using caramelised honey), not so much.
The article is about bochet, very specifically. The article's introduction is pretty clear that both mead itself and various ancient styles of mead have survived to the modern age e.g.
> “It truly is a lost style. It’s not a historical style that has survived into the modern era,” says Heit. “It’s literally something that disappeared.”
Sounds like this stuff really is the bee's knees.
Ridiculous claim. You don't need to boil honey anymore as long as you use clean ingredients these days. Before boiling was used to remove impurities and kill bacteria. You can make hydromel or bochet without boiling anything.