The Quest to Recreate a Lost and 'Terrifying' Medieval Mead | Hacker News Reader

The Quest to Recreate a Lost and 'Terrifying' Medieval Mead

atlasobscura.com

98 pointsrwmj39 comments

I've made this, but I have also used burnt honey as an adjunct in making imperial stouts.

It adds a toasted marshmallow note that goes very well with the roasted barley flavour.

One thing interesting thing is that boiling and burning honey attracts bees; I took to doing so at night and still bees would get into the house. These were African honey bees so may be a species thing, as they have a different temperament than other honey bees.

I remember that one university in my previous home town cross-bred Italian and African honeybees in an attempt to make a more docile bee.

One thing I found interesting while making bochet was just how many bees it attracted once it started heating up. I don't notice bees around my house regularly otherwise, but ended up closing all our doors and windows because we suddenly had 5+ bees flying around the kitchen.

You were literally "taking food out of the mouths of babies"!

I've made bochet. It's very different and quite tasty, and also a big hassle because you have to cook the honey for so long. The boiling honey smells amazing, though.

You can make it with a sous-vide heater. It still takes a very long time (20h!), but at least the honey doesn't boil so you don't need to watch it. Here's a youtuber doing it (and I have done something similar so I can vouch it works): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTcniVE3sU0

Where the hell can you find raw honey though? Anything in the store seems to be pasteurized.

Although, I wonder, if you're cooking it like this anyway, does it matter if it's raw?

Raw honey is common here, in Florida. Lots of small stores have some from local beekeepers. I buy mine at the feed store where I get my layer's mash.

I think unless you have your own bees or know someone it's probably very difficult. However you can make a mead/bochet just fine with ordinary store-bought honey. Be aware that there is a surprising amount of fake honey (dyed sugar syrup) out there.

Nasty stuff, prison napalm. Even artisanal prison napalm.

What’s the point of using honey if you’re just going to cook it until it’s caramelised. Might as well just use sugar syrup.

Back in medieval times, says Verberg, “They weren’t extracting the honey, they were crushing it.” In addition to bits of wax, the medieval meadmakers also had pollen and the occasional squished bee in their raw material—components missing from modern honey that would have added more flavor. For example, propolis, a sticky, antibacterial compound that bees produce for colony health, has a zingy taste, and beeswax itself can impart a fuller mouthfeel. “I found that that contamination is really good, and we’re really missing it,” says Verberg, a beekeeper who has made traditional meads.

...when you spin out your own combs, it's actually quite difficult to avoid some contamination. I do try to prevent bits of bees however, because very few people seem to appreciate finding legs in their gifted jars of honey. ;)

>> beeswax itself can impart a fuller mouthfeel.

Yup. Eating wax will do that. It probably had other interesting impacts throughout the digestive process.

Sometimes I knowingly eat some of the wax that is used to coat some cheeses like Gouda, and I have not felt any digestive issues.

Aren’t American chocolates mostly wax?

The cheap stuff, such as Hersheys. And not mostly, just enough to taste like crap.

How is honey extracted from honeycombs nowadays?

IIRC combs are removed, any bee on the comb is shooed away, the comb is uncapped, put into a centrifuge, the honey is extracted, then it’s filtered to remove more contaminants.

Thanks.

Centrifuges. Before, all the bees are shooed away to avoid the extra protein.

Thanks.

I wonder if just that little bit of trace of bee venom did anything to prevent bee allergies.

Not much. Venoms are usually not poisons.

Anaphylaxis doesn't care if it's a poison or peanut butter.

For allergy reactions, substances in the digestive tract get a different immune response from ones in the bloodstream. In some cases you can desensitize people to allergens through trace exposures in food. I think that stops working once you experience an anaphylactic response but the scenario I proposed would happen long before for most people.

Can you elaborate on that?

The usual saying is along the lines that a poison is something that harms when you ingest, while a venom harms when you inject.

The normal application of a venom is to go from the venom gland to the bloodstream pretty directly (possibly via the mouth).

The evolution of venom has thus usually prioritised efficacy, with little need for resilience. So venoms are not resilient to environmental factors (stomach acid, digestive enzymes, they often denature quickly just in air), nor will they be adapted to going through epithelial tissue (skin, gut lining, ...). The odds that they would be able to enter the bloodstream through the digestive system are limited to non-existent.

There's a caveat if you suffer from ulcers or open wounds in your digestive tract (or on your skin for contact), as those are openings into the organism which would allow venom through much more easily, but barring that you can literally drink venom and suffer no significant effects (well the gut flora might be affected which is not great). Though don't go and try it obviously, even if the risk is nigh non-existent, it's also 100% not worth it.

Now it should be noted that some products are both e.g. a few snakes will "spit", and their venom can affect mucous membranes or go through them (so it's poisonous). Also injecting a poison into your bloodstream directly is generally a very bad idea, if something burns / breaks down skin on contact, it's not going to be milder if it starts inside the organism.

Medieval brewers didn’t have access to the wealth of sugar variations available on our shelves today. I don’t think so anyway.

Also, honey caremelises at a much lower temperature (as low as 70C) compared to sucrose and glucose (~160C) and fructose (~110C). Not sure how that changes the flavour profile, but it probably contributes towards the danger vibes that this article tries so hard to emphasise.

This suggests that sugar was introduced to Western Europe by the Crusades. So depending on the exact date, the brewers may not have had sugar alternatives to honey at all! Crazy to think that something considered such a basic ingredient in cooking may not have been available at all.

https://makingsenseofsugar.com/all-about-sugar/history-of-su....

Well, where would it have grown? Sugar cane is a tropical plant. It's only modern (well, post Age of Sail) transportation logistics that makes it available to global consumers.

A lot of sugar is produced from sugar beet - particularly in climates too cold for sugar cane.

The method for extracting sugar from beets was discovered only in the Renaissance (most typically attributed to the French agronomist Olivier de Serres (1539-1619), so medieval people wouldn't have access to beet sugar even if they had beets.

Not only that but the modern sugar beet is a completely different beast bred for the task, with 10x more sugar than the average food beetroot.

Precolumbian European cooking was missing a whole lot of now-basic ingredients, among them tomatoes, potatoes, capsicum, and common beans.

> Also, honey caremelises at a much lower temperature (as low as 70C) compared to sucrose and glucose (~160C) and fructose (~110C).

Honey is about 70% fructose + glucose.

It's about 16-19% water.

So I'm not sure why it would caramelise at significantly lower temperatures than its constituent parts would suggest.

My hives may skew slightly as my bees harvest primarily from Australian native trees which can (seasonally) lead to a higher glucose:fructose ratio (and more prone to candying) but a recent composition report follows:

    Moisture 17.6%
    pH 4.08
    Electrical conductivity  0.32 (mS/cm)
    Hydroxymethylfurfural 1.7 (mg/kg)
    Sugar - Fructose 38.8%
    Sugar - Glucose 29.5%
    Sugar - Sucrose < 0.5%

> Honey is about 70% fructose + glucose.

> It's about 16-19% water.

> So I'm not sure why it would caramelise at significantly lower temperatures than its constituent parts would suggest.

Wikipedia states:

> The temperature at which caramelization begins varies, depending on the composition, but is typically between 70 and 110 °C (158 and 230 °F). Honey also contains acids, which act as catalysts for caramelization. The specific types of acids and their amounts play a primary role in determining the exact temperature.

The citation is "Zdzisław E. Sikorski Chemical and functional properties of food components CRC Press 2007 p. 121 ISBN 0-8493-9675-1". It's not publicly available, so I can't cite it, but if you're really interested you should try to find and read it.

I think the citation, on the wikipedia page[0] applies to the sentence after the one you're quoting.

I've looked at (and around) page 121 of Sikorski and don't see anything definitive about caramelising temperatures for honey.

I've searched the book and reviewed all references to 'honey' as well as 'caramel...' and I can't see anywhere these claims are made regarding catalytic acids, or that specific range for honey.

Yes, specific ranges for fructose (about 40% in honey) and glucose (~30%), but those numbers vary substantially from what GP was claiming about honey.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey

I'll try to hunt that down later, but the effect of those acids at very low concentration must be profound to affect the caramelisation of fructose/glucose at such a drastically different temperature.

Frustratingly the author of TFA doesn't actually specify temperatures anywhere, just uses the word 'boil' - so I'm guessing it's 100 (celsius, natch).

Though I'm assuming the boiling temperature of honey isn't going to be the same as the caramelisation threshold.

That’s a fantastic reference, thank you.

Is it worse than Klingon blood wine?

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