Ey, greetings to you. And I hope this day finds you well. I am His Lordship Rory McGowen. And I hear that you wish to accompany me whilst I make a batch of Mead. Tis true, that I make mead. And tis true as well, that I can show you how. But pray you, keep in mind, that this information is not to be taken lightly. I have seen the Mothers strike a man blind for disrespectfully making a batch of mead in an ill fashion. Wisdom is not a toy. And only the patient man can bring forth the best from the barrels. So pay heed my words carefully, whence you try this yourself.
Let us start a nice basic simple mead. We should start this task full knowing that it is one of the most simple of tasks. And yet it is the most difficult task if you want it to taste good. One of the difficulties of with this is that there are no outside flavors to cover up our mistakes. Every ingredient we use need be chosen for purity and flavor.
In Mead, there are three ingredients. They are water, honey, and the muck. And if we are to adhere to this standard, we must ensure that our ingredients naturally contain the essentials needed to successfully bless our batch, while not disturbing the flavor of the finished product. The other thing that we must take into consideration is the drinker's taste. Most people like a sweeter mead over a dry one.
First, the water. All the ingredients are crucial, but as the majority of the mead is water, it is important to find the best tasting, cleanest water as possible. I have built my brew house fairly close to a natural spring river, and I keep people and animals out of it on the upstream side of the hall for about a furlong to make sure that I get fresh water. I also use buckets sealed with bee's wax to fetch the water, so that nothing foul seeps in from the bucket's wood. In simple mead, there are no other flavors to cover your mistakes. Now, speaking of water, go about with that bucket and fetch five fold full, and bring them here to my kettle. When you are done with that, we'll continue.
You did well. Now stoke the fire under the kettle and then come here.
Honey is the most widely varied part of the mead. Honey that comes from one side a field can taste nothing like a honey from the other side of the same field! Not to mention, taste is subjective. One person may like wildflowers, and the next could hate them. I tend not to like wildflower honey because the major flavor is usually marigold, which is not desirable to me. Clover honey is usually widely accepted, but can leave a "common" flavor, and little body to the finished mead. Honey fetched from a hive near fruit trees or grapes, such as mine is, is especially pleasant on the tongue.
But avoid the green honey. Green honey is generally made from plants that will leave a man dead, and that poison is carried by the bees to the hive.
For this batch, we are going to use honey from a new swarm, and the hives were in proximity to the mead house with plenty of grape vines for the bees to gather from. This added a rich, fullness to the honey and will subtly influence the final flavor of the mead.
The Muck that mead houses use usually comes from years of brewing. A young brewer would get some from a Master when he had learned the craft and was ready to set out on his own. That Master would have gotten his from a Master before him, and so forth. I happen to get mine from the owner of the local pub. He had been making his own meads and ales for some time, and was getting too old to continue in comfort. So, we struck upon a deal. I would make the mead and ale, and he would sell it. I sell to the private sector as well, Lords, Ladies, Barons and Viscounts that are above going into a common tavern. My more common meads and ales go to the tavern, and the better beverages go to the Households of the titled.
But the Muck is very important. Without it, the mead either doesn't become, or it tastes terrible, or even strikes a man blind. I keep my muck in clay jars sealed with waxed cloth on the self over on that wall. Fetch us a jar, would you? At the end of each batch of mead, I take the muck that that batch provides and I seal that into its own jar. It only takes a mug full of the muck to seed the mead, and in the end, the mead returns to us ten fold. A mead maker should never run out of muck.
To begin making Mead, there are several tools that you will need. First you will need a large kettle the size of which will hold seven buckets of water. As I told you, my bucket is sealed with wax to prevent anything from tainting the flavor of the wood. You will also need a spoon with which to stir with. If you have a woodwright carve one for you, make sure that he puts a single slot in the spoon, it adds to the ability to stir the ingredients well. I bet you didn't know that, eh? And again, since it's wood, you should seal it with bee's wax. You will also need the clay pots and stoppers to hold your muck. You will need at least one barrel in which to put the mead and a funnel to put the mead into the barrel. I use two barrels for each batch, at least. I'll explain in a minute, I'm still talking about the tools. A candle the size of your first finger, and you will also need an egg. Trust me, its a tool in our trade.
Begin by heating the water in the kettle. A good trick is to only heat half the water, and make the mead far, far sweeter that you intend the final mead to be. You'll understand in a minute. Light the candle. Now start adding the honey to the water, little by little. This is now called the must. And keep stirring the kettle, you don't want the bottom to burn, it will change the flavor. Now stoke the fire a bit.
I didn't tell you to stop stirring. . . Now add more honey. All in all, you want to add about a bucket of honey. Once you have all the honey in the kettle, and you are still stirring, you will see foam forming in the center of the kettle. Skim this off with your spoon. This foam is the Mothers' way of getting things out of the mead that should not be there. Here, I'll stir for a minute, you take a close look at the foam. You will notice that there are little bee parts, small leaves, pieces of the hive, and whatever else fell into the water or the honey on its way to the mead house. That's enough playing, get back over here and stir. You're the one learning, remember?
Take the egg and place it in the mead. If the egg floats with more or less half of it out of the mead, then we have the right amount of honey in our mead. If not, you should add a bit more. Remember the candle I had you light? Take a look at it. It is mostly burned to nothing. When it burns fully, the mead is ready to take off the fire. I will finish stirring the mead while you fetch a barrel and place it in the holder over there. Move along. Good. Now place that funnel into the hole in the top of the barrel. You will notice that this barrel has a spigot on one of the ends. That is so that we can easily transfer the mead from one barrel to another.
Pour the rest of the water that we didn't use for the must into the barrel. This water is cool, and it will cool the must quickly so we can add the muck. I learned early on that if you add the muck to the must while the must is hot, the mead doesn't become. So I put half the water into the must, the other half in the barrel. It cools the must appropriately enough. Now, help me with this kettle, and watch yourself, it's hot. There we go. . . pour. That's it. Good, done. Now pour us a mug full of muck from the clay pot, replace the stopper quickly, and pour the mug of muck into the top of the barrel. Now stop up the barrel with that plug.
Help me put your barrel up on the rack with the others. You will notice that the entire rack of barrels starts several feet off the ground. This is so that other barrels will fit under even the lowest barrel. I use the space under that to store supplies and bottles.
Now we let it still for one moon. But, since you are here now, we can work with a barrel that has been sitting for about a full moon. First, let's taste this barrel. If it doesn't taste good now, it may not taste good later. We are also tasting for sweetness. Sometimes, if a mead is too sweet at this point in time, I will add some water to it to thin it out. Other times it may not be sweet enough, so I add some honey. But after a while, you get the hang of it and you seldom have to make sweetness adjustments. Sometimes the Mothers are angry at us and the taste of a mead may not be right. So to this you add herbs, and tell people you did it on purpose and charge more for it. Some herbs you might use would be ginger, rosemary, rose petals, clove, spice, whatever you feel the mixture needs. In some cases, it is whatever you happen to have on hand. I happen to be very lucky. There is a merchant that travels through here once a moon with fruits and spices from exotic, far off places. He and I do a fair bit of trading; I get things with which to add to meads and wines, and he gets meads and wines which he can sell. But try this, I think you will agree, that this barrel of mead taste very healthy.
So we need to drain it off into a second barrel. Position the second barrel under the first and open the spigot. Once the first barrel seems to be done, stop up the second one and move it aside for a moment. Fetch one of the empty clay pots, would you? Hold it under the spigot, and watch. As you can see, barrels are not flat on the sides, they sort of bow outward in the middle. Tilt the barrel up in the back, and the muck comes out of the barrel. Lots of it. Much more than we put in! This will then be stopped up and placed on the self. Take this now empty barrel out back and scrub it while I move the barrels around a bit and put the new barrel up in the rack.
Good, you're back. Cleaning barrels isn't any fun, is it? But now we need to let the mead sit for another moon. But again, since you are here, you can help me with a different barrel that has been sitting around for that second moon.
First, lets pour a little into a mug. Take a look at it. Is it clear? Good. It should be. Now smell it. Goodness that smells great! Now taste it. Yum. That tastes great. We can either rack this mead into a new barrel for sale in bulk, or we can bottle it for use in the pub. This one I think needs to be racked into a new barrel for sale to a noble.
Thank you for coming by and learning. I wouldn't call you a Master yet, but you at least have an understanding of how Mead is made, and what goes into it, right? Hey, for you help today, how about I give you a bottle of mead to take home tonight to the family? And I'll even give you one of the good ones I save back for myself. This bottle has been sitting in the bottle rack for nearly two years now. Drink to your health, and may the gods smile happiness on you. Anytime you want to come back, don't hesitate to come on by, I can usually be found here.
HL Rory McGowen
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