Behold the mead thread ...

Belgar

Belgar

The Wallonian Redneck.
Mar 3, 2003
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Yes, some might say "oh dear, here comes the redneck with another beer related thread" .... yes my dear friends of the suncross; I have decided in concert with a few monks friends from the Leffe and Chimay breweries to dedicate this thread to all beer, mead, wine, cheese,.. related produces.

The above does not include cheap US mainstream watered down beer.

A way to share the joyce of what we all love and for others the art of mead brewing,...

Anyways ... since I am stranded in a snow filled Florida, I will resume my activities and finish this bottle of Mr.Boston Eggnog and Leffe beer.

Due to royalties that Youtube has decided not to pay, I want to promote my Jager adventures and hope for others to share their drinking ventures in the deep woods.

http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/amon-amarth/260345-belgars-jagermeister-adventures.html

http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/amon-amarth/260577-belgars-jagermesiter-adventures-part-2-a.html
 
Mead isnt a beer, more like a wine. and all you have to do to make it is get some honey, mix with water. and add yeast. a lot more complicated then that but thats the basics.
 
Mead is great ... it reminds me of the mead that we could drink at Wacken; that is if you could fight your way in through all the bees.

Mead is fermented honey, I last drank some at Wacken and in Belgium at a Gallic open air museum, depending of the kind, it can taste more like a sugary white wine than regular beer. The one glass I drank in Belgium got me tipsy rather quickly.
Usually sugar turns into alcohol but I don't know why they prefered honey to other fruits that also contain sugar .... maybe Tyra can enlighten us.

Wacken fans will remember this one
P8060034.jpg
 
heh, we have a few Leffe bars in France, they're totally invading us! France to the french! Get those Waloon belgians off our territory!
lol just kidding, i have no problem with other european brothers, especially not walloons, blood brothers, we shall prevail! :p

anyway, i drink mead quite often. Whats cool about paris is that its, like what we learn in geography class, a central world-city or whatever the translation is in english. It contains rare products like specialised hospitals, international congresses, economical centers... AND MEAD and whatever other cool products you want.
I live 15 minutes away from this medieval shop where they sell lots of awsome stuff... the owner is a fascist but people aren't supposed to know that :p only us priviledged nationalists know it. hehe, i'm drunk right now sorry... the hollidays just started so i went out, just got back and decided to say hi to all of ya!
 
a lot of liquor stores sell chaucer's mead, which is a little on the "winey" side, but it comes witha sack of herbs and directions for mulling, which comes out really good.
 
Belgar said:
Usually sugar turns into alcohol but I don't know why they prefered honey to other fruits that also contain sugar .... maybe Tyra can enlighten us.
Click to expand...
I can, at least partially. Honey is already a liguid (don't need to spend extra time txtracting the liquid from another fruit), it's easier to ferment and still keep a good taste than most other natural sugars. They did not have some of the other liquid types of sugar, like maple syrup, sugar cane syrup, molasses and corn syrup at the time/in Scandianvia.
Mainly, though, I believe mead came into the culture by way of the religion. In almost all Indo-European religions, there is a holy drink made with honey. As the religious rituals would have entailed the use of this holy drink both for drink and sacrifice, and as the religion spread, the mead spread with it. So the use of honey to make alcohol may not seem the best way to do so in Scandinavian terms, but if the religion originated in India or Anatolia or on the steppes, then it may have been one of the few sources of natural sugar available when the first rites were performed and then it spread from there.

If you're interested in how to make it, you should ask Runesinger about mead. She's the highest authority on meadmaking that I know. Her stuff is gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood. :worship:
 
That's great info. It would be nice to know if in anthropology you can study the origin of alcohol in cultures. It does sound fascinating to ask why alcohol came into a culture and why cultures had this urge to make alcoholic beverages instead of the typical juices. I guess it was the after effect. I am sure that more often than not the alcoholic beverages were used in some religious rites.

So what's everybody's fav beer right now? do any of you enjoy beer and cheese. I know back home in Belgium, it is very typical for beer to have its own cheese made with the actual beer and it sure tastes great.
 
Never heard of that, but in Sweden we have Brännvinsost which is great, flavoured with some kind of liquer. Västerbotten is otherwis one of the best cheeses in Sweden, but we have lots of good ones. Other than that, I dont eat anything but Dutch or Swiss ones.

Concearning mead, Iäve tried both wine-tasting ones and beer-tasting ones, some better than others, but now around chrstmas time, theres a market with a guy who sells mead from his own brewery, very good stuff of the wine-tasting sort.
 
Jagermeister... the quickest way to flush a week's wages down the drain.

I went on a tour of local liquor stores, and found I was right, not a drop of mead or even anything similar to be found. I did, however, run across my old friend Bärenjäger, so one will make do as he must. ;)
 
Belgar said:
That's great info. It would be nice to know if in anthropology you can study the origin of alcohol in cultures. It does sound fascinating to ask why alcohol came into a culture and why cultures had this urge to make alcoholic beverages instead of the typical juices. I guess it was the after effect. I am sure that more often than not the alcoholic beverages were used in some religious rites. quote]
Yes, yes and yes. You can major and specialize in the study of alcohol or even specific forms of alcohol in anthropology, ethnology and archaeology. My own thesis paper (in ethnoarchaeology) deals with the political aspects of commensal feasting, much of it entailing the study of mead and it's symbolic and political meaning in the Germanic Iron Age. One of my friends wrote his paper on beer and its origin and political impact. You can read about some of the things I will cover in my thesis here if you're interested:
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba57/feat2.html

Bees, an by extention, honey, were coupled with fertility in many pre-Christian religions. After one got married, the host of the weddingfeast was supposed to supply a months' worth of honey alcohol - mead - for all the guests in order to ensure that the new couple would have high fertility. Hence the word "honeymoon". You may note that mead became more or less obsolete in the western cultures after the coming of Christianity, which is a religion that uses wine for its religious rituals. So do judaism and islam. There was an allure of the exotic that was used as a powertool for the Christians. Since grapes do not grow well in Scandinavia, and people liked to express status by owning and giving exotic materials as far back as the mesolithic, one was just though of as more powerful if one could supply wine rtather than mead, since everyone could collect the ingredients for mead. Imagine how powerful Jesus must have seemed to these people!

I copied this excerpt from some notes I made for an exam i wrote once about holy alcoholic beverages made with honey during pre-history. It is about the Pre-Indo-European language(s). Thought it suited the topic at hand. (Bates - apply duct tape before you read!)
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba57/feat2.html

The names for a number of insects can be reconstructed in the protolanguage, including the WASP (*wops ), the hornet (*k s-ro-, a derivative of ker-1, “head,” from the shape of the insect), and the fly (*m -). The BEE (bhei-) was particularly important as the producer of honey, for which we have the common Indo-European name melit- (MILDEW). Honey was the only source of sugar and sweetness (sw d-, “sweet,” is ancient), and notably was the base of the only certain Indo-European alcoholic beverage, medhu-, which in different dialects meant both MEAD (“wine” in Greece and Anatolia) and “honey.”

Click to expand...
 
No need... linguistics I'm down with, even if not exceptionally gifted. The only time I usually have problems is with slang terms, as I don't actually speak anything but English and really broken Spanish. :)
 
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