Vikings Mead

Brun Bjørn

Brun Bjørn

Kirche von Flammen
Dec 7, 2006
8
0
1
Brazil
Well, I was here looking at sites about meads such as www.gotmead.com and www.meadworks.ca and I found out that there are lots of types of meads..
I would like to know if any of you know what is the actual Mead that the vikings drank, and if by any chance you know a recipe that isn't a prank or whatever without any grounds...

Thanks a lot for the attention,
Brun Bjørn.

:kickass::headbang:
 
Have you tried searching the forum about this topic? I'm sure you could find a lot of information.
 
The kind of mead that Vikings made would make you sick today, unless you live in the slum and your stomch is used to contaminated stuff. Old style mead is also not made for the modern palate - a lot of the stuff they ate or drank back in pre-history tastes gross to us in this day and age, because we are used to refined sugar, salt, flour and so on.
Mead was made with fermented honey and water. That's the basic recipe. The spices varied, but medesweet was very common. The honey was unpasteurised, and the fermentation process was done in vats. They didn't have glass stoppers, thermometres and ways to calculate alcohol content the way we do today, so if you want to make a "true Viking mead", then you have to make several batches by trial and error until you get it right. You have to learn how hot the water must be for fermentation, how much honey you like and so on. Then you have to strain the dirt, seeds, spices, flies and other crap out of it as you pour it to drink it. Lovely stuff. Wouldn't recommend it.
I think you should try a recipe off the net like you had originally intended, something simple without fruit, just spices, like a spiced mead, or just plain with no flavouring at all. (The fruit makes it more difficult to calculate fermentation rates etc., and it'll be more difficult to get a decent result with your first batch. You have to add tanin - naturally occuring in black tea - too offset vitamin c to prevent it from ruining the fermentation and so on, so start with something simple.) Or you could PM Runesinger or Sleipnir. They're on the ball in terms of mead.
 
Tyra said:
The kind of mead that Vikings made would make you sick today, unless you live in the slum and your stomch is used to contaminated stuff. Old style mead is also not made for the modern palate - a lot of the stuff they ate or drank back in pre-history tastes gross to us in this day and age, because we are used to refined sugar, salt, flour and so on.
Mead was made with fermented honey and water. That's the basic recipe. The spices varied, but medesweet was very common. The honey was unpasteurised, and the fermentation process was done in vats. They didn't have glass stoppers, thermometres and ways to calculate alcohol content the way we do today, so if you want to make a "true Viking mead", then you have to make several batches by trial and error until you get it right. You have to learn how hot the water must be for fermentation, how much honey you like and so on. Then you have to strain the dirt, seeds, spices, flies and other crap out of it as you pour it to drink it. Lovely stuff. Wouldn't recommend it.
I think you should try a recipe off the net like you had originally intended, something simple without fruit, just spices, like a spiced mead, or just plain with no flavouring at all. (The fruit makes it more difficult to calculate fermentation rates etc., and it'll be more difficult to get a decent result with your first batch. You have to add tanin - naturally occuring in black tea - too offset vitamin c to prevent it from ruining the fermentation and so on, so start with something simple.) Or you could PM Runesinger or Sleipnir. They're on the ball in terms of mead.
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Thanks for the props hun. Lisa and I have 3 going as we speak, a pumpkin, a cyser and a pumpkin/cyser blend......all 3 smell awesome so far and with a little help from Aegir should hopefully come out like all the others we have done........if you need any help with recipes, let me know.
 
Depends somewhat on the variety, but it's closer to wine then beer in texture (Dunno if that's the right word, but it's the best I can think of), but mead pretty much tastes like mead. I've not really found any other way to describe it. But if you're referring to the taste of alcohol in hard liquor, no, not in any of the one's I've tried. Try and describe what beer is like to someone who's never had it. :p
 
Det Som Engang Var said:
I've never had mead...some Viking I am :erk:

I love beer though. Is it easy to down like beer, or nasty like hard liquor?
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It depends on the mead. A semisweet mead tastes a bit like white wine. A dry mead could taste a little like beer if you put some sparkle in it. More like a beer-whiskey boilermaker, because dry mead has a slight whiskeylike taste, and it's quite a bit stronger than beer. It's fairly easy to down, but you don't want to overdo it or you'll get drunk on your @$$ and wake up feeling Thor's been beating on your head with his hammer. I even have a recipe named Thor's Hammer for that reason.

My next planned mead is a dry sparkling to see if it is a little like beer.
 
I once heard that back then the word mead was basically interchangeable with ale. That ales were spiced with honey rather than hops. I read once that the dark type of "mead" described in some sources as the the mead Vikings drank was probably basically an ale (albeit still a horrid unrefined ale) with honey in it.

But since I don't remember the exact sources or fact/opinions I read take this tidbit with a huge grain of salt.

I haven't made mead yet, but I just made a nice porter. Any suggestions on a good mead variety to start with? I was thinking either a traditional mead or a melomel of some variety, not too interested in cysers though.
 
Mead (IPA: /ˈmiːd/) is a fermented alcoholic beverage made of honey, water, and yeast. Meadhing (ˈmɛ.ðɪŋ) is the practice of brewing honey. Mead is also colloquially known as "honey wine". A brewery that deals specifically in mead is called either a meadery or a mazery.

The first known description of mead is in the hymns of the Rigveda,[1] one of the sacred books of the historical Vedic religion and (later) Hinduism dated around 1700–1100 BC. During the "Golden Age" of Ancient Greece, mead was said to be the preferred drink.[2] Aristotle (384–322 BC) discussed mead in his Meteorologica and elsewhere, while Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) called mead militites in his Naturalis Historia and differentiated wine sweetened with honey or "honey-wine" from mead.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead

Ancient mead doesnt seem that bad to drink.
 
Tyra, I live in Brazil.. So that means that I DO live on the slum! Haha anyways I did get your tip, viking mead would be very hard on doing.. However, my biggest obstacle on meadhing would be of finding the equipment necessary for it(I looked the equipment in an ancient post of Sleipnir on Gorlith's topic 'Brewing').. I'm not sure, but I think that we don't have food grade plastics here in Brazil.. actually, we don't have any grade at all :erk:
Sleipnir, the gallons that you mention are on which measurement? American or British Imperial? Here in Brazil one gallon means 20L, but I was convinced that you didn't mean Brazilian gallons, that not even Thor could drink! You left a recipe on that topic, I'll probably get that one, since I want to do plain mead.. I will later on talk to you about it also, ask questions on what to do probably ;)
Runesinger, I loved the name Thor's Hammer for the recipe haha, made me get some good laughs :lol:

Gorlith
"The words for mead and ale are used interchangeably in the ON and AS texts, depending on the rythm and rhyme of the stanza. This is because ale was not "hopped" until about much later on, but both mead and ale were spiced with hops and medesweet. Mead is made with honey and flavoured with hops, while it was common to flavour ale with honey. So the two drinks tasted quite similar while the breweing process differs. Mead was a holy drink, and after conversion, the use of it dies out. To top it all off, hops were added to the ale, then it turned into beer, so then beer and ale took over. The difference between beer and ale didn't become law until much, much later in history."

Source: Tyra at Brewing topic (the one you started haha)

Well, thats it.. I hope to make my own mead soon! :headbang:
 
Ha, well of course any good info I have can be traced back to Tyra. : P
Man I havnt taken a look at that brewing topic I started in like a year I think haha. Time to take a look.
 
Ha ha, that's funny. I thought that might have been me...I had to learn a lot about it for my thesis paper.
If I am making a smaller batch, I use a big ass glass bottles for the brewing. We can buy apple cider in these big gallon jugs, and that's what I've used sometimes. If you really, really can't find a stopper, then there are alternatives for them, too. Don't you have any wine-making places close to where you live? They're usually quite helpful. Otherwise the net has supplies (but you need a credit card for that, most of the time...).
 
On Friday, I was going out with my true grim viking friends and I drank something called Odin's Drink. It is something between Met and beer. The barkeeper told me what it is exactly, but I must admit, I was too drunk already to remember it. I think it was something housemade like beer, just with honey. We endet up discussing how they made the bees eating the malt and so I forgot about the receipe :(
But it tasted just great!
 
All this talk of mead has made me stop procrastinating. I finally got the brew pot out. I am working on a batch of dry mead so I can give some to Tyra and her husband, as they have never tried my dry mead before. It's a recipe I have called Bifrost. Tyra and her husband have tried all my other recipes, but they have tried this one.

I started it at 25% sugar, so it should be about 14-15% alcohol when it finishes out (I like to make it strong!) :kickass:

This is assuming that it will ferment out completely. Sometimes mead has a mind of its own.
 
this thread made me buy a bottle of mead last week..
i was so curious about what it tastes like.. and... i don't like it at all... :yuk: :lol:
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