Outdoors On Edge
I’m not a good enough writer to convey just how bad my mead turned out. But I’m going to try.
But first … a little history.
Perhaps the oldest alcoholic drink in history, mead is made by fermenting honey mixed with water. Also known as honey wine or honey beer (despite not technically being either) mead carries an alcoholic content of between 3.5% ABV to more than 20%. Sometimes spices, grains or fruits are added to enhance the flavor.
Mead was probably first crafted by people in Africa some 40,000 years ago. The Chinese started making it about 7000 BC. The first written mention of mead occurred in Eastern Europe around 1700-1100 BC.
And while mead was enjoyed, celebrated and written about in the Golden Age of Ancient Greece, it was the Vikings who really put the drink on the map. The Scandinavian raiders were famous for making two strengths of the stuff and word of them downing the drink like water spread across the globe.
The word Honeymoon supposedly comes from the ancient tradition of giving newlyweds a month’s worth of mead (remember mead is also called honey wine … honey – moon. Get it?).
Mead has appeared in entertainment in everything from “Beowulf” to “Lord of the Rings” “Game of Thrones” to “How to Train Your Dragon.” And a lot of Viking movies.
I got the idea to make some mead about two months ago when my friend and local beekeeper buddy, John Sumners, was complaining about having an excess of honey. I suggested we make mead and found a mead making kit on Amazon. The kit boasts, “Be more than a mead drinker; be a mead maker! This Craft a Brew kit will turn mead lovers into mead brewers and give you all the independence, experience and fun that comes with brewing your own mead.”
The kit is “assembled by hand in Orlando, Florida” and “instilled with the core values of providing high-quality ingredients, elegant and effective design, and an environmentally sustainable mindset.”
Despite my not really being a “mead lover” or ever associating great mead as coming from Florida, I purchased the kit for $49.95.
John and I invited our friend, Mark Tippens, to our mead making gathering not because he knew anything about making mead but because he was bored and offered to bring beer. This would help as we would all soon find that pouring 25 pounds of raw honey into a kit and adding yeast and a bunch of other premeasured packets into a tub isn’t anything you want to do while sober. A case of beer later and the mead was ready to sit for a month of fermenting.
The three of us gathered last week to open our mead. Once again, lots of beer was involved. We opened the mead and found that it actually smelled pretty good. It was faintly sweet and was reminiscent of stale beer.
John used some tool he purchased off Amazon to test the drink and declared it to be just over 15% ABV. By comparison, the Miller Lite I was drinking is 4.2% ABV. OK, so this stuff will be a lot stronger. More than three times as strong.
But how will it taste? Like a wine cooler, Robitussin cough syrup, and hummingbird feeder liquid were all poured into a blender with a half a cup of Saccharin. Oh my Lord was it sweet. It tasted foul. Like rotted sugar. The drink jumped straight to my head, pulled out a meat cleaver, and came down hard.
My face twisted into agony, and I moaned in disgust. John and Mark did the same. Words cannot convey just how nasty that drink was. Considering that people have been making and drinking mead for dozens of centuries, I’m pretty sure ours was a bad batch as no one would ask for a second glass of the stuff we made.
The Vikings would have stayed home to knit rather than celebrate with the crap we made. It was heinous. Just god awful.
I poured the rest of my mead down John’s sink, announced that I hoped it wouldn’t ruin his pipes, and popped a beer. And then another. And then another. I kept drinking until the taste of rancid diabetes was flushed from my mouth.
Again, I’m not a good enough writer to convey just how bad that mead turned out. I tried but I know I didn’t do the experience justice.
Young is a Fredericksburg resident and avid outdoorsman whose work appears in the paper, Rock & Vine magazine, and other outdoor publications. Contact him at gayne@gaynecyoung. com.
