Back in the mid-eighties, I got it into my head to try to make mead, a beverage something like wine that is made from honey. I had read of mead-halls and such, and knew generally that it was an ancient and magical beverage, steeped in lore and slyly present in literature. Heorot, Hrothgar's mead-hall in Beowulf, was the location for the beginning of the saga, when Grendel burst in to slaughter the revelers. Tolkein referred to Meduseld (Old English for "Mead-hall") as the great structure built in Rohan. The Norse legend of Kvasir is a mead creation myth. Intrigued by these and other mystical references, I wanted to make some, emboldened by my father's lifelong hobby of making wine and beer. However, searching through bookstores and libraries for any information on how to make it yielded scanty results. I made the most of it, and through trial and error developed my own system, adaptable for many varieties, that produced mead ranging from good to splendid. Since then I have taught many people how to make mead, and a good number of them have gone on to produce really fine mead of their own. One even produced a very useful E-book presenting his variation of my brewing method, The Lore and Craft of Mead.
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| A mead cellar is a grand treasure. |
This spiritual, magical craft has been a rewarding pursuit for me for most of my adult life, and last night I reached a milestone; I bottled my 100th batch of mead! Actually I got three batches out of their fermenting vessels and into gallon jugs for settling, and in the process realized that the four gallons of Licorice Blend Mead were batch number one hundred. In a little over twenty-five years I have used a literal ton of honey. According to Wikipedia, a quart of honey is the product of about 48,000 miles of bee travel, just to put that into some perspective. Thirty-five million miles of bee-flight...
When I make mead, I am acutely aware of the sheer wonder of all that insect work that produced the honey that I am using, of the incredible number of blossoms that were visited and pollinated by the bees, the fruits and berries that grew from that work that are cousins of a sort to the mead that I am making. It is a way to be very subtly and intimately connected to the world around me, and feels nothing short of magical. Something that I believe strongly is that, since bees are such communal creatures, since the whole process that culminates in a bottle of fine mead is so beautifully woven into the natural world around me, I should make every effort to pay homage to the bees, teamwork, and the blessings of nature when I open that bottle. I don't drink my mead (other than testing as I work on it) alone. I drink it with friends, with family, taking a bottle as a host-gift, opening a bottle when someone comes through the door for my hospitality.
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| Newly bottled mead. |
The other two batches that I worked on last night were a special batch that I made to share only with my Honey, which I find completely appropriate, the chosen bond of love being the ultimate teamwork, the ultimate magic, the ultimate blessing, and a batch of Oak Leaf Mead. The Oak Leaf Mead is a recent creation, taking a little-known craft of making oak leaf wine, and adapting it for mead. I find it especially pleasing, a mead based on oak leaf tea made from early growth leaves. The flavor of the tea is subtle and earthy, a bit like some green teas that I've had, and the resulting mead brings even more subtlety and earthiness. It helps that oak trees are so much steeped (heh) in lore and myth, symbols of strength, portals, and honor.
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