Mead and Myths

I've gone on about mead before here, but not lately. The last frothy carboy I showed was this raspberry melomel from Havoc in Hastings two years ago.

I'll probably repeat myself somewhat, so if you've read the previous post you can go take a knitting break now.

First off, what is mead? Mead is a beverage made by fermenting honey. According to Louis Lémery's 1745 A Treatise of All Sorts of Foods,

"Mead fortifies the Stomach and Heart, revives the Spirits, helps Refpiration, keeps off the Inconveniencies of a bad Air, and is good for the Wind-Cholic; it opens the Body a little, and is wholefome for thofe that cough, and have the Phthific."

Your basic alcoholic beverage is made by taking yeast and giving it some kind of fermentable sugar to consume. The yeast gobbles up the sugar and generates carbon dioxide and alcohol.

There are all kinds of variations on this theme: if the fermentable sugars are from grapes, we call it wine. If they come from grain, it's beer. If the fermentable sugar is honey, the resulting beverage is mead.

Making mead is fairly easy: you need water, honey, and yeast, a nice clean container that will hold them and keep out contaminants, and time. There are lots of variations on mead, and lots of meadmakers who tinker with the process, but those are the basic three.

Each of the three ingredients makes a difference in the end product. Water can be hard or soft. It can contain minerals that will affect the fermentation and the final flavor. Honey can come from any of hundreds of blossoming plants, from buckwheat to blueberry fields. The flavor of the starting honey will affect the end product.

And yeast can make so much difference that I'm giving it its own paragraph! There are so many brewing yeasts out there that it's hard to know where to start. A heavy-duty champagne yeast, for example, probably has a high alcohol tolerance. It will consume a lot of the sugar and leave you with a dry mead that's fairly high in alcohol. A beer yeast, in general, is going to tolerate less alcohol and leave the mead sweeter.

(Go on off to Google and look up "beer yeast". You might be gone for a while, so you might want to take a bathroom break and bring some snacks along!)

I'll take a little side trip myself and say that the same is true for bread yeast. If you make lots and lots of bread with Red Star bread yeast, eventually you start to notice the character of that yeast. Especially if you switch to Fleischmann's, and suddenly your bread tastes different to you.

But wandering back to the subject of mead, let's talk about time. As a person who has done a lot of tatting, and a fair amount of fine-gauge knitting, I've heard "You must have incredible patience" more times than I can count. So I'm not going to say that meadmaking takes patience. It takes time, and storage room, but patience is optional.

How do you get 15-year-old mead without patience? My husband starts some about every year or so. The new bottles go to the back of the shelf. He doesn't drink a whole lot, so eventually he ends up with mead that's been on the shelf for five years or more. And since he doesn't drink a lot, he hands around a fair bit of mead to our friends in the Society for Creative Anachronism and the members of his local homebrewing club.

Now that I've popped the bubble of the patience myth, I have to comment on the idea of going blind from doing fine work.

I asked my eye doctor about this one a couple of years ago, in the course of talking about doing fine work and whether or not it was time to go for bifocals yet. Specifically, I'm talking about Chinese embroidery and the so-called "forbidden stitch". (A couple of good articles are here and here.) My question was "Is it possible to do damage to the eye by doing something like that?" and his short answer was no. It might cause eyestrain (soreness of the focussing muscles of the lens), but not blindness.

However, the most recent time I went in for glasses, I asked about floaters, those annoying specks inside the eye. This time around, I was told that floaters were harmless, BUT if lots of them showed up suddenly, or I saw sparks or streaks of light, to get my eyes checked immediately.

I'm pretty near-sighted. That means my eyes, instead of being round eyeballs, are a little on the egg-shaped side.

The first thing that does is give me no distance vision. Everything outside about six inches is blur zone.

The second thing it does is give me superior close-up vision. I'm told that people with 20-20 vision can't see everything all nice and sharp up close the way I can, poor blind things.

But the third thing, the one the eye doctor warned me about, was that extremely near-sighted people are somewhat more vulnerable to retinal detachment. (Booo!)

So there's my hypothesis: maybe instead of something about the fineness of the embroidery causing blindness, the embroiderers were near-sighted people who unfortunately suffered retinal detachment.

Lazy Summer Blogging

Aside from getting owls' dinners dropped on me, I've been doing and seeing and thinking about things I mean to blog about, and then thinking, "Oh, but I should do X post first."

Good old perfectionism. And if I wait to post about X first, I'll never get to Y or Z or back to A again, so I figured I better do a random, jumbled-up post and clear some of this stuff out of my brain.

Yesterday I went to the Lake Michigan beach with my husband and our son. There was no wind! This is very unusual. We almost always (I would have said always, but not yesterday!) have a lake breeze, generally onshore most of the day, then offshore at night.

With no wind, the water was flat and calm. The child waded in the freezing-cold stream, then when he went into the lake, it felt warm, so he immersed himself. I walked up and down on the sand and picked up stones.These days I try to limit myself to small coin-size stones, otherwise my house would be avalanched. The ones in the dish are mainly crinoid fossils.

When I pick them up, I think how different Michigan is now compared to the Paleozoic Era when the crinoids lived in the Michigan basin. It's strange to think about Michigan being tropical and growing corals. But the rocks say they were here. And there were lots and lots of them, because even with the centuries of waves grinding their fossils down, here their remains still are in my dish.

While we were at Origins, I finally braided the second drawstring for the first Valdani bag. That meant I was allowed to start a second one.

The thread is Valdani size 8 pearl cotton in M60 "Mountain Hike", described as "plums, grays, khaki, tan". I would say deep purple, gold, and a steely blue-gray. I started knitting the bottom on Dritz 1.1mm doll needles, and now I'm needling-up to Inox 4-0 1.25mm needles.

On our way home from Origins, we visited a friend in Ohio and dropped off various of my husband's meads, including a 15-year-old orange melomel (mead made with orange juice). My husband was told, "This is good. You need to make more 15-year-old mead. Start now."

So this is a photo of 15-year-old orange melomel, at T-minus 14 years and 364 days and counting:
This is also a good example of why he doesn't put the airlock on the top in the first enthusiastic days of fermentation. The plastic baggie keeps the fruit flies out, lets the carbon dioxide out, and keeps the sticky spewing orange juice and honey spray under control.

You can't really see it in this photo, but the carboy is sitting on a big deep cookie sheet to catch what's dribbling down the side. Within a week or so, things will settle down and it will be safe to put the bubbler on the top without worrying about it clogging and blowing off.

He has both of the bubbler/airlock types to the left. They serve the same purpose as the plastic bag, keeping fruit flies and other airborne contaminants out, while letting out the carbon dioxide that the yeast is blowing off.

Summer birds
Brown thrasher, Toxostoma rufum and male ruby-throated hummingbird, Archilochus colubris.

The thrasher was sitting on a branch in the early-morning sunshine, calling and preening himself. Thrashers are mockingbirds, so he was doing local birdcalls, each one repeated twice. I found it very funny to hear him doing a chickadee's call, since he's a great big reddish-brown bird and the chickadees are so little.

I might be doing some netting. I've been reading through and trying to learn some of the decorative netting patterns from things like The Ladies' Work-Table Book and The Young Ladies' Journal Complete Guide to the Work-Table.

Anyway, I started filling my steel netting needle with gray pearl cotton. I have no idea where this is going. But when I find out, the netting needle will be ready.

Spring

Ah, yes, there is still a lot of snow in the cornfield, but the point is, you can see the stalks above the snow!

The snow melted enough on the south side of the house that Truffles could lie in the brown grass and sunbathe.

My parents have a black dog, too, and he also loves to lie in the sun. You'd think their little doggie brains would melt in their black furry heads, but both their dog and Truffles will stay in the sun a lot longer than Ajax will.

In the hot summer, I make her come in so she won't end up with heat stroke, but this early in the spring, I think she's safe.

I walked around to see what I could spot: one snow drop so far. I usually have a big clump of snowdrops, but I think that clump is a little further back under unmelted snow.

I could hear lots of birds -- suddenly everything is singing! Red-winged blackbirds, the cardinals, American tree sparrows, and a bluebird, which I could hear but couldn't spot.

It got up to a balmy 51 degrees F. today, and I was reminded to put in a maple tap. The hole started dripping before I could even get the drill bit out. My husband's carboys are spoken for, for next weekend when he plans to bottle the mead in the enormous wooden barrel still sitting in our geodesic dome room, so I had to scald an empty milk jug for sap.

After I got the tap in and satisfied myself that it was running through the tubing and not down the side of the tree, I walked around the yard and found some more flowers coming up.

The north side of our property, in front of where the original house was, slopes down to the drainage ditch and the road. Decades ago it was terraced with cinder blocks, chunks of concrete, and stones. Most of the terrace material is hidden by leaf mold and overgrown with plants. It is the last place for the snow to melt, and usually the last place daffodils bloom in the spring. (The green stalks coming up through the snow in the foreground are the daffodils.)

But the winter aconite in the background is not called "winter" for nothing -- here it is in bloom, despite the 8 degree cold snap only days ago. Some of it is even blooming under the grainy snow.

Spring is coming -- I might have to go and roll in it!

Not the Mess I Was Expecting

Usually when my husband does any brewing, it's in a five or six-gallon glass carboy with an airlock or "bubbler" in the mouth.

This big barrel is different. He doesn't have a cork big enough for the bunghole. His solution was to put a clean piece of cloth over it, both to keep out the fruit flies that hatch out of nowhere (even in frozen January) in the presence of mead, and to control any foaming.

This weekend, we finally saw a bit of foaming. But the tongue of foam you see in the picture is as far as it got.

The mess we are getting that I wasn't expecting at all is that honey is weeping out of the very bottom of the barrel at both ends. Not very much honey, just a drop at a time, probably less than a quarter of a cup total so far. We put saucers under the drops, and my husband plans to weigh the honey that leaks out. But with over 100 pounds of honey in the batch, it doesn't look like it's a significant amount.

My husband and I each have a theory on why the honey is leaking out. Our theories are not mutually exclusive.

He thinks this barrel might have had a "wax seal" inside, and if it did, he inadvertantly melted it when he boiling-water-rinsed it before they filled it with honey and cider.

I think the honey has settled to the bottom, and is very slightly drying out and shrinking the barrel staves towards the bottom, allowing them to contract enough to let honey leak.

Since there is nothing we can do about the wax seal while the barrel is full, he has been stirring the proto-mead with a wooden dowel to mix the honey off the bottom. Following stirring, we got the small amount of foaming.

Two dogs trying to share a small rug. For scale, the floor tiles are sixteen inch squares. You can see that medium-sized black Truffles has the lion's share of the rug, while 100+ pound Ajax is curled up on less than half. When he was a small puppy, Truffles used to drag him around by his collar. Truffles is convinced that she can still do this. (Ajax is, too.)

Lost Art of the Day

Or, "What My Husband Did This Weekend".

This is a 50-gallon bourbon barrel. It has been used (post-bourbon) to brew a batch of beer at one of those "brew your own" establishments, where you show up and they supply the ingredients. Now it is being used to brew a huge batch of the variety of mead called cyser, mead made with apple cider.

This weekend my husband, with the help of friends in his homebrewing club and the local SCA canton, filled it with two five-gallon pails (120 pounds) of honey and forty gallons of no-preservatives-added apple cider. And yeast.

Now it is sitting in our house, fizzing.

This makes me very nervous. I have seen many a carboy foam over in the early stages of fermentation. Proto-mead makes a very sticky mess. This is about 45 gallons of proto-mead. Sitting in my house.

Usually my husband puts the five-gallon glass carboy on a big cookie sheet to catch any foam-over. As you can see, what is sitting under this barrel is -- a towel.

My husband claims that because of the curvature of the barrel, if it does foam over, it will run down the side and drip on the towel.

Boy, I sure hope he's right.

Going to the Fair

I finished Sampler M pattern 10 last night, and knitted about two rows of pattern 11. No new photo of that until you can see what pattern 11 looks like.

We are going to the county fair today, and I am looking right at the camera. If I actually remember it, check this space tomorrow for pictures of draft horses, oxen, bunnies, and so on. Maybe ribbons, if I have won any!

Monday my husband bought the 2x4's and 2x6's for our son's loft bed. It looks like Saturday my dad (the man with all the tools) will help us cut pieces and drill straight holes in them. If I'm lucky, I'll get to clean Shetland fleeces with my mom. Then the following week I'll be assembling the bed.

I'm sure I've mentioned that in our family, I'm the one who fixes stuff like dishwashers, mows the grass, and other mechanically-minded things. My husband is the cook and homebrewer.

Here is the red raspberry mead (raspberry melomel) he started at Havoc in Hastings. I know that when some people hear "homebrewer", they think "big beefy guy who drinks a lot", but truthfully D. hardly drinks any of what he brews. He does give away a lot.

And me, I'm your basic non-drinker mead authority!

You can see the thick frothy raspberry layer on the top of this batch. That's the danger of fruit meads -- the fruit likes to float and clog up the bubbler, then the bubbler blows off and fruity, sticky proto-mead spews all over. (Strawberries are even worse than this!) The tan layer on the bottom is mostly raspberry seeds that the yeast has eaten all the pulp off of.

This batch is sitting on top of the dishwasher with a plastic bag protecting it from fruit flies until it gets past the dangerous stage. Then he will siphon it ("rack" it) into another carboy, put a bubbler on it, and lug it into the basement to do its long-term fermentation thing.

How do you make really good mead? Set it up and forget about it (after that "spewing out the top" stage is over). Okay, cleanliness is important, too, like not starting with dead moths or anything in the bottom of the carboy. But D. is pretty strict about bleaching carboys and storing them sealed so nothing can crawl in.

The other batch, the "black mead", made with black patent malt, passed the dangerous stage quicker, since it didn't have any frothy fruit layer, and is already in the basement.

What is mead? People always ask that. Is it like wine, or beer . . . ?

Really mead is only like mead. When making beer, the yeast consumes fermentable sugars from a sprouted, roasted (that's "malting") grain. In wine making, the yeast consumes the fermentable sugars from the grape juice. In mead making, the fermentable sugar is the honey. You don't see it in US stores very often because mostly the alcohol regulations (and tax laws) were written to cover beer, wine, and spirits. (If you do find something labelled "mead" in the US, often it is either made out of the country, or else it is white wine flavored with honey. Or else you are at an SCA -- Society for Creative Anachronism -- event.)

From your basic mead (honey, water, yeast), there are a bunch of varieties. Add pears and it's perry. Apples (or cider), and it's cyser. Grape juice, and it's pyment. Any other fruit, and it's called melomel. Add a fermentable grain and it's braggot. If you add herbs, it's metheglin. Obviously at one point it was popular enough to bother to name all these subcategories!

And speaking of subcategories, suddenly I have a blank in my Blogger dashboard to add labels to posts. Cool!

I apologize if you have tried to comment and run into the "Blogger & beta Blogger aren't speaking" problem. I only switched to beta Blogger because otherwise I couldn't log in at all, not to shut anyone out!

Now off to knit pattern 11, just in case I forget to take the camera to the county fair after all.

Havoc in Hastings

Yesterday my husband demonstrated mead-making at the Society for Creative Anachronism event "Havoc in Hastings", held at Charlton Park, 2545 S. Charlton Park Road, Hastings, Michigan.

I brought along the socks I've been knitting, but once again I forgot the camera!

And that was a pity -- there were equestrian events, which we don't have all the time, and such beautiful horses! I didn't get a chance to talk to the riders, but I think there was at least one Friesian horse there, maybe two, like the ones we saw on our trip to the Netherlands several years ago.

A lot of the settlers in west Michigan were Dutch, and their descendants tend to be very proud of and very interested in their Dutch heritage.

With a little Googling, I found not one but three Friesian horse breed clubs in the Michigan area: the Great Lakes Friesian Horse Association, Midwest Friesians, and the West Michigan Friesian Horse Club.

I sat and knitted and watched the horses, talked to a couple of people about knitting, and listened to my husband explain mead-making.

Afterwards we headed home, and stopped at a couple of yard sales on the way. The only yarn I saw was acrylic, so I wasn't tempted off my stash diet. (And I didn't find any knitting needles.)

A fun day, and I wish I had remembered the camera!