Nice to Mead You, Part the First

Man, do I love Vikings. What's not to love? Dudes plundering whatever they saw, taking what they pleased, their only concern in life dying in battle so they'd get to live in a mead hall for all of eternity. By some accounts, there's a possibilty that they hunted down and wiped out the Neanderthals. I realize this is highly doubtful, but COME ON. To top it all off, there's an epic battle at the end of days, in which the earth is consumed by fire and almost all the gods die, and it's already decided and public knowledge.

These dudes were not effing around.

And they drank mead.

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Jeremy and I wrote a script a couple of years ago, which we love to no end, called ROBOT ROBOT STRIKE ZONE (which I will gleefully send to you if you'd like to read it). It prominently features a crew of berserker Vikings. It's probably my favorite thing I've ever been a part of, and more importantly, it got me thinking about mead.

Mead is one of the oldest alcoholic drinks, with the first mentions of it coming in Vedic texts, an ancient precusor to Hinduism dating around 1700 B.C.. Aristotle and Pliny the Elder drank it, presumably without sharing with Pliny the Mrs. or Pliny the Brother.

Somewhere along the way, however, we lost our taste for the drink of Leif Ericsson and Hagar the Horrible. Beer and wine supplanted mead as the preferred drinks. I blame the Germans and the French. They apparently blamed each other for some stuff as well.

After having some commercial mead, I thought 'why buy one bottle for $12 when I can MAKE 24 bottles for less than $100. That's a savings of over $8 a bottle!

I read up on mead making, which goes like this. Get some honey, get some water, get some yeast, put them all together, heat them up, let the yeast eat the sugar, wait six months, then drink the stuff. Seems easy, right?

At this point in my winemaking career, I didn't yet have a good six gallon stockpot to make my concoctions, only a tiny two gallon one. In addition to making everything take three times as long as it should, it also looks dorky. As we all know, there's no place for looking like a dork in wine making.

Anyhoo. So instead of heating up 6 gallons of water and adding my 15 pounds of clover honey all at once, I had to rinse and repeat three times, doling out the honey in highly unscientific increments. Honey, as you may know, is not known for its non-stickyness. You can imagine the countertop/pants situation that quickly developed and escalated beyond control.

I was seeing Dark Knight that evening, and I was worried that I might be attacked by bears on the way to the theater that night. Thankfully, that didn't happen.

So it took a little while, but I finally got all the honey boiled and poured into the bucket. It would have to cool down for awhile, so I happily drove to the Hughes Center with Lauren to meet Jeremy for some chile con queso and some Batman. Both went extraordinarily well, and we raced home to check on the mead.

When I arrived home, the carboy containing the mead was still hot. Not warm, hot. It would be well over 24 hours before it was cool enough to add the yeast.

I'm happy to report everything has gone normally to date. The mead has been racked off and is clarifying nicely on its own. It's currently sitting the coat closet, anxiously awaiting November, where it begins the next stage of its journey.