I find it curious that somebody so invested in recreating a medieval mead does not put in the extra effort of procuring long pepper and grains of paradise---those are certainly spices always present in my spice box.
I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour?
Which I would say is besides the point, the article was about recreating an ancient mead based on a recipe, which called for those ingredients.
Sometimes it's impossible to source the historical ingredients because they themselves have been lost (to memory or possibly entirely e.g. silphium), but that's not the case here. Both grains of paradise and long pepper are in active use, even if not in european cuisines.
They had a pepper blend when the recipe called for (I assume) straight spices and probably mortaring it all together.
Going through so much effort to match the source material but not the minimal additional step to source the proper ingredients (which have not at all disappeared and are easily obtainable) is weird.
I call it the artistic dilettante last 5% laziness effect. As an artistic dilettante you make it mainly all done to your satisfaction but you don't sweat the final details which is for the small people to do, because, while you are totally focused and energetic until nearly done that last little bit makes you extremely lazy.
> I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour?
No, they do have an impact on the final flavor. I don't know what long pepper or grains of paradise taste like, or what the yeast will do with the flavor compounds. In my experience, the quantity of spices in that volume will come through. I honestly feel like 20 cardamom pods will come through quite strongly, in my few years of experience of meads.
I also found this curious. I don't have either of those in my kitchen or at my grocery store, but they're certainly available online.
They would be pretty noticable in the finished flavor, I imagine. Mead flavor is often best described as "delicate", especially in lower abv meads. The carmellization and yeasts are probably going to be the most notable flavors here.
The article did mention that sometimes you do your absolute best to follow exactly what they would have done in the Middle Ages... and you get something awful.
It's possible that the proportions suggested were something the brewer knew would be nasty. It's also possible the proportions for spice weren't given, instead being "to taste".
The difference between a spiced and non-spiced mead is pretty obvious, but I must admit I haven’t paid enough attention to the recipes of different spiced meads to tell them apart based on spice content.
> To avoid the chlorine, fluoride, and other additives found in modern tap water
You should be able to get a water report from your municipality, listing any treatments they perform. Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store. I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product. I know plenty of breweries that just use fluoridated city water.
Note the special lid on that mason jar for allowing off-gassing. Fermenting in a mason jar with a standard lid is a recipe for exploding glass.
I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes.
If you don't want to play the guessing game on fermentation time, buy a hydrometer or refractometer.
> Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store.
Never heard of this. I've googled a bit around, and I think I'll try this in the future.
> I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes.
The caramelization process does slow the process down a good bit. I've made a few bochets, and I notice they go slower than other meads.
I've heard of people having issues using Ale yeasts with meads. The temperature of the house could have an impact. The lack of available nutrients (raisins a hotly debated topic in the mead community).
I would expect the Kveik yeast, the Lalvin D47, and maybe the "yeast party" to be faster than the S-04 and Saison yeast.
The choice of distilled water in particular for a historic recreation is very strange; water makes a big difference. Unless there's reason to believe water in whatever part of France is very soft, a bottled spring water would have been a better choice if you don't want to use tap.
Right, simple minerals such as calcium can make a big difference in final taste of a beer. The excess calcium in waters of karst country (big limestone deposits) is said to have a huge effect on German beers historically, and I'd imagine some of that extends into France as well.
Distilled water minimizes variables of course, but it by itself indeed very non-historic.
It shouldn't matter much; both chlorine and fluoride evaporate faster than water, and with all brewing processes you need to boil the water anyway.
Distilled water is no good, it lacks the minerals, and without minerals water has no flavor (and it's actually harmful to drink distilled water for too long).
I'm just glad our water is not fluoridated or chlorinated. There's evidence (citation needed) that drinking fluoridated water impacts neurological development, mood, behaviour, etc.
> There's evidence (citation needed) that drinking fluoridated water impacts neurological development, mood, behaviour, etc.
Citation definitely needed. General Ripper notwithstanding, the science doesn't seem to support the conclusion that the amount of fluoride that is intentionally added to drinking water is detrimental to health. (https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-study-show...)
There's only a brief boil in this because it's mead. There are plenty of no-boil meads, like JAOM.
Chlorine can be removed just by leaving the water uncovered over night before brewing, but chloramine can't. Chloramine is common. Not treating for it risks chlorophenol creation in the finished product.
> I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product.
I've never done a comparison myself, but I've seen this mentioned many times as a consideration when fermenting foods. A cursory search indicates that floride can have detrimental effects in wine yeasts as well.
Interesting fact:
in Russian language, mead is "мёд" (myod) which also means "honey" which (мёд) also has a very old meaning of "alcoholic beverage made from honey".
In Polish, 'miód' is the generic word for honey, while 'miód pitny' means 'drinkable honey'. I wonder if, in the past, there was a phrase for 'spreadable honey'.
The fact it's 'mi' in Chinese may mean that this word could be from Borean language family, possibly making it extremely ancient (together with 'mama' and some others).
And indeed some scientist say it is a Borean word!
It's possible it comes from a common ancestor, but it could also be a loan word, or more likely, given that it's so short, a coincidence (i.e. false cognate), like the word for dog in Mbabaram (a native Australian language), which is "dog". Better known, perhaps, are ありがとう and obrigado - same meaning, similar pronunciation, but known to be unrelated.
Not only that, but apparently it tends to boil "volcano-style", and if you have ever burnt (or "caramelized", to use the more elegant term) sugar, you know how sticky it is - now imagine a burning-hot drop of that sticking to your skin...
I got some molten sugar on my hand once. For how innocuous "hot honey" sounds, making this stuff really would be pretty white knuckle for me (ha ha).
It sticks to you. It stays hot enough to burn you, while burning you, for an unintuitively long time. I've burned myself blacksmithing a few times and accidentally brushed red metal with a finger.
None of those burns have ever came close to the brilliant white hot, long lasting agony of molten sugar.
It calculates based on volume of the combined ingredients. I assume dissolving 1 pint of honey in 9 pints of water will result in less than 10 pints of total volume. I don't know exactly how much, but guessing 9.5 pints total, and using raw honey and raisins as the fermentables, I get 11% ABV with the high attenuation D47 yeast, and 8.7% with the low attenuation S-04.
Caramelization will reduce the fermentability of the honey, but I am not sure by how much. My guess is that it's a small effect.
(All this is wrong, go to edit) I would expect this mead to be high ABV, in the 12-13% range.
The rule of thumb I've heard, and has been good in my experience is 1.035 SG per 1 lb honey per 1 gallon of water. The 3 lbs in 1 gallons would come out to a ~1.105 SG, which is a bit over 13%.
Though, the sugar content of honey varies from batch to batch, and the non ferment-able sugars from the caramelization process, I would expect anywhere from 9-12%. The more caramelization, the more "burnt sugars", the less ABV.~
EDIT: I grossly miscalculated the weight oz to lbs. This is only 1.5 lbs, which would be ~5-6%, making it more akin the ABV of a beer. Same caveat that it would have probably been lower due to the unfermentable sugars.
Most mead I’ve had is similar percentage-wise to wine, yeah. I’m sure it’s possible to fluctuate it up and down, much like sake, depending on the recipe.
Which yeast you use could be very important too!: Different yeasts "pack up shop" during fermentation at different levels of ethanol. It's their own waste-product, that humans love, that stops them, but some types of yeast can put up with much higher levels than others! (though there are other factors too like Ph/pressure/mineralisation/etc).
Some yeast strains keep fermenting to (tolerate) a much higher ethanol percent than others, and the result of these more 'vigorous' yeasts is generally a 'dryer' result in brewing terms: A less 'sweet' result because all the sugars have been 'dried' out (ie roughly, consumed and converted to ethanol). This is not the only axis to think about here though! For mead to be 'sweet' in the end it either has to use a yeast that gives-up (for that much sugar) and hope that nothing else can live in there (not a bad bet for partially-fermented-honey actually), or to be sweetened after-the-fact (probably more common in modern 'Mead' products).
Fermentation involving a community of microorganisms (not just yeast) can often end up far dryer (especially given the time-frames they talk about in the article)! Many bugs can consume the 'waste' products that each other makes, and this variety can create enzymatically-linked cascades of molecular conversion-in-phases that can result in all sorts of unexpected "processing" of the "raw" molecules in the brew, including the hops components (if beer) and I'd think all those spices in traditional mead-recipes were probably undergoing some transformations too! Fascinating!
> Mead is not uncommon to find for purchase in some European countries till this day.
Mead is common, the specific "bochet" style mead (using caramelised honey), not so much.
The article is about bochet, very specifically. The article's introduction is pretty clear that both mead itself and various ancient styles of mead have survived to the modern age e.g.
> “It truly is a lost style. It’s not a historical style that has survived into the modern era,” says Heit. “It’s literally something that disappeared.”
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then rush into the HN comments to get angry about it. That leads to generic tangents, which are predictable, tedious, and usually turn nasty. It's all so boring. We may need to add this to the site guidelines, although it's arguably covered by Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
One way of looking at this is to take the following guideline to apply at the article level as well: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
The idea on HN is to have curious conversation. For that, a better practice would be to bring in the most interesting bit from an article, or the bit that creates more interesting responses in you. If an article creates no such responses in you, then the way to use HN in the intended spirit is to look at at different article instead.
I've read portions of that book, and the description is not inapt. It's a man of late middle age explaining to his young (14 iirc) wife _every painful feature of her duties_ in excruciating detail and with perfect self-concern, in a way that is not typical of the way wives are addressed and marriage handled in other works I've read from the time. I found it hard not to dislike the author intensely, which was not my reaction to other medieval writing at all.
> Knee-jerk virtue signalling is not a sign of a good historian
The author isn't and never claimed to be a historian. Their bio on Atlas Obscura says "I'm a senior editor and writer at Atlas Obscura, bee steward, mead maker and veteran of karaoke in Antarctica."
It seems you missed the whole point of an actually pretty interesting article and wrote a frankly boring rant about one word that seemingly triggered you.
If the new bride (14yo) can read such a book then she is not a peasant. If the family owns a book then they are several tiers up again. Anyone reading this book therefore has at least one servant. If they do, that servant may well be a child even younger than the new bride (12yo). Such a person definitely cannot read. This is a book for the master or lady of a 14th century household speaking to their servant. Mansplaining is expected.
I'm about as anti-PC as they come, but to me this passage is not attempting to criticize Medieval culture by framing it within modern PC context. Instead, it reads like the inverse – it's making light of modern PC culture by framing it within Medieval context.
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then rush into the HN comments to get angry about it. That leads to generic tangents, which are predictable, tedious, and usually turn nasty.
One way of looking at this is to take the following guideline to apply at the article level as well: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
The idea on HN is to have curious conversation. For that, a better practice would be to bring in the most interesting bit from an article, or the bit that creates more interesting responses in you. If an article creates no such responses in you, then the way to use HN in the intended spirit is to look at at different article instead.
Edit - btw can you please stop posting flamewar comments in general? We've already had to ask you this several times. You clearly have good things to contribute, and at the same time you're mucking them up with guidelines breakage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147928 is a good example - there was good info and interesting conversation there, but then you spoiled it by going into attack. In the end the comment was rightly flagged. If you had posted it in the intended spirit of curiosity and openness, that would have been much better. Please do that going forward.
> Instead of using honey I’d extracted and strained the modern way, however, I crushed some comb taken from a colony that had unfortunately not survived winter—the bees’ lasting legacy would be to provide honey close to what was available in the 14th century, including the occasional stray leg or wing.
> For some homebrewers, the danger of recreating bochet may be the very thing that attracts them to it. “People who like rollercoasters and jumping off cliffs like bochet,” says Verberg with a laugh. “You can make a sugar volcano that will explode, violently.”
Ridiculous claim. You don't need to boil honey anymore as long as you use clean ingredients these days. Before boiling was used to remove impurities and kill bacteria. You can make hydromel or bochet without boiling anything.
I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour?