Mead Entry

Category Four: Medieval Life

Then said Harr: "Now thou askest strangely; as if Allfather would invite to him kings or earls or other men of might and would give them water to drink! I know, by my faith! that many a man comes to Valhall who would think he had bought his drink of water dearly, if there were not better cheer to be had there, he who before had suffered wounds and burning pain unto death. I can tell thee a different tale of this. The she-goat, she who is called Heidrun, stands up in Valhall and bites the needles from the limb of that tree which is very famous, and is called Laeradr; and from her udders mead runs so copiously, that she fills a tun every day.

- The Prose Edda, Translated from the Icelandic by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, 1916.

Mead is the quintessential Viking drink. We know that mead was important to the pre-Christian Scandinavian and Northern European cultures as it features prominently in their myths. Mead is an ancient drink and variations of it are found all over the world. For the Persona Pentathlon, I have chosen to submit two meads that I have brewed in the way of the Viking Age Scandinavians.

Humans have been figuring out how to brew alcohol for a very, very long time and the key is fermentation. Prior to modern times, commercial yeast was not available. To the best of our knowledge, people in the 9th century would have used wild fermentation or some of an actively fermenting brew to start another brew. For my Pentathlon brews, I have used wild fermentation and honeys that match profiles available in the 9th century in Sweden and Denmark.

Throughout this page, there are hyperlinks to my Brewing page which contains a glossary of terms that may be useful.

For the mead entry, I submit two brews:

A five year old buckwheat show mead
A four month old short show mead

Process

Both entries began with wild fermentation. They were brewed five years apart and used different ginger bugs to begin the initial fermentation process, though the methodology was the same. The ginger bug is the equivalent to a sourdough starter but for brewing instead of baking. Using a fresh ginger rihzome and sugar, you cultivate the yeasts on the ginger. I added two tablespoons of this starter to the initial fermentation. For more discussion on wild fermentation, visit my mead page here.

A note on using ginger: Asarum europaeum is not true ginger but it grows wild in Europe with its northern distribution reaching southern Finland. The roots have a ginger-like aroma and have been used in cooking and folk medicine in Europe. Typical ginger bugs are made with zingiber officinale due to the naturally occurring yeasts on the rhizomes. As I do not have access to asarum europaeum, I used zingiber officinale, common ginger. Like zingiber officinale, there is a naturally occurring yeast on asarum europaeum and thus for this process, they are interchangeable despite being different plants. For further discussion on the fungi (yeasts) present on the asarum europaeum root, see the Schwartz citation at the end of the page.

For both meads, I combined the initial ingredients in a stock pot along with the ginger bug and began the fermentation process before racking it into carboys to begin aging. The buckwheat mead was aged five years and the short mead was aged four months.

Buckwheat Show Mead

Ingredients:

3lbs buckwheat honey

1 gallon water

10 raisins (tannins)

1/4 cup orange juice (acid)

Prior to 2015, it was believed that buckwheat was not cultivated in Europe until the late Medieval period. However, a study done by Pim de Klerk, John Couwenberg & Hans Joosten from the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe and Greifswald University found evidence that buckwheat was present in parts of Europe since prehistoric times. I have cited their very interesting paper at the end of this section.

As a honey, buckwheat has a profile that I find intriguing and thought would make for a really interesting and complex mead. I began this mead on June 13, 2019. It was racked four times over the course of a year and back-sweetened twice before being left to age in an amber carboy with a flip top for five years.

This is a dry mead with a smooth body. It is tart, but not sour.

Bottled Buckwheat Dry

From my Mead page:

One of the first meads I tried was a dry show mead, brewed using buckwheat honey and aged first one year, then another four years. In the picture to the right, you can see the buckwheat mead during its primary fermentation. It is the carboy with the dark brew in it. Like all of my meads, it was wild fermented. The glass jar on the left with the cheesecloth is the original ginger bug that I used in the initial fermentation, which according to my notes, took about three days to really kick off. I transferred it to a carboy after five days and sealed it with an airlock for it's primary fermentation. I racked it four times for clarity, meaning I transferred it from one carboy to another four times, which separated the brew from the sediment leftover from fermentation, also known as the lees. I bottled it in glass bottles to age for a year before trying.

The buckwheat was very good at one year. It had a bit of a bite that I did not mind but knew was not necessarily popular with someone drinking a mead. I saved some back to see how it aged further and the answer is, in my opinion, very well. It is a very dry mead, which may surprise some people. But in its dryness, the complexity of the buckwheat shows through. It is, without question, the prettiest mead I've ever brewed. The rich browns and red of the buckwheat honey stayed throughout the fermentation and aging process and it is truly lovely.

Short Mead

Ingredients:

2lbs wildflower honey

1 gallon water

12 raisins (tannins)

9 apple slices (malic acid)

1/2 orange, peeled (citric acid)

In this instance, the short mead offered at KASAF 2025 will be about four months old. Six months is ideal but in August I didn't think I wanted to display at KASAF 2025 and so I did not begin the brew in time. The must began its journey on 11/30/2024.

Initial fermentation begins

Short Mead Process Journal

Below is journal-style documentation kept concurrent with the fermentation process for the short mead.

11/30/2024

I combined 2lbs of wildflower honey with 1 gallon of well water and approximately 2 tablespoons of my active ginger bug. In addition, I added 10 raisins for tannins and 9 slices of apples for malic acid. Neither of these additions will be tasted in the final product but do contribute to the development of a well balanced wine.

I used a stainless steel stock pot as my initial fermentation vessel for two reasons. The stainless steel will not affect the flavor profile of the finished product and the wide opening will allow the liquid to come into greater contact with the air to increase the chances to capture wild yeasts. The pot is covered with a single layer of cheesecloth and stirred with a wooden spoon at least twice a day. This is the same spoon I use to stir the ginger bug, which increases the likelihood of yeast transfer, which we want.

12/01/2024

I moved the stock pot from the kitchen to a table near the woodstove in the living room. The increase in ambient temperature should help encourage fermentation.

12/03/2024

The olfactory signal of fermentation is present, though the auditory signal is not present as of yet. My experience has been that once the must begins smelling like beer or bread, the yeast are beginning to become active. The addition of the heat seems to really helped kickstart the fermentation and the must absolutely has begun smelling like alcohol. However, the fizzing chitter sound that signals fermentation has not as of this morning. I will listen again when I stir it tonight.

12/12/2024

The must continued to not ferment robustly. On the advice of another brewer, I adjusted the acid levels by adding a peeled orange to the pot. Oranges were cultivated on the Iberian peninsula and throughout the Islamic world during the Viking Age. Scandinavian people likely did encounter them through trading and raiding in the southern parts of the continent, but it is unlikely that such a precious fruit was used in brewing. I do not have access to safe sources of acid that were available in Scandinavia during the Viking Age, other than apples which provide malic acid. My concern is that by adding more apples for more malic acid, they will begin to impact the final flavor profile in a way that moves the brew towards a cyser, which is not what I want. I am familiar with how citric acid works in mead brewing and am confident that the orange included in this stage will not be tasted in the final brew. Therefore, with the goal of producing a mead that has the correct flavor profile, I am choosing to use citric acid from a source that likely was not used for brewing in Scandinavia but which was available in parts of Europe and Asia during the Viking Age.

12/13/2024

Robust fermentation has begun finally. The additional acid made all the difference. The orange and apples will be removed during the racking process.

Action shot of the must being stirred. The foam and bubbles signal robust fermentation.

12/17/2024

I have racked the must from the initial fermentation vessel to a glass carboy with an airlock. This will be where the mead rests for the next couple of months. It will likely be racked again to minimize sediment and give me a chance to see if it needs back sweetened with additional honey.

Right after the first racking

01/11/2025

The fermentation continues. The airlock is bubbling away and the brew is clarifying nicely. I will likely rack it in a month to let it clarify further, which will also allow me to taste test it and make adjustments as needed.

03/02/2025

Fermentation continues. It is still clarifying and I really do need to rack it soon. As KASF was this weekend and I sure was not there, I suppose I need to decide if I'm going to bottle it as a short mead or keep things moving along and make it into a show mead.

Citations:

De Klerk, Pim, John Couwenberg, Hans Joosten. "Pollen and macrofossils attributable to Fagopyrum in western Eurasia prior to the Late Medieval: An intercontinental mystery". Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume 440, 2015, Pages 1-21.

A press release for the paper, which includes a link that is behind a paywall for the journal. You may be able to access it through a library, either directly or through Interlibrary Loan: https://www.greifswaldmoor.de/files/dokumente/Pressrelease%20Fagopyrum.pdf

SCHWARTZ, E. J. “Observations on Asarum Europaeum and Its Mycorhiza.” Annals of Botany, vol. 26, no. 103, 1912, pp. 769–76. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43235975.

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