Every time my wife calls me honey, I think of mead. This thought arises because mead is made from honey and I enjoy relaxing with a glass of mead, guess you would do so if you can lay your hand on such a noble drink. Popular legend claims the word ‘’honeymoon’’ comes from an old tradition where a bride and groom drink mead (honey wine) every night for a month (the full cycle of the moon) following their wedding to increase virility and fertility.
Mead Drink
Those less romantically inclined speculate that ‘’honeymoon’’ refers to the short period at the beginning of a marriage when the relationship is new and ‘’sweet’’. I would rather go with the first assertion than the second one because I have two male children just in less than three years. Is there any other proof you need to recommend it for a newly wedded couple. Now I make it a point to include a bottle of mead in all my wedding gifts and hope the couple take it along on their honeymoon.
Is it that it is made from honey or that because in the olden days, couples make it a point to take it along on their honeymoon due to its aphrodisiac properties? I would go with the latter because I have experienced its monstrous power.
In fact, it was discovered by accident by a hunter. We all know how hunters can go hours in the bush in search of a kill, it was one of those fruitless hunting exercise that a particular hunter stumbled on an upturned beehive trapping substantial rainwater. Due to thirst and exhaustion, he decided to have a taste to quench his thirst.
After the first sip, he noticed how sweet it was but that is not surprising because it was a beehive harbouring the water. What bothered the hunter was the lulling effect he felt afterwards which was followed by outright intoxication. He felt weak at the knees and decided to sit down, and that was how he dozed off. He woke up to find it was dark all around and the last thing he remembered was the sip. He could not go home that night because of the difficulty of navigating your way in the dark through the thicket and when it was dawn he took the precious concoction home. And that was how the mystery of mead started to unravel and as at that time fermentation was not fully understood.
The origins of mead have its root in African bush a long time ago. Elephants roamed the continent and weather patterns were seasonal, as they are today in Africa. In Africa, there is the dry season, characterised by drought, and heavy rains in the rainy season were common. This weather pattern would facilitate hollows to rot out the crown of Iroko or “Achi” trees, which could have branches been broken by winds and in some case by elephants that roam the forest. During the dry season, the bees would settle and nest in these hollows, and during the wet season, the grove would fill with water. Water, honey, osmophilic yeast, and it is only a matter of time before a mead is born. Early African bushmen and tribes searched for honeycombs to harvest, likewise mead and as people migrated from Africa, they took with them with them some knowledge of mead and mead making.
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In Norse/Aryan mythology, the compensation for warriors that made it to Valhalla is a shot of mead served by the beautiful divine maidens.The term “honeymoon” originated from the ancient culture of giving bridal couples a moon's worth of honey–wine (mead). This tradition was long ago thought to ensure a fruitful union. In fact, the payment to the mead maker was often increased, based on the promptness gender of the first-born child with higher reward coming to the mead maker if it was a male child.
Mead can be fermented to be sweet; it can be made very dry. As meads age, they achieve a level of dryness, and a level of sweetness can still be brought back by adding honey.
With the discovery of grapefruit as a more viable alternative for the making of alcoholic wine due to its ready availability and cost advantage in Europe, mead popularity started plummeting. Honey has remained valuable possession throughout history; it was often available only to royalty. Somewhere about 1300 A.D., the Italian voyager Marco Polo (1254-1324) returned from the Spice Islands with sugar cane which further diverted attention off honey. Grape wine started flourishing though mead was able to hold on to its popularity in areas where the grape was less available.
Bees were believed, by most European cultures, to be the messengers of the gods. Therefore, even with the dwindling production of mead, it was still used for the temples rites, and the high profile ceremonies, while ales were used for everyday life. The same mystic properties that kept mead in the temples made mead a natural choice for the use of western medicine. In England, there are medicated meads, infused with specific herbs that were used to cure different types of diseases. For example, mead made with balm was thought to aid digestion and put you in high spirit, and mead made with borage was used to revive hypochondriacs and the chronically ill. The Welsh call these spiced meads ''Metheglin'', meaning medicine.){kind=tracking}
The market for mead has been a fluctuating one as compared to the widely consumed grape wine and beer which has dominated the alcoholic beverage market since its discovery, and we cannot say this about mead. The demand for commercial mead waxes and wane and the pattern are there because they lack historical market persistence and we can attribute it to a level of mismatch between what the market offers and consumer taste. It is left for the industry to match consumer demands with a specific recipe of mead so that the future generation can buy into it from which a vast global industry can emerge.
Is the future Is the mead industry sustainable?.
Apart from the from the great taste of mead, there are hidden treasures in mead and mead making.
There are a limitless variety of meads, traditional - the basic recipe consisting of water, honey and yeast; and apple cider and pumpkin spice can be added to the traditional recipe; Jabanero peppers added to the conventional recipe, and white grapes added to the traditional recipe. Jabanero mead is great with barbeque, while the apple cider and pumpkin spice mead are more or less a dessert mead."
Dr Roger Morse of Cornell University patented two formulas of ideal yeast nutrients for mead making decades ago. Dr Garth Cambray of Makana Honey Company in South Africa followed up more recently with a dissertation on a new process which can ferment honey to 12% alcohol in 24 hours.
Lengthy fermentations were characteristic of these meads when the yeast, honey nutrient, Ph level and other additives are left uncontrolled. Up till today, there are mead makers who believe that a prolonged fermentation, along with an extended ageing period, are an expected part of the process of making a good mead. It would be necessary to analyse the causes of these problems for ventures in commercial mead-making to be successful. Production standards required meads to be brought to completion within a much more reasonable time, with clean fermentations leaving no off flavours requiring long periods of time to age out. The consistency of quality would need the assurance of mead-making techniques that gave the mead-maker more control over the process.
Morse and Steinkraus came up with the experiment highlighted below:
We can add the following nutrients during fermentation at the inclusive rate of 6.75 grams per litre of honey must to aid and quicken it: ammonium sulphate-1.0 gm, potassium phosphate-0.5 gm, magnesium chloride-0.2gm, sodium hydrogen sulphate-0.05, citric acid, ammonium sulphate-5.0gm. This formula can speed up fermentation and can produce 13% alcohol in two weeks.
We can add another additive during fermentation at the inclusive rate of 0.25 grams per litre of honey: biotin-0.05gm, pyridoxine-1.0gm, meso-inositol-7.5gm , calcium pantothenate-10.0gm, peptone (Roche)-100.0gm. This formula can aid fermentation and can produce 13% alcohol in 18 days.
Nitrogen and phosphate sources were more important than vitamin supplements as concluded from using the above formula.
Individual variety honey was also found to vary in fermentability. Clover honey were all found to take a longer time to ferment than the darker counterpart.
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Variations in the temperature of the fermentation and size of the inoculum starter were found to have effects on the fermentation of the honey must. Fermentation rate increases with increase in temperature.For a range of 75 to 80 F, the fermentation would be complete in two weeks, with alcohol over 12%.
Yeast strain selection also determines the speed of fermentation, and this is the case with Yeast 618, Steinberg, which was found to be a consistent, rapid fermenter, yielding meads with good flavour and above average stability during storage.
The resulting mead was light and dry, little or no harsh or bitter flavours, with excellent stability. Alcohol content was approximately 12% by volume.
Light dry meads, with mild and clean taste, were hard to be found in a market dominated by overly sweet meads. This scenario was in step with changing U.S. tastes in wine at the time of the experiment, which reflected a growing appreciation of dryer and more subtle wines.
Achieving consistent fermentation times of two weeks with little off flavours was hard to believe. A light dry mead was a rarity in those days, compared with the sweet meads which are popular at the time when Morse and Steinkraus were developing their mead-making techniques.
CONCLUSION
Let us make a little comparison between a medium sized grape vineyard to a medium sized apiary. In the case of the vineyard, the owner or operator must mechanise to remain in business since it involves the deployment of heavy machinery to work the vineyard. Tractors, irrigation systems, and turbines are sometimes used to produce microclimate controls. There is need to procure this equipment, and this further depletes the eats into the profit margin.
Furthermore, the mechanisation replaces manual labour, and the implication is the replacement of men by machines and consequent loss of job, as opposed to apiary that does not necessitate mechanisation. Most of the manipulations done in the apiary are done manually. Large-scale beekeeping entails lots of manual labour, and that provides local employment. Moreover, an apiary does not require fertiliser, a rotor-tiller, irrigation and as climatic changes put pressures on current global vineyard acreage, apiaries can flourish. Maybe in the future, mead, the first alcoholic beverage, is the most sustainable alcoholic beverage and could be the last alcoholic beverage enjoyed by man.
REFERENCES
History Of Mead
Overview Of Mead
Laboratory experimentation of Mead Fermentation Additives
I never knew that wine could be made from honey. I always thought that the sweetness of honey was not because it contains sugar (the dreaded carbohydrate that causes weight gain). But surely, if honey could be fermented, does that not mean that is is made of sugar? And does that imply that taking honey is like taking sugar?
Oh, I know that this is unrelated; I was just thinking out loud.
A well written post. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for making out time to go through my post. For it to be mead, 50% of the fermentable sugar must come from honey.
cool post did not know all the history behind it. just started fermenting mead this month