Talk:Mead

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[edit] A few noteworthy literary passages about Mead

These are all from Robert Gayre's Wassail! In Mazers of Mead! but I have added the footnotes he cites to the source documents. I can see good placement for several of these within this article.

And after that he [King Vortigern] had been entertained at a banquet royal, the damsel stepped forth of her chamber bearing a gold cup filled with wine*, and coming next the King, bended her knee and spake, saying: "Lavered King, wacht heil!". But he, when he beheld the damsel's face, was all amazed at her beauty and his heart was enkindled of delight. Then he asked of his interpreter what it was that the damsel had said, whereupon the interpreter made answer: "She hath called thee "Lord King" and hath greeted thee by wishing thee health. But the answer that thou shouldst make unto her is 'Drinc heil!'." Whereupon Vortigern made answer: "Drinc heil!" and bade the damsel drink. Then he took the cup from her hand and kissed her, and drank; and from that day unto this hath the custom held in Britain that he who drinketh at a feast saith unto another, "Wacht heil!" and he that receiveth the drink after him maketh answer "Drink heil!"[1]

Take of spring water what quantity you please, and make it more than blood-warm, and dissolve honey in it till 'tis strong enough to bear an egg, the breadth of a shilling; then boil it gently near an hour, taking off the scum as it rises; then put to about nine or ten gallons seven or eight large blades of mace, three nutmegs quartered, twenty cloves, three or four sticks of cinnamon, two or three roots of ginger, and a quarter of an ounce of Jamaica pepper; put these spices into the kettle to the honey and water, a whole lemon, with a sprig of sweet-briar and a sprig of rosemary; tie the briar and rosemary together, and when they have boiled a little while take them out and throw them away; but let your liquor stand on the spice in a clean earthen pot till the next day; then strain it into a vessel that is fit for it; put the spice in a bag, and hang it in the vessel, stop it, and at three months draw it into bottles. Be sure that 'tis fine when 'tis bottled; after 'tis bottled six weeks 'tis fit to drink.[2]

  1. ^ Geoffrey of Monmouth, Histories of the Kings of Britain, London, 1920, Book VI, Chap. XII, pp. 106-107, * Gayre notes that the wine in the cup would have been Mead
  2. ^ Edward Spencer. The Flowing Bowl, 1903, pp. 32-33.

BTW, I object to the statement that Yeast Nutrient is required to brew a decent Mead. I used nutrient when I started, but learned quickly that Honey is all the wee little yeasties need to keep them happy. That, and time to age.

A side note. When asked by folks at my brewing workshops what yeast is, I am fond of telling them that "Yeast is a bacteria that consumes sugar, exhales carbon dioxide and pisses alcohol". :)

--Bill W. Smith, Jr. 18:59, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Feel free to add some to the article... — RevRagnarok Talk Contrib 02:42, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comment about Yeast

I had JUST added this comment to an old thread when the whole page got archived, so I am re-adding it here...

Personally, I only use Cotes de Blanc if I am making a Melomel or Cyser. For straight Wassail I use Red Star Pasteur Champaigne. The Pasteur Champaigne produces a decidedly nutty after-taste which I and my friends have become quite fond of. :) --Bill W. Smith, Jr. 18:43, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

  • Interesting. I've never heard such a thing, but it would explain the distinct nutty notes in the last dry sparkling mead I got from a friend. Will have to check and see if he used the Red Star Pasteur yeast (I had put it down to agitation during the shipping process) It was an unusual set of flavors but not unpleasant by any means. In my area people tend to use the Lalvin wine yeasts or liquid yeast from White Labs or Wyeast. -MalkavianX 20:00, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sourcing & Copyedit Ahoy!

I am going to start doing some major copyedit to the history section directly, and am going to remove anything which I cannot verify or find sources for.

  1. That there is a term in Ancient Greek or even the modern Greek language which correlates being drunk with "honey-intoxicated". I have looked in two different Ancient Greek dictionaries as well as looked at the morphology of every single word for "drunk" and "intoxicated" at the Perseus Tufts database and haven't found anything to substantiate this. Maybe it is a metaphor or kenning, so hopefully someone has the actual source for this.
  2. Another questionable statement is about Leszek I the White's declining to participate in the Crusades because there was no mead or beer in the Holy Land. I cannot find a source for this.
  3. A verifiable etymology of the term honeymoon having anything to do with mead. Etymology online doesn't seem to indicate this.

I am attempting to source every claim in the section, but if I can't find a source I'm removing the statement if it seems particularly outlandish. If I cut to deep or if I remove an important element, please re-add it, albeit sourced if possible.- WeniWidiWiki 01:45, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Over the next couple days I will check my bookshelf and see if I cannot find a source for the Honeymoon claim. I have heard this claim forever, but that don't make it so! :) Wacht Heil! --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/ contribs) 05:14, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

If it is something you are pretty sure is true why not tag it {{cn}} for a few days instead of tossing it? — RevRagnarok Talk Contrib 13:12, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Because the claims still exist in the history, and because the section has been tagged with various requests for sources for quite awhile, none of which were provided. Since these aren't really controversial statements, I've erred on the side of removal rather than leaving dozens of unsourced claims in the entry which seem to have found their way all over the internet because people have written articles on mead based on the content in this entry. Our lord and saviour Jimbo Wales has recently been reiterating the WP:V policy:
"I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information...[1]"
While I don't quite agree about "zero content being better than misleading or unsourced content" , so much of this entry is unverified, that I had to remove some of the most sensationalist statements. There are still numerous unsourced statements which I left in , which seem plausible and easily verifiable. - WeniWidiWiki 15:37, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Found it! On page 22 of "Wassail! In Mazers of Mead" by Lt. Colonel Robert Gayre, he says "While among our own Gothic ancestors it was the custom at marriage, and for a month afterwards, to feast upon mead, as a consequence down to the present time we call the period following the wedding, the honeymoon, and the French the lune de miel."
Here is his citation from the References and Notes:
Leon Arnon, Manuel du Confiseur-Liquoriste', Paris, 1905, p. 4. The French consider both honey and the bee-ssting to have a powerful aphrodesiac quality. Beck & Smedley, Honey and Your Health, London, 1947, p. 117.
--Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 23:32, 5 April 2007 (UTC).
Found another one, although this one doe snot cite sources...
On page 14 of "Making Mead", by Bryan Acton & Peter Duncan, An Amateur Winemaker Publication, SBN 900841 07 9, Standard Press, Andover, Hants. "Most people know that the word honeymoon comes from the practice of drinking honey wines during the month-long celebrations which followed better class weddings..."
--Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 23:45, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I was talking to a mead maker and he said that the word "Honeymoon" came from medieval times when a man and woman would marry and spend thier first month together drinking mead in order to sweeten the marriage. "Honey" for the mead, and "moon" for the first month (or moon cycle) together. I can't give any proof on this but I thought I'd add it. Ross A. Christensen207.20.178.1 15:36, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Recipes

I just removed this:

An old Cornish recipe for metheglin is:

"To 1 gallon water put 4 pounds honey, boil 1 hour; skim well, add 1oz. hops /gallon; boil 1/2 hour longer then stand till next day, then cask. Add 1 gill brandy/gallon, stop lightly. When worked stop close. Keep 1 year. Aromatic flowers e.g; thyme, sweet-briar rosemary, heather, can be boiled in the water before using. It was never considered good until 3 years old."[1]

Once before a recipe was put in the article; however, they belong in wikibooks instead of here. — RevRagnarok Talk Contrib 20:08, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I already left a note on Archolman's userpage about it, but left the material so as not to bite. - WeniWidiWiki 20:22, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
If there were a seperate article on Metheglin this recipe would be placed well there, but only one recipe. As it is Metheglin redirects to Mead. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 14:54, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
I didn't think I bit anybody, I didn't put a big vandal flag on the talk page, just brought it here, explaining why... I surely don't want the information lost either. — RevRagnarok Talk Contrib 15:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I didn't say you bit anyone, I said *I* didn't remove the material because I didn't want to knee-jerk undo new editor's work and scare them off when they are interested in the same things I am. There is already a huge quoted recipe passage in the article, and I personally think the addition of a short concise recipe is no detriment - especially one so old. I almost inserted one myself by Pliny that is shorter than Archolman's which disproves that "honey-wine" and "mead" are the same thing. - WeniWidiWiki 16:01, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Denver Festival

I just want to put up a note regarding the mead festival that was added, then removed by another editor as linkspam. It could be easily re-added IF you first find an article in a major brewing publication discussing the importance of this festival. As it stood, the paragraph had NO citations and smelled like original research. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 21:12, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Ditto. I removed it because there was nothing in either the text added or the link provided to suggest that it was notable from a global perspective. Gregmg 23:05, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Seems like hydromel isn't mead?

Hydromel redirects to mead but the Oxford English Dictionary says for hydromel "A liquor consisting of a mixture of honey and water, which when fermented is called vinous hydromel or mead." ... Does this need an adjustment? Katewill 20:06, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

A mixture of water and honey fermented is precisely what mead is.Ryandaum 00:55, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

The same goes for hippocras: hippocras redirects to mead, but it certainly isn't mead. It is a spiced wine that doesn't even contain honey, as far as I can tell. Josgeluk 14:25, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Medovina

I notice the article states that medovina is not brewed for personal consumption and is not available commercially. I'm currently sitting next to a 1L bottle bought at a market in Slovakia and I had no trouble finding medovina commercially packaged in a supermarket, it seems to be quite well available, though it is much more expensive than wine (around 64Sk for wine compared to over 200Sk for the commercial medovina, under €2 vs over €6 equivalent). Does this need to be looked at? I know Slovakia is not among the countries listed but it is just next door to the Czech republic.

[edit] Mazery

I will have to look this up, but I believe it is from 'Wassail! In Mazers of Mead'... Anyway, the author says that a brewery that makes mead is a mazery. Mazery comes from the word Mazer, literally 'a tree knot', which leads to the traditional serving bowl or guesting cup which was carved from a single knot of sacred wood. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 21:12, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Restored honeymoon after removal by bloodofox

As it is properly cited and referenced, I have restored the 2 sentences referring to the gift of mead to newlyweds. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 00:30, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

bloodofox did not delete the reference, he moved it. It is now in the article twice. Please pick one and delete it. Webaware talk 00:37, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
I removed the section titled Honeymoon, leaving the original paragraph in the History section. This doesn't seem significant enough to justify having it's own section. Gregmg 05:11, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Right now this trivia is buried in the history section. It should be in a different section to where it is more apparent, in my opinion. This was my attempt to do so. :bloodofox: 02:42, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
And my apologies to bloodofox for implying that he had removed the honeymoon text I searched so hard to cite... I simply did not see that he had moved it. Still, I have to agree with Gregmg that it is too short to stand alone as a section. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 01:27, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Problem with History section

Current text states that Mead became less popular due to the german purity laws and such. Every reference I have states that the decline in mead had more to do with a shift in demand as western european politics made wine the court drink of choice. I will have to gather my references before I start repairing this section. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. (talk/contribs) 02:37, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Historical Reference

I ran into this link http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0407921102v1 (PDF), which talks about honey-based fermented beverages 9,000 years ago in China. I'll leave it to those more qualified to edit this into the article, if appropriate... 69.236.67.246 05:58, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Etymology of "metheglin"

This article seems to offer two different etymologies for "metheglin". In the first section of the article, the origin is given as Old English "medu" tracing back to a Proto-Indo-European root of the same meaning. Later, under "mead variants", it is given as Welsh "meddyg" + "llyn", with "meddyg" - "healing" usually being traced to Latin "medicus". If the first etymology was intended to refer only to the word "mead" (not "metheglin"), then it is confusingly and ambiguously positioned. In any case, it would be valuable to have an authoritative opinion as to whether or not the "med/th" component of "mead" and "metheglin" have a common etymology. FredV 16:04, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] An exclusive drink

The article should point out that mead was a very exclusive product throughout its heyday among the Slavic and Germanic peoples. It was very popular as a ceremonial gift at weddings, baptismal parties and as a gift to foreign diplomats and other rulers and was very expensive. Just like grain is refined into a more expensive product by being turned into beer, so is honey when it's brewed into mead, and honey is very expensive when compared to grain.

Peter Isotalo 10:34, 15 October 2007 (UTC)