A Mead Making......

Another one of our adventures involves Mead.  My background involves a deep history in all things Norwegian.  I'm 50% Norwegian and enjoy learning all about Norway's history.  Which of course includes Vikings.  But Nate, you say, why would I ever enjoy learning about Vikings when I'm a Packer fan?  Not that kind of Viking, true I'm still a Favre fan, but I bleed Packer Green and Gold.
Anyway, Mead was a honey wine that would take close to 5-6 months to make.  If you would like to make a mead it is very very simple to do.  Get your fermenter and put one pound of honey per gallon of water in the fermenter and seal it up with yeast.  Wait 5 months, bottle, wait till its clear, then drink.  If you want to play with the recipes a bit, you can make another type of Mead, called Braggot.  My buddy Nate Kehn, seen bottling Garrison's Red Cap in an earlier blog, decided he wanted to do a Braggot and then make it his own.  Thus, Big Dirty Braggot was born, a.k.a. Black Thunder, cause it ain't White Lightening.

To make a Braggot you make regular Mead but you add grains to add flavor and body to the mead.  Some say you can even add hops to have more of a beer flavor to it.  For this recipe Kehn added 2 pounds of chocolate malt and steeped it until he was happy with the color and flavor.....FYI the flavor he got was coffee.   Above is the grains steeping......and.......

This is the grains still steeping, only you can't see the bag anymore....that's a dark brew.  Like I said it tasted like coffee and after we added the honey, it tasted like sweet coffee.  To make matters worse, (or better to be honest) he added four sticks of Tahitian vanilla, just for kicks.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time.......