From Alcohol to Alchemy

Just a note here, for those of you who read this blog but not BardicBrews.net, I am hosting a Mead Workshop with my friend Daniel Vitalis coming up on 16 November:

I’m greatly looking forward to this. Mead has become a very important part of my reality as of late and I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with others. Furthermore, it’s always a treat hearing Daniel Vitalis speak.

Brewing Mead

I haven’t written much about brewing yet, probably because I’ve only gotten into brewing since I moved into this house 3 years ago, which coincidentally is when I stopped posting to this blog with the same regularity as I once did.

I started off brewing beer, and learned quite a bit about how to make good clones of popular kinds of beer. Some of the brews were quite delicious, but it never seemed quite right to me. Hard to explain. I had been sitting with this thought for a while when I saw this video of Daniel Vitalis talking about the health effects of hops, which in a way sealed the deal for me:

After I saw this video, I started experimenting with herbal beers, brewed with herbs other than hops. I started to feel better about drinking these beers, but honestly they just didn’t taste as good. Daniel has since become an even bigger influence on my health strategy, as well as a friend, and we did some experimental brews together.

Then I re-discovered mead. A friend of mine has been brewing mead for many years, and hosted a workshop on how to do it. That was it. From the moment I tasted my first batch of mead, I have yet to brew a batch of beer. I’m just not interested.

I’ve set up a website to chronicle my brews, and other interesting brew-related data points I encounter at BardicBrews.net so if you are interested in more detail about what I’m up to go check it out.

In the meantime, I’ve set myself up that I can have several batches of mead going at once… and in a few weeks I’ll have the beginnings of a good variety of mead that will be in constant rotation.

One difference between mead and beer is that mead (like wine) gets better with age. So far by the time my next batch is ready to drink, the previous batch has been gone! Hopefully the new setup will mean I can actually have a respectable mead cellar within a few years.