General Discussion Thread

[Jitter]

Oh I had no idea mead needs or can stand for years! I thought it’s more of a make now, consume within the year type deal.

JoB, the chemicals leaching can cause taste to deteriorate and is unhealthy, but neither is likely to be a concern for the survivors. The sweetness of honey would likely overpower the weird taste or at least get overlooked to get the good stuff. And the chemicals are a serious health issue for us, surrounded with them and getting some from everything we eat. But if historical honey is the only source, the stuff would have to be inedible before it has so much it could have health implications.

Imagine Lalli’s disappointment if he found a stash of honey and then it turned out it’s weird and stupid and doesn’t taste good after all.

[Róisín]

Life of mead depends very much on the type of yeast used to ferment the mead, and what else is in there besides honey. Meadale, a simple mead type made with an ale yeast, honey and usually the addition of a grain (rye, barley, wheat or whatever), has a short span about that of ale or beer - months or a few years. Plain mead, honey and water with a wine yeast or a specific mead yeast, lasts longer, years to decades. Melomel, mead made with honey, yeast and a fruit juice instead of water, or partly replacing water, lasts longer because the alcohol level is usually higher, and the flavour usually improves with age. And the best melomel I make is made with honey, apple juice and a sauternes or champagne yeast. I want to try it sometime with a cider yeast. And metheglyn is made from honey and water or fruit juice mixed with herbs for flavour and/or medicinal effect. The metheglyn recipe I most often use is called ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Mead’, from a recipe collected from Elizabeth the First by Sir Kenelm Digby. I find it interesting because all the herbs in it are both good-tasting and were treatments used back in her day for treating both migraines and bad periods. My personal metheglyn recipe contains hawthorn berries, melissa officinalis, sage and thyme. Metheglyn can easily be drinkable after decades.

[lwise]

... So once or twice a year I buy 5 gallon buckets of honey.

Well, now I know who buys the 5 gallon buckets of honey!

Imagine scavengers coming across one of those buckets, and the sheer joy they'd be welcomed home with.

Also, I'm now imagining Mikkel finding a jug stashed away in a cabinet of the tank, where Sigrun is making mead from a little jug of honey she found and pocketed.  Though apparently mead can explode just like beer, so Mikkel might discover it when he has to clean up the mess...

[Róisín]

Not just mead and beer. Way back when my kids were little, husband of the time was making ginger beer, and had it stashed in a high cupboard out of reach of tiny hands. Heat rises and it was a humid stuffy night in the middle of a Far North Queensland summer. In the small hours of the morning I was woken by a loud explosion, closely followed by the crash and tinkle of cupboard doors being pushed out and fragments of glass sliding down the hall, way louder than the usual tree frogs or the occasional snakes which slid down the hall in the middle of the night when they emerged from the toilet. Fortunately the kids were all in their rooms with the doors shut. We were able to clean up before they emerged. Even nonalcoholic beverages like ginger beer or the horehound beer my sister makes can blow up if they generate enough bubbles. That’s why I always keep an eye open for the old Pickaxe brand beer bottles, which seem less likely to blow up than other brands, even if some of them are more than a century old. I also use old champagne bottles for drinks that are possibly explosive - those are designed to cope with such pressures!

[Yastreb]

Years ago I realised that a part-filled bottle of orange juice was well past its use-by date. I decided to get rid of it, so I went to the toilet to pour the juice out, began to unscrew the cap...
BANG!
Orange juice sprayed over my face and shoulders.
The juice had fermented in the bottle, and unscrewing the cap was the equivalent of pulling out the pin of a hand grenade.

[Róisín]

A nasty experience, Yastreb, but all too common!

[Keep Looking]

Oh, no!

So far the only fermented beverage I've made was when I was a child and my best friend and I stuffed a whole lot of mashed-up lillypillies into a bottle and then forgot about it in the backyard for a month. Needless to say we decided it probably wasn't safe to drink when we found it again and gave it a good sniff.

[Róisín]

Safer to be cautious, for one thing it is useful to know what kind of fermentation products are being generated. Methanol, for example, can blind or kill you. And I am sure that you have heard about how scrumpy differs from regular cider?

[Keep Looking]

Safer to be cautious, for one thing it is useful to know what kind of fermentation products are being generated. Methanol, for example, can blind or kill you. And I am sure that you have heard about how scrumpy differs from regular cider?

I have not heard, actually! I would be happy to learn

[Róisín]

Scrumpy is a very strong cider, which causes a type and degree of drunkenness greater than what the alcohol content alone would strictly account for. Nowadays the term tends to be used just for fortified cider in general, but originally it was used for a cider which also had more than just the products of fermentation of fruit juice. Not only sugars ferment, so do some proteins.

So the story was that a farmer somewhere in the southern parts of the UK found that his most recent batch of cider was unusually rich and intoxicating, and he decided to save some of the yeast to make next year’s batch, since brewers had figured out that particular strains of yeast gave different results which could be duplicated by reusing the same yeast culture. So when the barrel was emptied, the farmer went to scrape a yeast sample out of the bottom to save for starting next year’s brew of cider. What he found embedded in the yeast sludge was a very large, very dead rat. He was horrified, but decided to try the yeast anyway, discarding the rat. He made next year’s batch with that yeast but without rat, and while it was a good cider it didn’t have that extra something.

So the year after that he added a rat, and the result was a return to the special qualities of the first batch. After a few years people figured out that the rat could be skinned and gutted without loss of effect, and much later worked out that it didn’t have to be a rat. My gran made scrumpy and used a couple of pounds of fresh beef. It worked fine. Apparently it just has to be a protein. Disgusting, but fascinating.

Edit: I gather that the same process happens in those Mongolian brews that have a base of mare’s milk.

[Yastreb]

Róisín, the scrumpy story brings to mind the old tale of "Tapping The Admiral."

https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tap1.htm

[Róisín]

Not one I had heard before! But bleakly funny. I wonder how the Admiralty would have felt about that?

[Keep Looking]

Oh, wow, that's certainly a story! While it does make sense that proteins would affect the brewing process, I'm not sure how I'd feel about drinking cider that had a dead rat at the bottom of the barrel!

Then again, I grew up in a wine-growing region and I am fairly sure that there is a good number of bees, spiders and the occasional mouse that end up in those big crushing vats they use to process the grapes, so.... really the moral of this story is that maybe we should be a bit less squeamish about weird things in food, haha. I don't drink alcohol myself but I am quite fond of fish sauce which is made from fermented whole small fish, and I've definitely had dishes that contained various types of innards! Anything grown outside that isn't slathered in pesticides is gonna end up with some bugs on it at some point.

[Róisín]

True that, as any farmer could tell you! Also, I do like your new avatar. Did you draw her, and what is she?

[Keep Looking]

True that, as any farmer could tell you! Also, I do like your new avatar. Did you draw her, and what is she?

My new avatar is a commission by Rithalie on the SSSS discord! She is Lyn from Fire Emblem 7 (a videogame - my girlfriend and I have been playing through all the Fire Emblem series together)