The Lore And Craft Of Mead: eBook Release

UPDATE: As of June 2017, this eBook is no longer available. If you really, really would like a copy, then contact me and we’ll work something out.

We’re excited to announce the release of this ebook as a PDF download!

This book has been a long time coming. Since I started brewing years ago, I knew that I wanted to help teach people how to make their own fermented beverages. It’s not a terribly difficult process, but I felt the process was more complicated for beginners than it perhaps should be.

Later, when I took Harper Meader‘s “Measure by the handful and stir with your arm” meadmaking class, I knew that I had finally found my fermented beverage of choice. Mead has many things going for it; it’s humanity’s oldest fermented beverage, it’s made from one of the most profound foods known (honey), and it’s really simple and easy to make a delicious batch.

This book builds (or perhaps restores) a bridge between two camps: traditional meadmaking, and traditional herbalism. If we go back far enough there is no difference between the two. So if you are an experienced meadmaker looking to add a dose of herbalism to your brewing, or if you are an herbalist looking to get into meadmaking, this book will speak to you. Of course, it is also ideal for the beginner as it walks you through every step of the way.

There is somewhat of a focus on keeping mead a healthy beverage; I speak of spring water, the best local organic honey you can find, and local or wildharvested ingredients for your mead. Honey and good water are both profound nutrients for the human body; when we combine them with yeast and other ingredients from our ecosystem we can get some of the most powerful beverages available anywhere.

I also worked hard to cut out the fluff, and make the book as concise as possible. Those of you who know me or my default writing style know this is no easy task. ;-)    My aim was to take this meadmaking method, which both is simple for the beginner and very expandable for the intermediate or advanced meadmaker, and keep it to a booklet-length document, cramming as much information as possible into 16 pages. Hopefully I was successful.

So for all of humanity’s meadmakers, past, present, and future, I raise my drinking horn to you!