Mead Workshop Tonight

Last call for the From Alcohol To Alchemy: The Lore, Craft, and Nutrition of Mead workshop! As of this moment there are a few openings left, so pay at the door WILL be an option. Please come! We’ll get you in even if it’s “sold out.”

I just got back from the spring a while ago, collecting wild spring water for the 12 of us who will be brewing tonight. I’m getting very excited for this event!

In addition, there is additional excitement in the pipeline for BardicBrews.net…. watch this space for a special announcement after the workshop.

Elecampane Mead

I’d never even heard of elecampane before, until I heard an herbalist called Sean Donahue was moving to Maine. I read about his story dealing with asthma, getting great results with elecampane, and immediately felt inspiration and resonance:

Its a familiar archetype: the bookish, asthmatic child whose imagination is captivated by stories of other worlds that sound more like home than this one. At once distant and emotionally sensitive. At times deeply empathetic and perceptive and at other times completely oblivious to social norms and cues. Asthma in these cases is often closely associated with social anxiety. Breath is a tenuous thread barely keeping the child present in this reality….
Elecampane is a medicine that reaches deep into the lungs and gets things moving again — releasing and cleansing buried grief just as it brings up old, infected mucus.

I decided I wanted to do a medicinal mead, incorporating elecampane, to treat my asthma.

I also decided to add some additional herbs to the mixture. I wanted to include rose hips, because they are in season and a great source of vitamin C; schisandra berries, because they’d add more adaptogens and other nutrients; St Johns Wort, because it helps elevate the spirit allowing one to breathe more deeply, and mullein, which is a great lung tonic.

In researching how each of these herbs should be prepared, I decided to make a decoction with the elecampane, rose hips, and schizandra berries, and an infusion with St John’s Wort and mullein.

I began the decoction with 2c rose hips, 1c elecampane, 1/4 c shizandra berries, 2 gallons spring water, and simmered it for 1 hour:

After an hour, I turned off the heat and added the infusion herbs: 1/2c St Johns Wort and 1/2c Mullein:

I let this cool overnight and strained it the next day, leaving me with a gorgeous, deep brown, very potent-tasting tea:

I poured it back into my stockpot and added about 3/4 of a gallon of honey. I don’t want this medicinal mead to be too sweet, so I was shooting for 15% alcohol potential. I took a few readings, adding a bit of honey or spring water to get the desired result:

As you can see it’s a bit above 15%, not quite 16%, but I knew I’d be topping off the carboy with extra water to get it to 3 gallons. So I pitched the yeast and transferred the must into the carboy, shook it up, gave it some positive juju, and wound up with a beautiful carboy:

Looking forward to being with this medicine in 2011.

UPDATE (Feb 27): I just racked the elecampane into jugs. Fermentation had definitely stopped; there was no bubbling and the mead was “dead”, which is just a subjective observation that there was no life remaining in the mead. Much to my surprise, with a low initial alcohol potential of 15%, the mead still tastes quite sweet. I took a hydrometer reading and got 5%, which means this mead is only 10% alcohol. Admittedly I’m somewhat puzzled by this, since this mead sat for 4 months in fermentation. Perhaps one of the herbs is a fermentation inhibitor, and is unfriendly toward yeast? I think I shall let these jugs sit for a few months and then take another reading. Not sure if there is any live yeast left in the jugs or not….

UPDATE (Mar 15): It was almost certainly the elecampane, which is used in antifungal and antiyeast protocols. Now the question is, do I try adding another yeast to get it to ferment some more, or just drink it as is?

UPDATE (Apr 11): The two gallons of mead have cleared somewhat, and I’ve been sipping on the top of the batch for a while. I really love this medicine. I wanted to bottle one of these gallons to capture it as it is now, and I wanted to experiment with the other gallon by tincturing more elecampane herb in the alcohol of the mead.

So for the first gallon, I added about 2 TBSP of dried elecampane root to tincture, which floated at the top and will slowly start to sink down in the coming days:

With the other gallon, I simply bottled it into 10 extremely handy 12oz grolsch bottles:

I drink about 4oz of this medicine per day when I’m using it, so a bottle will last me 3 days. I’m grateful for this powerful medicine, and I look forward to seeing how the other gallon with the tincture will turn out.

So far, my favorite quote about this batch is: “the Elecampane Mead is far from my best tasting mead. However, it is by far the best tasting asthma medicine I’ve ever used.”

Mead Workshop podcast interview

In my spare time, my family and I have done the Sweet Peas Podcast for nearly two years, chronicling our journey around diet and health. Episode 73 is now live, and it’s an interview with me and Daniel Vitalis about the upcoming Mead Workshop.

Give it a listen, subscribe to the rss feed for other episodes, and get a great little teaser about what this workshop will be like. Check it out!

Mead Workshop Preview Video

We shot this video last night at the UFF, as we get ready for the workshop. It’s very exciting, and it’s gonna be a great evening. There are only a few Get Your Gear, Brew Your Mead seats left (where you take home your carboy with fermenting mead inside), as well as some General Admission seats to see the workshop, so register soon before it sells out!

Preregistration Now Available!

Preregistration is now available for the From Alcohol To Alchemy: The Lore, Craft, And Nutrition Of Mead event at the Urban Farm Fermentory on Tuesday, November 16. There are 2 registration packages available.

If you’d like to register for the full Get Your Gear, Brew Your Mead package, including admission, ingredients, and all brewing gear so you can take home your first batch of fermenting mead, register here. There are only 12 premium seats available, so hurry!

If you’d like to register for general admission, to see the workshop and hear the talk by Daniel Vitalis, then register here.

Seating is limited, so register soon! Hope to see you there.

Samhain Harvest

Had some good bottling sessions as of late:

Plus, a week or so ago I did a mini-bottling session:

Blessings and gratitude for the bounty!

Next out of the carboy: Elderberry Mead, followed by Dry Vanilla Peach and Mabon Mugwort, followed by Autumn Berry Cyser. The cooler weather has slowed down fermentation time for sure.

Next up: thinking a rose hip mead is in order. Harper did one last year and it was UNbelievable, like spring in a bottle. Gonna see if I can harvest some wild rose hips in the next few days….

Autumn Berry Cyser

So all summer long I’ve been thinking about the cyser (or cysers) I’d do in the fall. Well, fall is here in full swing, and a friend just happened to turn me on to some Autumn Berries (also called Autumn Olives):

The autumn olive, elaegnus umbellate, is native to China, Japan, and Korea and was introduced to the United States in the mid 1800s. It is a deciduous tree or shrub that grows up to 20 feet high and 30 feet wide. In the 1950s it was promoted throughout the states to control erosion, and as a wildlife habitat. It was once used to help refoliate areas that were stripped bare due to mining and other environmental disturbances. Now, it is considered an alien invasive species.

He gave them to me still on the branches, so I had a bit of food processing time as I picked the berries off. Once picked and rinsed, I had probably less than a cup of the berries:

Turns out Autumn Berries are quite healthy also:

With as much as 15-18 times the amount of lycopene found in tomatoes, autumn berries are being touted as one of the best cancer preventative natural medicines. (The autumn berry has 40 to 50 mg/100g of lycopene compared to 3 mg/100g for a fresh raw tomato and 10 mg/100g for canned whole tomatoes.) The carotenoid is thought to be helpful in the prevention of heart disease, muscular degenerative disease, bladder, breast, gastrointestinal, cervix, mouth, throat, lung, prostate and skin cancers. The berries also contain vitamins A,C, E, flavonoids and essential fatty acids.

I thought these would go nicely in a cyser with the local apples, since both are quite ripe just now. Of course, to make cyser you need cider, so I went around the corner from my home and picked up 3 gallons of fresh, unprocessed, unfiltered, non-UV treated cider from my local orchard. I left them a 3 gallon carboy, which they held until their next pressing day which was yesterday.

Since I’m using cider, I decided to make a small amount of sumac tea, so I filled a saucepan half full of water, added a sumac drupe, brought it to a boil and let it steep for a couple hours until the liquid was a lovely pink color. Here’s the beginning of the infusion process:

Once done, I let it cool off some, strained the tea into the high speed blender with the autumn berries, and let it whizz for a couple minutes. Then I poured the puree into the pot, that I’d put about 2 gallons of cider and about 1/2 gallon of honey.

I mixed everything up well, heating it slightly up to about 85 degrees, so everything would dissolve. I then took a hydrometer reading and was showing about 13% potential alcohol. I then added a bit more honey until I reached a 15% alcohol potential.

I chose this number because I want a bit of a dry cyser. I’ll be doing more hydrometer readings from now on, simply because I think my meads have been great but a bit too sweet. I want a better understanding of how to “tweak” this parameter to achieve the desired sweet/dry end result.

For now, my stakes in the ground are that 15% potential will produce a reasonably dry mead; 20% will produce a reasonably sweet mead. 17.5% (what Harper generally recommends if you aren’t sure) is a great middle ground.

End result is interesting, it looks like cider with a hint of pink to it (from the sumac tea and the autumn berries):

Looking forward to trying this one, though I’m not sure how the aging process will go. Time will tell!

UPDATE:

Finally racked the autumn berry cyser. Fermantation slowed down with the cooler seasons, plus I let it go a bit longer than usual (12 weeks). Final alcohol potential is under 1% but we’ll call it good at 1%. This means the cyser is 14% alcohol. Taste is exquisite, tartness from the cider, very little remaining sweetness. Very nice!

Here is the label for this batch:

This mead won First Place at the first annual Maine Pagan Meader’s Cup, for “Best Dry Mead.” It’s a private event, and was my first ever mead award! :-)

Mead Workshop Details

BardicBrews.net presents:

From Alcohol To Alchemy:
The Lore, Craft, and Nutrition of Mead

Tuesday, November 16, 7-10pm
At the Urban Farm Fermentory
200 Anderson St. – Bay 4
Portland, ME 04101
207-653-7406

General Admission, $35
42 spots available ($45 at the door)

– or –

Get Your Gear, Brew Your Mead, $125
only 12 spots available, including:

  • Admission ($35 value)
  • Brewing Kit ($60 value) — you keep all the brewing equipment
  • Ingredient Kit ($40 value) — your first batch will produce 10-12 bottles of mead for you to enjoy
  • Hand-holding: consult with James Lindenschmidt in advance to plan your first batch of mead, and brew onsite with guidance during workshop
  • You keep everything, you will take home the 3 gallon carboy full of what will become mead in a few weeks (about 10-12 bottles).

Workshop includes:

  • Short talk on Mead Lore by James Lindenschmidt of www.BardicBrews.net
  • One-Hour lecture on the Nutrition and Alchemy of Mead by Daniel Vitalis
  • Meadmaking Craft workshop with James Lindenschmidt, where you will see several batches of mead being made, and have the opportunity to brew your own first batch of mead

Also Available At The Workshop:

Brewing Equipment Kit
Optional, available at event
$60 includes:

  • 3 gallon glass carboy
  • funnel
  • stopper
  • airlock
  • siphon hose
  • hydrometer

Ingredient Kit
Optional, available at event
$40 includes:

  • 1 gallon of honey
  • 1 packet of brewing yeast

Preregistration will begin soon. Watch this space! In the meantime if you require more information, contact us.

Mabon Mini-Harvest

Had a small bottling session tonight, just to get me through the weekend:

The big bottle in the middle is for a medieval party I’m attending this weekend. In addition, my band has a gig this weekend, so I’m sure I’ll bring a few up there. I love the clear bottle, 3rd from the left. It has raspberry mead, which turned out great and beautifully clear.

These are also the first labels with the new logo…. I think I need to brighten it up just a tad but I love it!