A Quick Guide to Serving Honey Wine at a Reunion

From scubby.com

Are you hosting a fun reunion party? From buying the right snacks to choosing the alcohol, there is a lot to do! Of course, there is one wine that can suit everyone’s palate, the honey wine mead.

Mead is an exquisite yet simple blend of honey, water, and yeast fermented to perfection. You can find it in dry, wet, and various flavours. Of course, for the regular sud-enjoyers, mead might be a new concept. So how about taking your time to learn how to serve and introduce this golden elixir to your guests? Here’s how you can do it.

Create Some Intrigue

You might have some friends second-guessing the drink and ask for other options. Try to educate them on this splendid sip. Mead has a rich cultural heritage and has been a vintage choice among many.

While its blend sounds simple, its taste is out of this world, warming the hearts of all. Many are used to champagne and whiskeys are house parties. Therefore, by bringing this new drink to the crew, you can cut the formalities and have everyone’s curious eyes on what is in their glass.

Before Serving, Check the Drink’s Temperature

Is your reunion during the day or before the clock struck 12? Mead or honey wine is drinkable both as a chilled and a warm drink. It is perfect in all temperatures if you know how to store it well.

During the summers, guests prefer a chilled glass of wine as they beat the heat. And if it is a cold night, you might have some friends asking for something warm to shield yourself from the chill. Mead suits both occasions. For evening sessions, stock some fruity flavors as they taste best when chilled.

If you want to serve cold mead, try to store it between 12 degrees to 16 degrees Celsius for that nice, chilled sip. For a warm brew to soothe the throat, try to bring it between 50 degrees to 55 degrees Celsius.

Keep in mind that you should not warm the drink over 60 degrees Celsius. It then foams up and loses its flavours. If you are warming up for a large crowd, try with small amounts. Doing so helps retain a lot of flavours.

Serve it right

After popping a bottle, serve it fresh. For parties with alcohol, there are many steps before the gathering starts. You have set up the glasses, ensure you have sufficient coolers and the right environment to set the mood for the boozing.

For starters, make sure your glasses are colourless to enhance the rich golden tone of this mead. Up next, try to find tulip-shaped glassware so people can hold it better as they enjoy every sip. You can bring out whiskey glasses for those requesting some warm honey wine.

For chilled honey wine, serve about 125ml per person. If you are pouring out some warm wine, maybe a 50ml shot would be enough for starters.

Pair it Up With Some Food

You can go for an elegant charcuterie board as your centrepiece. Deck it up with spicy and sharp cheese. You can also place in some peppered salami, fresh crackers, fruits, and nuts. Pickles and jellies also enhance the experience of enjoying sips of the honey wine.

You can also prepare some sliders, sauteed veggies, kebabs, and other delicious finger foods to serve the guests.

Closing Thoughts 

All in all, enjoy the reunion, have fun with your friends, and try out this beautiful drink. You can even try out some sample kits from famous honey wine from an award-winning winery like Hidden Legend Winery to know the taste first hand and only leave room for a “sweet surprise” for your guests.

https://scubby.com/a-quick-guide-to-serving-honey-wine-at-a-reunion/

A Finnish drink with a heroic past

From bbc.com

In the 16th Century, effervescent sima was a more desired drink than beer and has since become Finland's go-to beverage for ushering in spring

Finland is known for its triple "s" – sisu (resilience), sauna and Sibelius. But for centuries, there has also been a fourth, more subtle "s": sima, a fermented drink made with water, sugar, lemon and yeast. Today, effervescent and virtually non-alcoholic sima is beloved across the nation, most often consumed by children and adults alike as a special drink to celebrate Vappu, or May Day, a time when Finns flood the outdoors to embrace the coming of spring.

I had my first taste of homemade sima, its soft bubbles sparkling in the spring sunshine, 35 years ago in my friend's garden in the Finnish city of Pieksämäki. It was the eve of Vappu, and the drink's sweet acidity left a memory in my brain that has stayed with me to this day. As it also happened to be my fourth birthday, it took some time for me to realise that the celebratory refreshment had nothing to do with my special day, but instead was part of a rich piece of Finnish history that stretches back centuries.

Annual Vappu picnics offer the chance to visit with friends, enjoy spring and sip sima

(Credit: Markus Mattila/Alamy)

Sima's roots stem from the ancient alcoholic drink mead, or honey wine, which was widely drunk in early Bronze Age Europe. Mead, which in its simplest form is fermented honey and water, wasn't specific to Europe – it's also mentioned, for example, in India's Rigveda, an ancient collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. But, perhaps due to TV series such as Game of Thrones and The Vikings, mead's modern-day fame lies on the shoulders of 8th-Century Vikings, who enjoyed a highly alcoholic mix of water, honey and herbs such as meadowsweet and harrow. For them, mead was a drink from the gods that gave people strength to win battles. In fact, Vikings held mead in such a high regard that aspiring chieftains would build their own mead drinking halls to gain their followers' respect.

Nevertheless, the citrusy mead that more closely resembles today's sima didn't dock on Finnish shores such as those of the seaside city of Turku until the 16th Century, imported from the Hanseatic Northern European towns in what is modern-day Germany and Latvia. This 16th-Century drink – which, contrary to today's low-alcohol sima, contained up to 17% alcohol due to a longer fermentation process – was a more desired drink in Finland than beer.

The fermented Finnish drink sima is a traditional part of Vappu, or May Day, picnics

(Credit: Paula Hotti)

One of the busiest 16th-Century Finnish importers was savvy merchant and shipowner Valpuri Erkintytär Innamaa, a strong-willed woman who helped make sima the iconic Finnish Vappu beverage it is today.

In Innamaa's day, Turku was still part of Sweden. When Gustav I was crowned king in 1523, he recognised the city's strategic importance, renovated its dilapidated castle and occasionally visited. While in town, he enjoyed Turku's sima, making it a fashionable drink among the bourgeois. According to Seija Irmeli Kulmala, author of the recipe book Sima – a festive drink made with nature's ingredients, "King Gustav I of Sweden loved the sima he tasted in Turku. He created a sima boom," she said. "Sima was imported [from Riga and Lubeck] in vast quantities and its popularity grew."

Innamaa's first husband had received a royal warrant of appointment from the Swedish court residing at Turku Castle to provide goods he had imported. When he died in 1563, Innamaa took over the merchant business, becoming the wealthiest Turku merchant with the city's biggest fleet of ships. Spurred by the craze for sima that Gustav I had created in Turku, Innamaa started importing more of the increasingly popular drink from Baltic ports, spreading it at least as far as Stockholm. In the Swedish capital at the time, sima was nearly as expensive as wine.

Turku's port was a point of entry for 16th-century ships importing sima and other goods from around the Baltic Sea (Credit: Steve Weaver/Alamy)

Innamaa's success in business was remarkable, as traditionally her late husband's inheritance would have been transferred to her new spouse. Instead, she took control of the business herself – even after marrying three more times. Her success made her an easy target during the 1560s political turmoil that followed Gustav I's death, and she was attacked and looted more than once. Yet, according to Kristiina Vuori, author of the historical novel Western Winds based on Innamaa's life, Innamaa wasn't afraid of enemies. "She even travelled to Stockholm to tell the king himself about the injustices she suffered," Vuori said. "Despite being a woman, [Innamaa] wouldn't be silenced."

It took more than two centuries for sima to drip from high society's goblets to working-class glasses in Finnish homes. In Innamaa's day, sima remained an expensive upper-class beverage because both of the drink's main ingredients, honey and lemon, were still a rarity in the region. "Because of honey, sima was very expensive and only the richest bourgeois and Turku Castle's court could afford it," said Vuori.

By the 18th Century sugar had replaced honey, but was a rare commodity as well, dependent on imported sugarcane until Europe began producing sugar from beets. Once Finland's first sugar refinery was established in Turku in the 1750s, increasing numbers of Finns were able to make and afford sweet luxuries like sima. During this time, working class people could get a taste of sima at special events like the local vicarage's springtime gatherings. Decades later, that changed, and people could enjoy it more often, "when sima's ingredients – sugar and lemon – became more readily available in the 19th Century," said Kulmala.

At springtime Vappu festivals, people don white summer hats and quirky costumes

(Credit: Mikko Mattila/Alamy)

In the 1880s, Finland also began commercially producing yeast, making sima even easier to make on a large scale. Local companies could suddenly produce the drink with more consistency, and it was sold in kiosks and cafes across Finland. By the early 20th Century, sima, now virtually non-alcoholic, became the go-to beverage of Vappu, the festival to celebrate spring's arrival.

According to Tiina Kiiskinen, curator at Helsinki's Hotel and Restaurant Museum, the connection to Vappu came about thanks to the Finnish Temperance Movement, which first gained popularity at the end of the 19th Century and swelled to become an ideological social crusade that resulted in a full ban of alcohol between 1919 and 1932. "Around the turn of the 20th Century, there was a strong will to find a non-alcoholic alternative to drink at the celebrations," Kiiskinen said. "Sima was popular because it was cheap and resembled sparkling wine. Advertising further solidified sima's status as a May Day drink."

More than 100 years on, the temperance movement has lost momentum but sima remains a quintessential part of Finnish Vappu. The annual celebrations stretch from 30 April to 1 or 2 May, during which market squares fill with stalls selling food and balloons, people dress up in quirky costumes like colourful wigs and fake red noses, and young and old alike gather to sip sima and enjoy a spring day out with friends.

Finland's forager culture has inspired new flavours of sima including berry and spruce

(Credit: Sitikka/Getty Images)

The reach of sima also extends beyond the festivities. Young students learn to ferment sima in schools; restaurants offer sima on their Vappu menus alongside herring, potato salad and sweet pastries; and big breweries bottle and sell their own versions of the drink. Each spring, shop shelves fill with varieties of sima, and newspapers review the best brands. Furthermore, artisanal food culture has turned homemade sima into a trend, with creative home brewers experimenting with new flavours ranging from spruce to cucumber to rhubarb.

I, too, have dabbled in making my own. Following Kulmala's sima recipe from her book, I added pineapple and orange to the traditional lemon rind and juice, mixed everything together with sugar, then poured over near-boiling water, adding a pinch of yeast when the water had cooled down a little. After waiting eight hours, I strained the sima into bottles and topped each with a few raisins. Once a day for almost a week, I opened the bottles to let the pressure escape, and, once the raisins rose to the surface, I knew the fermentation process was complete.

This spring, while tracing the path of sima from Viking drink to a Finnish spring tipple, I ventured to Turku with a bottle of my homemade sima. In the Turku castle's cobblestone courtyard, I imagined being back in Innamaa's days, when barrels of sima would be hauled into the castle and enjoyed by the court. I popped the cork, my fingers getting sticky as the lightly pressured drink fizzed onto my hands. A lemon scent surrounded me and pulled me back to childhood. I took the year's first sip of sima, let the citric sweetness roll on my tongue and made a toast to the rich history of Finland.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20210519-a-finnish-drink-with-a-heroic-past

Mead in India: It’s all about the honey

From thehindu.com

Produced with a minimal carbon footprint, Indian meads rely on existing bee colonies on farmlands, and are slowly making a buzz in the country

What is the most sustainably produced alcoholic beverage? It is a non-grain recipe, once known as the elixir of the gods: Mead. Crafted from honey and water and fermented by yeast, mead leaves a small carbon footprint since it depends on bees and nectar already available on existing farmlands, unlike grains that are cultivated specifically for beer, rum or whiskey.

In terms of alcohol content, mead is closer to wine than beer, ranging between eight to 20% ABV (the amount of alcohol/ethanol in a drink). Mead is widely thought to be one of the oldest alcoholic beverages, with evidence of a fermented beverage made of honey, rice, and fruit dating to 7BC in China.

Over the past decade, meaderies in India have slowly been taking this story forward in some pockets of the country. In barely a year since it opened, Nashik-based Cerana Meads is supplying to select hotels and restaurants in Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Nashik.

Pune-based Moonshine, which holds the distinction of being Asia’s first meadery, has been around since 2018 and retails its experimental wares across retail at about 200 stores and 200 restaurants across Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad, Nashik, Navi Mumbai,Thane and Goa.

“We began with just two tanks when we were testing the waters for mead, then we scaled up with two larger tanks and now we have 20,000 litre tanks like the ones at wineries, at our factory. Our idea is to have a pan India footprint and build a global brand,” says Moonshine co-founder Rohan Rehani. Clearly, mead is in demand.

A range of fruit-based meads produced by Cerana. Photo: Special Arrangement/THE HINDU  

Built by curiosity

For Yoginee Budhkar and Ashwini Deore, co-founders at Cerana Meads in Nashik, starting a meadery in 2020 was a natural progression of their interest in beekeeping and their fascination with fermentation. Yoginee explains, “While doing my doctorate in Food Engineering and Technology, I had a fortuitous introduction to meads while visiting a professor in the UK. My friend and fellow PhD scholar Ashwini was enthusiastic about creating an innovative product from agricultural resources, and her love for wine and spirits led us to Cerana Meads.”

Along with its flagship mead, the meadery has collaborated with breweries in Maharashtra and Karnataka to make braggots, melding malt and mead, and also makes India’s very first pyment — a mead using grapes. Their version uses chenin blanc grapes from Nashik.

Cerana’s melomels, which are fruit-infused meads, highlight both local produce and natural honey, “Our jamun (black plum) melomel uses local jamuns and jamun honey, which is earthy and spicy. For our pomegranate melomel, we have a lychee honey that has floral notes. We also use multi-floral honey from forests in Himachal Pradesh, where you find citrus fruits and flowers,” says Yoginee.

All of Cerana’s offerings are priced at ₹180 a pint except for their Yule spice sold in winter at ₹450. The products find takers among the 25-40 age bracket, largely upper middle class consumers who have travelled and are curious to try out home-grown craft beverages. Says Cerana customer Shilpa Brahme from Pune, “Their jamun melomel and yule spice continue to be my favourites. Being a home-baker, I have also used Yule spice for cake preparations when I’ve invited friends for dinner and dessert.”

Business of bees

The founders at Cerana have undergone training in beekeeping. In every natural hive, a portion of the honey is used as food for the bee larvae, and the surplus gets stored in the upper one-third of the structure.

Manmade bee-boxes mimic this ingenious design. The upper one-third of the bee-box, called the super, is where honey is stored. The lower two-thirds, called the brood box, houses the queen and worker bees. “It took us painstaking effort to convince beekeepers to start using only the supers for their honey collection, instead of invading the brood box, and we buy only that honey for our mead production,” states Yoginee.

 

‘Bee Whisperer’ Akshay Borse at work for the Moonshine Project.

Photo: Special Arrangement/THE HINDU  

Honey is also important to entrepreneur duo Rohan Rehani and Nitin Vishwas, who started Moonshine. Back then, meads did not exist in the Indian excise lexicon. Now Moonshine Meadery in addition to its regular stream of meads in the market, has branched out to a special Moonshine Honey Project.

Moonshine has its own ‘bee whisperer’, Akshay Borse, “with two years of experience on the field, 10 harvests across the country, and probably 1,000 bee stings, Akshay has made it his mission to change the way beekeeping is practised in the country,” adds Rohan. The Mustard honey harvested from Doonda, Rajasthan, in January 2021, tastes like a lemon glaze, quite counterintuitive to the memory of pungent mustard.

“Our latest harvest was in March, an acacia honey which we will use for the next edition of the Project X mead, to highlight the wonderful single-origin honey that our country has to offer,” states Nitin. To revive beekeeping, bee-boxes have been set up in and around Pune, and the Mulshi valley.

The post-processing filtration and packaging is carried out below 38 degrees Celsius, to preserve all the bio-enzymes produced by the bees. The lockdown has been busy at Moonshine, with the launch of MeadLABS, gluten-free meads celebrating seasonal fruits and honey, priced between ₹130 in Goa to ₹190 in Maharashtra. The meadery plans to expand retail in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala by 2022.

The grilled pineapple mead is made with rum-soaked pineapple that has been grilled over coal, combined with a multi-floral honey. For the guava-chilli variant, white and pink guavas meet multi-floral honey and the feisty Naga ghost chillies. The bourbon-soaked apple mead is crafted by ageing Moonshine’s apple cyder mead over bourbon-infused French oak chips.

Shinchita Majumdar, a regular mead patron says, “Moonshine Meads are pure art in a pint. The guava chilli, grilled pineapple and coffee and my current favourites.” Rohan agrees, “Meads lend themselves to so many iterations; combining Indian flavours and Indian honey is a thing of beauty.”

https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/indian-meads-make-a-buzz-with-fruit-and-floral-honey-notes/article34552105.ece

Finding sweet success in the mead-making business

From bostonglobe.com

There’s an art to making good honey wine, says Michael Fairbrother of Moonlight Meadery in New Hampshire

The tagline for Moonlight Meadery, “romantic enough to share,” may seem overly saccharine until you spend any time listening to Michael Fairbrother talk about his product.

Just listen to the way Fairbrother dreamily describes the first time he tried mead, or honey wine, way back in 1995 at a monthly meeting of homebrewing enthusiasts.

“I was at one of these meetings and somebody offered me a cyser,” Fairbrother says. “I’d never had a cyser before and was too embarrassed to say that, so I passed my glass over. I said, ‘What’s this?’ He said, ‘Apple mead.’ I said, ‘What’s mead?’ He said, ‘A wine made from honey.’

“I used to be a beekeeper, and I love honey. If you’ve ever seen a little baby try something they love for the first time, their eyes light right up, and that’s what happened.”

Moonlight Meadery bottles.Handout

In that context, Moonlight Meadery bottles with lovey names like Fling, Entice, Blissful, and Breathless make sense. Fairbrother really loves mead, and he thinks you will, too.

Evidence that humans drank mead in ancient times exists in written form; Aristotle and Pliny the Elder both wrote about the beverage. It is featured in “Beowulf,” and monks who kept up the practice of beekeeping often made mead as well.

The method of fermenting honey with water is so tried and true that updating the drink for modern times wasn’t so much about changing how it’s made as how it’s marketed. The craft beer boom of the late ’90s and early 2000s should have theoretically helped sell mead to modern customers, but Fairbrother says the decision to devote his life to the drink wasn’t an easy one.

“I looked at the marketplace in 2007 and realized there were a lot of breweries, but nobody was making great mead,” says Fairbrother. “The New Hampshire Liquor Commission told me not to ever quit my day job, but they’re one of my biggest customers now.”

Today, Moonlight Meadery is selling the romance from its Londonderry, N.H., tap room. Bottles range from $16 offerings like Wild, made with wild blueberries and presenting like a dry cabernet, to the $250 Utopian X, an orange blossom and wildflower honey blend aged for 10 years in Samuel Adams Utopias beer barrels. Fairbrother said he landed on that price point after seeing similarly priced bottles of Sauternes, a French sweet wine, and realizing he liked his drink better.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve had,” he says of the Utopian X. “I’ve shared a bottle with my father and I’ve shared a bottle with my son. I really do believe in my skills as an artist, with the technology behind it. The slight oxidation adds to the flavour like you might find in a really good Madeira or a port.”

Fairbrother admits his meads aren’t for everyone — I’ve tried several varieties, and beer lovers may find the meads cloying — but he’s found that the people who like mead really like mead. He says he often hears from women in particular telling him they’ve never found anything they’ve liked so much.

Moonlight Meadery’s Londonderry tap room is open seven days a week. The company also ships more than 70 meads to 39 states, including Massachusetts, via moonlightmeadery.com.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/11/lifestyle/finding-sweet-success-mead-making-business/

Crazy idea celebrates six years

From thelocalne.ws

Flash back to six years ago …

It is noon.  A bright spring day in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Deb runs out the open flag for the first time. Dan waits with anticipation. If you brew it, will they come? 

Would his crazy, mid-life crisis idea of making the old-fashioned beverage, mead, and selling it right here in Ipswich actually work?

Favoured by the Vikings, mead is one of the oldest fermented drinks, dating back to the 7000 BC.

Very popular during colonial times, mead is wine made from honey and fruits that has a smooth flavour. Dan Clapp, owner and brewer at the 1634 Meadery on Short Street, only used honey from local beekeepers, and got his fruits from Russell Orchards and Marini Farms. “Supporting local trade is part of our mission,” he said.

Deb Clapp (left), "mead wench," of the 1634 Meadery, talks to

Vinnie Burridge and Caryl Munsell of Ipswich (file photo)

The name “1634” refers to the year Ipswich became a town. In keeping with their local theme, Dan and Deb Clapp tip their hats to Ipswich’s rich history with names for their meads such as Devil’s Footprint, Choate Bridge Cyser, and Mooncusser.

“Turns out, if you brew it, they sure will come,” Dan said. “That weekend was such a hit! We were blown away by how many Ipswich folks showed up to wish us well and support our new business. Our friends and family helped operate the tasting room and manage the crowds. It still seems like a blur.”

Since then, the meadery has become a destination for their popular tastings and gift shop. The Clapps have welcomed tourists from all over the U.S. and abroad.

Over these past six years, Dan has churned out over 72,000 bottles of mead in 40 different flavours. 1634 Mead is sold to new and die-hard mead fans in local liquor stores and wine shops. 

The Clapps recognize how fortunate they are to have had a solid staff over the years, which has been instrumental in helping their business grow.

“We wish to thank the folks of Ipswich, our family and friends, and our meadery neighbours for their support and encouragement. Cheers to six years!” said Deb. 

http://thelocalne.ws/2021/05/04/crazy-mid-life-crisis-idea-celebrates-six-years/