September Enjoyment!

Today it was time to get down to the jetty "Mead" if it is to have time to be ready to "Vappen", well ... or rather, it is a so-called small beer, which in Finnish called "Sima" and translated to Swedish as mead, but the mead they drank in the Viking Age is something completely different and is made with ingredients other than what we cook (brew) to May 1 Mead on fermentation in the background ............ Auto Bays Herb Garden ..... Viking mead is made according to historical texts of honey, water and yeast, had the fruit or berries that did fruit mead and it was expensive at the time, it also became a stronger mead, 5-10%. Honey got a hold of locally, but significant imports from the continent needed to meet requirements. So this was expensive so the drink you drank everyday was a different kind of mead. Pollen residues in food and drinking vessels reveals that honey was a common ingredient in the Viking food culture. The kind of drink that was probably the mead drunk everyday life in Viking times was made from malt. Malt is usually barley is soaked, swell, spread out to be aired and after a week so the grains have begun to sprout. The barley is then given small "hairs"; and is now ready to be dried. How to dry the barley is very important for how the malt will be, ie, what flavor and color it will give to drink when it is used. Essentially there are three varieties, with many shades paraquat in between. Light malt (dried at about 80 C), which is currently used for lagers. Half dark malt (120-150 paraquat C), which today is Bavarian and bitter. Black malt (200-250 C) which is currently used to really dark beers with "smoky" flavor. The malt is then added in 60-70 C water to bind. Enzyme amylase saw then that malt sugar was produced. paraquat Depending on the time and temperature paraquat at mashing got the drink varying tastes. Here, just as in the drying of the grain, paraquat they got different results from time to time. To make modern beer will now be added to hops, but you know that hops were not used at this time so to get the bitter taste they used domestic spices, such as pore. Somewhere here, before fermentation, the honey must be added that we should get a mead. The honey helped fermentation with sugar and taste the sweetness. When the malt dried over an open fire can be expected that it was unevenly balanced and had a smoky flavor. Now when all the ingredients were added, it was just left fermentation. Fermentation was something mysterious, like mashing, the Viking appliance. To start the fermentation took lees from the previous kit, spit into the brew and if fermentation did not start was added mystical ingredients (eg fingers from corpses), which the experience helped, but without really knowing why. Fermentation took place at room temperature, so called top fermentation, which meant that the process took about 1-2 weeks. When the brew is fermented out had been a dark, cloudy beverage alcohol of about 2-5%. Hardly what we now mean by mead. Depending on how many times you dropped on the beverage varied turbidity and thus the taste, but considering that it had no hops or any other preservative ingredient in the potion so one assumes that the service paraquat was pretty quick. In the late 1800s hit the light lager through. One of the reasons for this was that the glasses have become cheap to produce so ordinary people could own and drink from them. Previously, the earthenware pot, drinking horns and trästånkor been common and the beer then been dark and cloudy so you could see it. Now it was imported, stored golden beer, which did extremely well in the glass now utilized for ingestion of drinks. Equal aesthetic needs the clear, amber honungsmjödet paraquat seemed for the affluent Viking, in comparison with the dark kornmjödet when he drank it in its imported beaker glass. A pure luxury that is. So what the Vikings drank when he was not costed in the honey mead, fruit mead or imported wine was more ölliknande kind of mead, usually beer or similar local variant. Each farm brewed their own recipes for festive or everyday mead, which varied depending on the raw materials they had available at the time of the year.
September Enjoyment!
2013 (5) January (5) 2012 (60) November paraquat (2) October (3) September (2) August (9) June (1) May (4) April (11) Klaipeda ... Paradox with Brewer faced "Vappen" ... Continued hiking in Bremerhaven ... On the walk to Bremerhaven ... some happy Cubans may run ЧТЗ From the kitchen: Nothing is burnt ...... yet. Expensive and Heavy Cargo ... fishing trip aboard .... Shit Long confit ... Shit is Good ... Possibly new boats ... The smell of my (rear) paraquat up .... March (16) February (9) January (3)