9 ms·

The quest to recreate a lost and ‘terrifying’ medieval mead

97 points by kwhitefoot 5y ago

kevinmchugh 5y ago
> To avoid the chlorine, fluoride, and other additives found in modern tap water You should be able to get a water report from your municipality, listing any treatments they perform. Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store. I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product. I know plenty of breweries that just use fluoridated city water. Note the special lid on that mason jar for allowing off-gassing. Fermenting in a mason jar with a standard lid is a recipe for exploding glass. I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes. If you don't want to play the guessing game on fermentation time, buy a hydrometer or refractometer.
- ixwt 5y ago
  > Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store. Never heard of this. I've googled a bit around, and I think I'll try this in the future. > I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes. The caramelization process does slow the process down a good bit. I've made a few bochets, and I notice they go slower than other meads. I've heard of people having issues using Ale yeasts with meads. The temperature of the house could have an impact. The lack of available nutrients (raisins a hotly debated topic in the mead community). I would expect the Kveik yeast, the Lalvin D47, and maybe the "yeast party" to be faster than the S-04 and Saison yeast.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    > The temperature of the house could have an impact. Temperature cycles. The barn wort batches are always more complicated flavors than the steady temperature basement batches.
  - awild 5y ago
    > I would expect the Kveik yeast, the Lalvin D47, and maybe the "yeast party" to be faster than the S-04 and Saison yeast. Kveik has extreme Nutrient requirements compared to other yeasts. Likely also why the sample of that batched tasted off.
- jccooper 5y ago
  The choice of distilled water in particular for a historic recreation is very strange; water makes a big difference. Unless there's reason to believe water in whatever part of France is very soft, a bottled spring water would have been a better choice if you don't want to use tap.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Right, simple minerals such as calcium can make a big difference in final taste of a beer. The excess calcium in waters of karst country (big limestone deposits) is said to have a huge effect on German beers historically, and I'd imagine some of that extends into France as well. Distilled water minimizes variables of course, but it by itself indeed very non-historic.
  - fogihujy 5y ago
    Or, you know, just draw water from an old well. Distilled water seems too clinical.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  Yeah. I think for historical accuracy they should go ahead and add some cholera bacteria too. Why stop at removing chlorine?
- blix 5y ago
  > I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product. I've never done a comparison myself, but I've seen this mentioned many times as a consideration when fermenting foods. A cursory search indicates that floride can have detrimental effects in wine yeasts as well.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It shouldn't matter much; both chlorine and fluoride evaporate faster than water, and with all brewing processes you need to boil the water anyway. Distilled water is no good, it lacks the minerals, and without minerals water has no flavor (and it's actually harmful to drink distilled water for too long). I'm just glad our water is not fluoridated or chlorinated. There's evidence (citation needed) that drinking fluoridated water impacts neurological development, mood, behaviour, etc.
  - kevinmchugh 5y ago
    There's only a brief boil in this because it's mead. There are plenty of no-boil meads, like JAOM. Chlorine can be removed just by leaving the water uncovered over night before brewing, but chloramine can't. Chloramine is common. Not treating for it risks chlorophenol creation in the finished product.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    > There's evidence (citation needed) that drinking fluoridated water impacts neurological development, mood, behaviour, etc. Citation definitely needed. General Ripper notwithstanding, the science doesn't seem to support the conclusion that the amount of fluoride that is intentionally added to drinking water is detrimental to health. (https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-study-shows-fluoride-safe/ https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-study-show...)
wizzwizz4 5y ago
It's “terrifying” because hot honey is hot.
- rob74 5y ago
  Not only that, but apparently it tends to boil "volcano-style", and if you have ever burnt (or "caramelized", to use the more elegant term) sugar, you know how sticky it is - now imagine a burning-hot drop of that sticking to your skin...
  - onorton 5y ago
    It's so known for its stickiness that a mixture of sugar and boiling water is used by inmates against others. It's known as "prison napalm".
    - Arrath 5y ago
      Well that is decidedly unpleasant knowledge.
    - bastiantower 5y ago
      It also has a high specific heat value
- bigie35 5y ago
  It's also terrifying because the honey mix can expand 3-4x, quickly expanding beyond the container you're using.
- MrLeap 5y ago
  I got some molten sugar on my hand once. For how innocuous "hot honey" sounds, making this stuff really would be pretty white knuckle for me (ha ha). It sticks to you. It stays hot enough to burn you, while burning you, for an unintuitively long time. I've burned myself blacksmithing a few times and accidentally brushed red metal with a finger. None of those burns have ever came close to the brilliant white hot, long lasting agony of molten sugar.
Darmody 5y ago
I think it's time to make some mead. It's been years since last time.
- dmead 5y ago
  Almost 39 years by my watch.
unklefolk 5y ago
What is the alcohol content once fermentation is complete? Is it similar to wine?
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  It depends on how much honey you use.
  - danwills 5y ago
    Which yeast you use could be very important too!: Different yeasts "pack up shop" during fermentation at different levels of ethanol. It's their own waste-product, that humans love, that stops them, but some types of yeast can put up with much higher levels than others! (though there are other factors too like Ph/pressure/mineralisation/etc). Some yeast strains keep fermenting to (tolerate) a much higher ethanol percent than others, and the result of these more 'vigorous' yeasts is generally a 'dryer' result in brewing terms: A less 'sweet' result because all the sugars have been 'dried' out (ie roughly, consumed and converted to ethanol). This is not the only axis to think about here though! For mead to be 'sweet' in the end it either has to use a yeast that gives-up (for that much sugar) and hope that nothing else can live in there (not a bad bet for partially-fermented-honey actually), or to be sweetened after-the-fact (probably more common in modern 'Mead' products). Fermentation involving a community of microorganisms (not just yeast) can often end up far dryer (especially given the time-frames they talk about in the article)! Many bugs can consume the 'waste' products that each other makes, and this variety can create enzymatically-linked cascades of molecular conversion-in-phases that can result in all sorts of unexpected "processing" of the "raw" molecules in the brew, including the hops components (if beer) and I'd think all those spices in traditional mead-recipes were probably undergoing some transformations too! Fascinating!
- mrob 5y ago
  There's an online beer recipe calculator (Javascript required) that can also be used for mead: https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator It calculates based on volume of the combined ingredients. I assume dissolving 1 pint of honey in 9 pints of water will result in less than 10 pints of total volume. I don't know exactly how much, but guessing 9.5 pints total, and using raw honey and raisins as the fermentables, I get 11% ABV with the high attenuation D47 yeast, and 8.7% with the low attenuation S-04. Caramelization will reduce the fermentability of the honey, but I am not sure by how much. My guess is that it's a small effect.
eutectic 5y ago
Sounds like a waste of good honey.
- CivBase 5y ago
  Sounds like you've never had mead before.
  - eutectic 5y ago
    I meant more the caramelization - if you're going to nuke all the aromatics, why not just use sugar?
    - galangalalgol 5y ago
      maybe some recipes die out for a reason?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
moses-palmer 5y ago
I find it curious that somebody so invested in recreating a medieval mead does not put in the extra effort of procuring long pepper and grains of paradise---those are certainly spices always present in my spice box. I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour?
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  I also found this curious. I don't have either of those in my kitchen or at my grocery store, but they're certainly available online. They would be pretty noticable in the finished flavor, I imagine. Mead flavor is often best described as "delicate", especially in lower abv meads. The carmellization and yeasts are probably going to be the most notable flavors here.
- ixwt 5y ago
  > I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour? No, they do have an impact on the final flavor. I don't know what long pepper or grains of paradise taste like, or what the yeast will do with the flavor compounds. In my experience, the quantity of spices in that volume will come through. I honestly feel like 20 cardamom pods will come through quite strongly, in my few years of experience of meads.
- detritus 5y ago
  Not sure I'd want those in my mead, but thanks for making me feel like a total ignoramus - I'd never heard of either of those two spices! I've now found a site that sells them in my country and lo! Oh dear, so many other things I've never heard of to try too. 'Thanks?' :)
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Not sure I'd want those in my mead Which I would say is besides the point, the article was about recreating an ancient mead based on a recipe, which called for those ingredients. Sometimes it's impossible to source the historical ingredients because they themselves have been lost (to memory or possibly entirely e.g. silphium), but that's not the case here. Both grains of paradise and long pepper are in active use, even if not in european cuisines.
404mm 5y ago
Mead is not uncommon to find for purchase in some European countries till this day. I cannot speak for how authentic is the modern day recipe compared to what the author found. But it’s a mead. It’s sweet and contains alcohol :) Btw (bitter) beer mixed with mead makes for one delicious drink!
- hvs 5y ago
  Mead has reached the modern day. The author is saying that this specific recipe for mead (bochet) has not.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Mead is not uncommon to find for purchase in some European countries till this day. Mead is common, the specific "bochet" style mead (using caramelised honey), not so much. The article is about bochet, very specifically. The article's introduction is pretty clear that both mead itself and various ancient styles of mead have survived to the modern age e.g. > “It truly is a lost style. It’s not a historical style that has survived into the modern era,” says Heit. “It’s literally something that disappeared.”
the_third_wave 5y ago
> The first and only complete recipe for the drink—and the primary source for modern recreations—turns up in 1393, in what might be considered a manual of mansplaining. Really? Mansplaining in the 14th century? Is that how historical subjects are going to be treated now? > An anonymous French writer penned an exhaustive guide to etiquette, moral conduct, and the practical concerns of a young bride, from choosing servants to throwing feasts: Le Ménagier de Paris (The Good Wife’s Guide). “It’s a ridiculous book,” says Verberg. “It’s micromanagement. I would not have wanted to be his wife.” Nor would she (or he) have wanted you as her husband (or wife), she (he) would possibly not even have recognised you are a marriage-worthy candidate. Times change, attitudes change, mores and morals change, that is what makes history so interesting. Knee-jerk virtue signalling is not a sign of a good historian. Read Machiavelli's The Prince for another detailed manual on how to behave, in this case on how to become an effective prince. Was Machiavelli mansplaining as well, seeing as how he wrote the book to instruct another male? Let history be history and study it for what it is, the past which eventually led to the present. Rest assured that once we are history many of our cultural traits will seem strange as well. Rest assured that what is considered virtuous now will be considered something totally different in a few centuries - if not a few decades. Also, stop using labels like mansplaining, it adds nothing to the discourse and only leads to polarisation of the 'he is not in my camp' type.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  Yeah I quit reading as soon as she used "mansplaining". Not the sort of article I wanted to read.
  - kevinmchugh 5y ago
    Replace it with "patronizing" and try again
    - CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
      That should be the job of "a senior editor and writer"
CountDrewku 5y ago
Stopped reading as soon as she used the term "mansplaining". I can't take anyone who uses that term seriously. How about just write about the mead instead of trying to fit in with modern wokeness. If men are that bad maybe you shouldn't be using a recipe one wrote? This woman appears to have a massive chip on her shoulder. Edit: Oh whoops I forgot being sexist towards men is fine. If i swapped in a similar derogatory term for this woman that should be ok as well right? Yay DOUBLE STANDARDS!
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then rush into the HN comments to get angry about it. That leads to generic tangents, which are predictable, tedious, and usually turn nasty. One way of looking at this is to take the following guideline to apply at the article level as well: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) The idea on HN is to have curious conversation. For that, a better practice would be to bring in the most interesting bit from an article, or the bit that creates more interesting responses in you. If an article creates no such responses in you, then the way to use HN in the intended spirit is to look at at different article instead. Edit - btw can you please stop posting flamewar comments in general? We've already had to ask you this several times. You clearly have good things to contribute, and at the same time you're mucking them up with guidelines breakage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147928 is a good example - there was good info and interesting conversation there, but then you spoiled it by going into attack. In the end the comment was rightly flagged. If you had posted it in the intended spirit of curiosity and openness, that would have been much better. Please do that going forward.
CivBase 5y ago
> Instead of using honey I’d extracted and strained the modern way, however, I crushed some comb taken from a colony that had unfortunately not survived winter—the bees’ lasting legacy would be to provide honey close to what was available in the 14th century, including the occasional stray leg or wing. Sounds like this stuff really is the bee's knees.
robarker 5y ago
To think that the ingredients are adapted from 1393. I am looking forward to this modern adaptation of Bochet.
sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
Interesting fact: in Russian language, mead is "мёд" (myod) which also means "honey" which (мёд) also has a very old meaning of "alcoholic beverage made from honey".
- enlyth 5y ago
  In Slovak, "med" is also honey, but mead we call "medovina".
  - sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
    Same word essentially! Modern Russian has word "medovuha" but OLD Russian was just "med".
    - mantas 5y ago
      In Lithuanian honey is "medus" while the drink is "midus"
- blowski 5y ago
  In Polish, 'miód' is the generic word for honey, while 'miód pitny' means 'drinkable honey'. I wonder if, in the past, there was a phrase for 'spreadable honey'.
- danans 5y ago
  It goes all the way back to Proto Indo European. Sanskrit for honey is "madhu"
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  That's in archaic, hundreds years old Russian though. Mead in current Russian is "medovuha" and that's it.
- zebbadee 5y ago
  In Chinese it's 'mi', Spanish 'miel'
Nursie 5y ago
I made a bochet a few years ago. It was slightly terrifying boiling up the honey and the smell of doing so seemed to attract a number of bees! I think I went too far on the caramelisation though, and the finished product was a bit ashy.
ekianjo 5y ago
> For some homebrewers, the danger of recreating bochet may be the very thing that attracts them to it. “People who like rollercoasters and jumping off cliffs like bochet,” says Verberg with a laugh. “You can make a sugar volcano that will explode, violently.” Ridiculous claim. You don't need to boil honey anymore as long as you use clean ingredients these days. Before boiling was used to remove impurities and kill bacteria. You can make hydromel or bochet without boiling anything.
- uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
  You misunderstood the concept caramelizing as boiling for a hygienic purpose. Meanwhile its done to create taste.

97 points by kwhitefoot 5y ago

> To avoid the chlorine, fluoride, and other additives found in modern tap water You should be able to get a water report from your municipality, listing any treatments they perform. Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store. I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product. I know plenty of breweries that just use fluoridated city water. Note the special lid on that mason jar for allowing off-gassing. Fermenting in a mason jar with a standard lid is a recipe for exploding glass. I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes. If you don't want to play the guessing game on fermentation time, buy a hydrometer or refractometer.

ixwt 5y ago
> Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store. Never heard of this. I've googled a bit around, and I think I'll try this in the future. > I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes. The caramelization process does slow the process down a good bit. I've made a few bochets, and I notice they go slower than other meads. I've heard of people having issues using Ale yeasts with meads. The temperature of the house could have an impact. The lack of available nutrients (raisins a hotly debated topic in the mead community). I would expect the Kveik yeast, the Lalvin D47, and maybe the "yeast party" to be faster than the S-04 and Saison yeast.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  > The temperature of the house could have an impact. Temperature cycles. The barn wort batches are always more complicated flavors than the steady temperature basement batches.
- awild 5y ago
  > I would expect the Kveik yeast, the Lalvin D47, and maybe the "yeast party" to be faster than the S-04 and Saison yeast. Kveik has extreme Nutrient requirements compared to other yeasts. Likely also why the sample of that batched tasted off.
jccooper 5y ago
The choice of distilled water in particular for a historic recreation is very strange; water makes a big difference. Unless there's reason to believe water in whatever part of France is very soft, a bottled spring water would have been a better choice if you don't want to use tap.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Right, simple minerals such as calcium can make a big difference in final taste of a beer. The excess calcium in waters of karst country (big limestone deposits) is said to have a huge effect on German beers historically, and I'd imagine some of that extends into France as well. Distilled water minimizes variables of course, but it by itself indeed very non-historic.
- fogihujy 5y ago
  Or, you know, just draw water from an old well. Distilled water seems too clinical.
N1H1L 5y ago
Yeah. I think for historical accuracy they should go ahead and add some cholera bacteria too. Why stop at removing chlorine?
blix 5y ago
> I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product. I've never done a comparison myself, but I've seen this mentioned many times as a consideration when fermenting foods. A cursory search indicates that floride can have detrimental effects in wine yeasts as well.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It shouldn't matter much; both chlorine and fluoride evaporate faster than water, and with all brewing processes you need to boil the water anyway. Distilled water is no good, it lacks the minerals, and without minerals water has no flavor (and it's actually harmful to drink distilled water for too long). I'm just glad our water is not fluoridated or chlorinated. There's evidence (citation needed) that drinking fluoridated water impacts neurological development, mood, behaviour, etc.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  There's only a brief boil in this because it's mead. There are plenty of no-boil meads, like JAOM. Chlorine can be removed just by leaving the water uncovered over night before brewing, but chloramine can't. Chloramine is common. Not treating for it risks chlorophenol creation in the finished product.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  > There's evidence (citation needed) that drinking fluoridated water impacts neurological development, mood, behaviour, etc. Citation definitely needed. General Ripper notwithstanding, the science doesn't seem to support the conclusion that the amount of fluoride that is intentionally added to drinking water is detrimental to health. (https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-study-shows-fluoride-safe/ https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-study-show...)

wizzwizz4 5y ago

It's “terrifying” because hot honey is hot.

rob74 5y ago
Not only that, but apparently it tends to boil "volcano-style", and if you have ever burnt (or "caramelized", to use the more elegant term) sugar, you know how sticky it is - now imagine a burning-hot drop of that sticking to your skin...
- onorton 5y ago
  It's so known for its stickiness that a mixture of sugar and boiling water is used by inmates against others. It's known as "prison napalm".
  - Arrath 5y ago
    Well that is decidedly unpleasant knowledge.
  - bastiantower 5y ago
    It also has a high specific heat value
bigie35 5y ago
It's also terrifying because the honey mix can expand 3-4x, quickly expanding beyond the container you're using.
MrLeap 5y ago
I got some molten sugar on my hand once. For how innocuous "hot honey" sounds, making this stuff really would be pretty white knuckle for me (ha ha). It sticks to you. It stays hot enough to burn you, while burning you, for an unintuitively long time. I've burned myself blacksmithing a few times and accidentally brushed red metal with a finger. None of those burns have ever came close to the brilliant white hot, long lasting agony of molten sugar.

Darmody 5y ago

I think it's time to make some mead. It's been years since last time.

dmead 5y ago
Almost 39 years by my watch.

unklefolk 5y ago

What is the alcohol content once fermentation is complete? Is it similar to wine?

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
It depends on how much honey you use.
- danwills 5y ago
  Which yeast you use could be very important too!: Different yeasts "pack up shop" during fermentation at different levels of ethanol. It's their own waste-product, that humans love, that stops them, but some types of yeast can put up with much higher levels than others! (though there are other factors too like Ph/pressure/mineralisation/etc). Some yeast strains keep fermenting to (tolerate) a much higher ethanol percent than others, and the result of these more 'vigorous' yeasts is generally a 'dryer' result in brewing terms: A less 'sweet' result because all the sugars have been 'dried' out (ie roughly, consumed and converted to ethanol). This is not the only axis to think about here though! For mead to be 'sweet' in the end it either has to use a yeast that gives-up (for that much sugar) and hope that nothing else can live in there (not a bad bet for partially-fermented-honey actually), or to be sweetened after-the-fact (probably more common in modern 'Mead' products). Fermentation involving a community of microorganisms (not just yeast) can often end up far dryer (especially given the time-frames they talk about in the article)! Many bugs can consume the 'waste' products that each other makes, and this variety can create enzymatically-linked cascades of molecular conversion-in-phases that can result in all sorts of unexpected "processing" of the "raw" molecules in the brew, including the hops components (if beer) and I'd think all those spices in traditional mead-recipes were probably undergoing some transformations too! Fascinating!
mrob 5y ago
There's an online beer recipe calculator (Javascript required) that can also be used for mead: https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator It calculates based on volume of the combined ingredients. I assume dissolving 1 pint of honey in 9 pints of water will result in less than 10 pints of total volume. I don't know exactly how much, but guessing 9.5 pints total, and using raw honey and raisins as the fermentables, I get 11% ABV with the high attenuation D47 yeast, and 8.7% with the low attenuation S-04. Caramelization will reduce the fermentability of the honey, but I am not sure by how much. My guess is that it's a small effect.

eutectic 5y ago

Sounds like a waste of good honey.

CivBase 5y ago
Sounds like you've never had mead before.
- eutectic 5y ago
  I meant more the caramelization - if you're going to nuke all the aromatics, why not just use sugar?
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    maybe some recipes die out for a reason?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

moses-palmer 5y ago

I find it curious that somebody so invested in recreating a medieval mead does not put in the extra effort of procuring long pepper and grains of paradise---those are certainly spices always present in my spice box. I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour?

kevinmchugh 5y ago
I also found this curious. I don't have either of those in my kitchen or at my grocery store, but they're certainly available online. They would be pretty noticable in the finished flavor, I imagine. Mead flavor is often best described as "delicate", especially in lower abv meads. The carmellization and yeasts are probably going to be the most notable flavors here.
ixwt 5y ago
> I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour? No, they do have an impact on the final flavor. I don't know what long pepper or grains of paradise taste like, or what the yeast will do with the flavor compounds. In my experience, the quantity of spices in that volume will come through. I honestly feel like 20 cardamom pods will come through quite strongly, in my few years of experience of meads.
detritus 5y ago
Not sure I'd want those in my mead, but thanks for making me feel like a total ignoramus - I'd never heard of either of those two spices! I've now found a site that sells them in my country and lo! Oh dear, so many other things I've never heard of to try too. 'Thanks?' :)
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Not sure I'd want those in my mead Which I would say is besides the point, the article was about recreating an ancient mead based on a recipe, which called for those ingredients. Sometimes it's impossible to source the historical ingredients because they themselves have been lost (to memory or possibly entirely e.g. silphium), but that's not the case here. Both grains of paradise and long pepper are in active use, even if not in european cuisines.

404mm 5y ago

Mead is not uncommon to find for purchase in some European countries till this day. I cannot speak for how authentic is the modern day recipe compared to what the author found. But it’s a mead. It’s sweet and contains alcohol :) Btw (bitter) beer mixed with mead makes for one delicious drink!

hvs 5y ago
Mead has reached the modern day. The author is saying that this specific recipe for mead (bochet) has not.
masklinn 5y ago
> Mead is not uncommon to find for purchase in some European countries till this day. Mead is common, the specific "bochet" style mead (using caramelised honey), not so much. The article is about bochet, very specifically. The article's introduction is pretty clear that both mead itself and various ancient styles of mead have survived to the modern age e.g. > “It truly is a lost style. It’s not a historical style that has survived into the modern era,” says Heit. “It’s literally something that disappeared.”

the_third_wave 5y ago

> The first and only complete recipe for the drink—and the primary source for modern recreations—turns up in 1393, in what might be considered a manual of mansplaining. Really? Mansplaining in the 14th century? Is that how historical subjects are going to be treated now? > An anonymous French writer penned an exhaustive guide to etiquette, moral conduct, and the practical concerns of a young bride, from choosing servants to throwing feasts: Le Ménagier de Paris (The Good Wife’s Guide). “It’s a ridiculous book,” says Verberg. “It’s micromanagement. I would not have wanted to be his wife.” Nor would she (or he) have wanted you as her husband (or wife), she (he) would possibly not even have recognised you are a marriage-worthy candidate. Times change, attitudes change, mores and morals change, that is what makes history so interesting. Knee-jerk virtue signalling is not a sign of a good historian. Read Machiavelli's The Prince for another detailed manual on how to behave, in this case on how to become an effective prince. Was Machiavelli mansplaining as well, seeing as how he wrote the book to instruct another male? Let history be history and study it for what it is, the past which eventually led to the present. Rest assured that once we are history many of our cultural traits will seem strange as well. Rest assured that what is considered virtuous now will be considered something totally different in a few centuries - if not a few decades. Also, stop using labels like mansplaining, it adds nothing to the discourse and only leads to polarisation of the 'he is not in my camp' type.

CountDrewku 5y ago
Yeah I quit reading as soon as she used "mansplaining". Not the sort of article I wanted to read.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  Replace it with "patronizing" and try again
  - CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
    That should be the job of "a senior editor and writer"

CountDrewku 5y ago

Stopped reading as soon as she used the term "mansplaining". I can't take anyone who uses that term seriously. How about just write about the mead instead of trying to fit in with modern wokeness. If men are that bad maybe you shouldn't be using a recipe one wrote? This woman appears to have a massive chip on her shoulder. Edit: Oh whoops I forgot being sexist towards men is fine. If i swapped in a similar derogatory term for this woman that should be ok as well right? Yay DOUBLE STANDARDS!

dang 5y ago
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then rush into the HN comments to get angry about it. That leads to generic tangents, which are predictable, tedious, and usually turn nasty. One way of looking at this is to take the following guideline to apply at the article level as well: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) The idea on HN is to have curious conversation. For that, a better practice would be to bring in the most interesting bit from an article, or the bit that creates more interesting responses in you. If an article creates no such responses in you, then the way to use HN in the intended spirit is to look at at different article instead. Edit - btw can you please stop posting flamewar comments in general? We've already had to ask you this several times. You clearly have good things to contribute, and at the same time you're mucking them up with guidelines breakage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147928 is a good example - there was good info and interesting conversation there, but then you spoiled it by going into attack. In the end the comment was rightly flagged. If you had posted it in the intended spirit of curiosity and openness, that would have been much better. Please do that going forward.

CivBase 5y ago

> Instead of using honey I’d extracted and strained the modern way, however, I crushed some comb taken from a colony that had unfortunately not survived winter—the bees’ lasting legacy would be to provide honey close to what was available in the 14th century, including the occasional stray leg or wing. Sounds like this stuff really is the bee's knees.

robarker 5y ago

To think that the ingredients are adapted from 1393. I am looking forward to this modern adaptation of Bochet.

sedan_baklazhan 5y ago

Interesting fact: in Russian language, mead is "мёд" (myod) which also means "honey" which (мёд) also has a very old meaning of "alcoholic beverage made from honey".

enlyth 5y ago
In Slovak, "med" is also honey, but mead we call "medovina".
- sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
  Same word essentially! Modern Russian has word "medovuha" but OLD Russian was just "med".
  - mantas 5y ago
    In Lithuanian honey is "medus" while the drink is "midus"
blowski 5y ago
In Polish, 'miód' is the generic word for honey, while 'miód pitny' means 'drinkable honey'. I wonder if, in the past, there was a phrase for 'spreadable honey'.
danans 5y ago
It goes all the way back to Proto Indo European. Sanskrit for honey is "madhu"
huhtenberg 5y ago
That's in archaic, hundreds years old Russian though. Mead in current Russian is "medovuha" and that's it.
zebbadee 5y ago
In Chinese it's 'mi', Spanish 'miel'

Nursie 5y ago

I made a bochet a few years ago. It was slightly terrifying boiling up the honey and the smell of doing so seemed to attract a number of bees! I think I went too far on the caramelisation though, and the finished product was a bit ashy.

ekianjo 5y ago

> For some homebrewers, the danger of recreating bochet may be the very thing that attracts them to it. “People who like rollercoasters and jumping off cliffs like bochet,” says Verberg with a laugh. “You can make a sugar volcano that will explode, violently.” Ridiculous claim. You don't need to boil honey anymore as long as you use clean ingredients these days. Before boiling was used to remove impurities and kill bacteria. You can make hydromel or bochet without boiling anything.

uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
You misunderstood the concept caramelizing as boiling for a hygienic purpose. Meanwhile its done to create taste.