A complete, practical, and entertaining guide to using the best ingredients and minimal equipment to create flavorful brews—including wildcrafted meads, bragots, t’ej, grog, honey beers, and more! "A great guide . . . full of practical information and fascinating lore."—Sandor Ellix Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation Ancient societies brewed flavorful and healing meads, ales, and wines for millennia using only intuition, storytelling, and knowledge passed down through generations―no fancy, expensive equipment or degrees in chemistry needed. In Make Mead Like a Viking, homesteader, fermentation enthusiast, and self-described “Appalachian Yeti Viking” Jereme Zimmerman summons the bryggjemann of the ancient Norse to demonstrate how homebrewing mead―arguably the world’s oldest fermented alcoholic beverage―can be not only uncomplicated but fun. Inside, readers will learn techniques for brewing: Sweet, semi-sweet, and dry meads Melomels (fruit meads) Metheglins (spiced meads) Ethiopian t’ej (honey wine) Flower and herbal meads Bragots Honey beers Country wines Viking grog And there's more for aspiring Vikings to explore, including: The importance of local and unpasteurized honey for both flavor and health benefits What modern homebrewing practices, materials, and chemicals work—but aren’t necessary How to grow and harvest herbs and collect wild botanicals for use in healing, nutritious, and magical meads, beers, and wines How to use botanicals other than hops for flavoring and preserving mead, ancient ales, and gruits The rituals, mysticism, and communion with nature that were integral components of ancient brewing Whether you’ve been intimidated by modern homebrewing’s cost or seeming complexity in the past or are boldly looking to expand your current brewing and fermentation practices, Zimmerman’s welcoming style and spirit will usher you into exciting new territory. Grounded in history and mythology, but―like Odin’s ever-seeking eye―focusing continually on the future of self-sufficient food culture, Make Mead Like a Viking is a practical and entertaining guide for the ages. "Adventurous mead makers or brewers who want to move beyond the basics will find plenty to savor here."—Library Journal
The first major book on making mead that continues to be a best seller, this book contains the essence of what you need to know about making honey wine (mead) from the honey sitting right now, in storage.
Since The Compleat Meadmakerwas first published, mead has continued to grow in popularity as crafted beverages have become an established part of the beverage market in America. In 2003 there were roughly 60 commercial meaderies in the US, but by 2020 this number stood at 450. Naturally, many hobbyists are also discovering the delights of making this “nectar of the gods” themselves. Thanks to the global distribution of bees and, therefore, honey, you will find mead-like drinks in virtually every corner of the world. No wonder historians recognize it as one of humankind’s oldest fermented beverages. Mead production never really ceased in Europe and Africa, but its star was eclipsed with the increasing production and distribution of wine, beer, and distilled spirits from the 1600s onward. With the rebirth of brewing and the establishment of world-class wine producing regions in the US, it is time for mead in the twenty-first century to be brought back into the limelight. Mead needs to establish a vocabulary of its own and find a place in the hearts of homebrewers and home winemakers. In The Compleat Meadmaker, veteran meadmaker Ken Schramm—one of the founders of the Mazer Cup Mead Competition, North America’s oldest mead-only competition—introduces the novice to the wonders of mead. With easy-to-follow procedures and simple recipes, he shows how you can quickly and painlessly make your own mead at home. In later chapters, Schramm introduces flavorful variations on the basic theme that lead to meads flavored with spice, fruits, grapes, and malt. The author covers the many aspects of meadmaking in a comprehensive but easy-to-read fashion, with something for novices and experienced brewers and vintners alike from basic equipment for meadmaking, creating your first must, and on through the basics of fermentation, racking, and bottling. Once the first steps have been taken Schramm goes into more detail, involving balancing for taste using acid, priming for sparkling mead, corking practices, and strategies for clarifying. He also covers aspects of fermentation, such as selecting the right yeast strain, aerating and managing the pH of your must during the critical early phase of fermentation, and adjusting nutrient levels to suit mead fermentation. The author also troubleshoots common problems and processes, such as stuck fermentations, fermentations that will not start, slow or prolonged fermentations, measuring total acidity via acid titrations, and on balancing residual sugars through sweetening, malo-lactic fermentation, increasing acidity, and drying out the mead further. The fine-tuning process does not stop after fermentation is finished. Perhaps the finest characteristic of mead is that it seems to improve with age almost indefinitely. As well as advice on how long to store it, Schramm also offers up his experience with the many different approaches to conditioning and maturing mead, focusing on the use of oak chips, blocks, and barrels to age mead on wood. As one of the oldest fermented drinks and using the oldest sweetener known to humankind, mead and honey are inextricable. Schramm delves into a brief natural history of honey production and the bees that make it possible, with fascinating insights into the profession of beekeepers. He explores sources of nectar and pollen and the benefits of honey varietals explored, with a section devoted entirely to varietal honey based on floral variety. Along the way Schramm delves into the concept of honey “vintage”, grades of honey, sugar, moisture, organic acids, mineral content, color terminology, and how you should not judge a honey’s flavor by its color. There is also a discussion of aroma compounds, absolutely essential if wishing to understand the organoleptic qualities of honey. While mead can be a charmingly simple drink to make, home meadmakers can easily indulge in a host of different flavors to make unique and delicious meads. The author provides you with an understanding of the role quality ingredients play in creating a really pleasing mead. There are several ingredients-focused chapters that look at making sack mead, melomel, cyser, pyment, hippocras, metheglin, and braggot. At the end, Schramm puts it all together in a section devoted entirely to recipes. As one of the most ancient of human beverages, mead arose in part because it was easy to make. Despite this, mead is a surprisingly complex, diverse, and romantic drink that can range from bone dry to profoundly sweet, and can be crafted to complement any type of food. With The Compleat Meadmaker, you can see just how simple, fun, and rewarding meadmaking is.
Home Brewing Just Got Easier and More Exciting with 1-Gallon Recipes Amber Shehan makes home brewing a breeze for beginners and experts alike with smaller 1-gallon (3.8-L) recipes that reduce the time, money and energy needed to create delicious brews all year long. Enjoy the nuanced flavors of homebrews like tart Orange-Hibiscus Cider, palate-cleansing Peppermint Wine or soothing Vanilla Bean and Chamomile Mead. As an herbalist, Amber showcases her knowledge of culinary and medicinal herbs, wildflowers and plants in this incredible collection of deliciously infused brews that are both intoxicating and tonic. Rosemary and Clementine Mead is the perfect refresher for a warm summer evening and Spiced Pomegranate Wine will warm you right up on the coldest of winter days. With inventive, potent recipes and all the brewing know-how you need to get started or build your skills, Artisanal Small-Batch Brewing is your go-to guide for creating memorable brews beloved by all.
*SHORTLISTED for the 2021 Gourmand World Cookbook Award* *SHORTLISTED for the 2022 Taste Canada Award for Single-Subject Cookbooks* A sustainable lifestyle starts in the kitchen with these use-what-you-have, spend-less-money recipes and tips, from the friendly voice behind @ZeroWasteChef. In her decade of living with as little plastic, food waste, and stuff as possible, Anne-Marie Bonneau, who blogs under the moniker Zero-Waste Chef, has preached that "zero-waste" is above all an intention, not a hard-and-fast rule. Because, sure, one person eliminating all their waste is great, but thousands of people doing 20 percent better will have a much bigger impact. And you likely already have all the tools you need to begin. In her debut book, Bonneau gives readers the facts to motivate them to do better, the simple (and usually free) fixes to ease them into wasting less, and finally, the recipes and strategies to turn them into self-reliant, money-saving cooks and makers. Rescue a hunk of bread from being sent to the landfill by making Mexican Hot Chocolate Bread Pudding, or revive some sad greens to make a pesto. Save 10 dollars (and the plastic tub) at the supermarket with Yes Whey, You Can Make Ricotta Cheese, then use the cheese in a galette and the leftover whey to make sourdough tortillas. With 75 vegan and vegetarian recipes for cooking with scraps, creating fermented staples, and using up all your groceries before they go bad--including end-of-recipe notes on what to do with your ingredients next--Bonneau lays out an attainable vision for a zero-waste kitchen.
Make extraordinary homemade wines from everything but grapes! In this refreshingly unique take on winemaking, Patti Vargas and Rich Gulling offer 125 recipes for unusual wines made from herbs, fruits, flowers, and honey. Learn to use ingredients from your farmers’ market, grocery store, or even your own backyard to make deliciously fermented drinks. Lemon-Thyme Metheglin, Rose Hip Melomel, and Pineapple-Orange Delight are just the beginning of an unexplored world of delightfully natural wild wines. Cheers!
The legendary drink of Vikings and verse and the oldest alcoholic beverage, mead is brewed by both amateur winemakers for their own consumption, and in larger quantities by beekeepers who have built a separate line of business of mead production. With home-brewing and smaller distilleries more popular than ever, this book offers valuable DIY assistance to the hobbyist and the professional alike. The first part of the book discusses the historical stature of mead and details the mead-making process itself, with clear and concise instructions simplified with the support of foolproof diagrams. Also included is a more in-depth, scientific analysis of fermentation, fining, and stabilization of mead, as well as legal requirements, bottling methods, troubleshooting throughout the mead-making process, and even a collection of mead-based recipes.
Bronze Winner—Best Book from the Beer Writers Guild Experimentation, mystery, resourcefulness, and above all, fun—these are the hallmarks of brewing beer like a Yeti. Since the craft beer and homebrewing boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, beer lovers have enjoyed drinking and brewing a vast array of beer styles. However, most are brewed to accentuate a single ingredient—hops—and few contain the myriad herbs and spices that were standard in beer and gruit recipes from medieval times back to ancient people’s discovery that grain could be malted and fermented into beer. Like his first book, Make Mead Like a Viking, Jereme Zimmerman’s Brew Beer Like a Yeti returns to ancient practices and ingredients and brings storytelling, mysticism, and folklore back to the brewing process, including a broad range of ales, gruits, bragots, and other styles that have undeservingly taken a backseat to the IPA. Recipes inspired by traditions around the globe include sahti, gotlandsdricka, oak bark and mushroom ale, wassail, pawpaw wheat, chicha de muko, and even Neolithic “stone” beers. More importantly, under the guidance of “the world’s only peace-loving, green-living Appalachian Yeti Viking,” readers will learn about the many ways to go beyond the pale ale, utilizing alternatives to standard grains, hops, and commercial yeasts to defy the strictures of style and design their own brews.
Packed with delicious recipes, natural remedies, gardening tips, homemaking ideas, crafts, and more, this indispensable lifestyle reference from the popular blogger behind Attainable Sustainable makes earth-friendly living fun, real, and easy. Whether you live in a city, suburb, or the country, this essential guide for the backyard homesteader will help you achieve a homespun life--from starting your own garden and pickling the food you grow to pressing wildflowers, baking sourdough loaves, quilting, raising chickens, and creating your own natural cleaning supplies. In these beautifully illustrated pages, eco-guru Kris Bordessa offers DIY lovers an indispensable home reference for sustainability in the 21st century, using tried-and-true advice, 50 enticing recipes, and step-by-step directions for creating fun, cost-efficient projects that will bring out your inner pioneer. Filled with more than 300 four-color photographs, this relatable, comprehensive book contains time honored-wisdom and modern know-how for getting back to basics in a beautiful, accessible package.
