mead « The Witch of Forest Grove

Posts Tagged 'mead'

Bottling (Half) the Magical Meads

After a long but amazing previous night of mischief involving the last Harry Potter movie and the Richmond summer night market, we witches reconvened today to bottle our magical meads. It turned out that we were not to bottle all the meads. The aphrodisiac and moon meads survived their murders and so we have zombie meads on our hands. First, we’ll wait to see if they die in another week or two… if that fails we might have to try the double-tap as we heard it works on zombies (oh Zombieland, thou useful advice runneth over).

We all sanitized our bottles beforehand and I had put the mead carboys up on the counter in the morning so the sediment had time to settle before we bottled. Then it was time to get cracking. The others brought a neat gadget that looks like its for a bong. The racking cane goes in one opening and an empty pop bottle covers the other. When you squeeze the pop bottle the mead gets siphoned into the hose with no sucking needed. It’s pretty awesome as one often gets a mouthful of vomit-tasting green mead or even sprayed in the face by the hose when trying to siphon the mead out by sucking. The old fashioned way is good for dirty jokes, but the gadget was awesome and the bottling was all smooth sailing thanks to it (minus the odd dribble).

Saturn of course bottled the Saturn mead, a blend of Saturnian herbs and blackberry and black currant juices with local wildflower honey. Tyson bottled the sabbat mead, I bottled the blessing mead (drinkable Florida water, mmm), and Holly bottled our monsterberry mead which we made exactly a year ago together with wild harvested berries.

After corking all our many many bottles of mead it was time to divide up the bottles and pack up. We were all still pretty tired from last night’s adventures. I, for one, had a nap after all the mead mischief before it was time to make dinner (homemade chili with sour cream and cheese, nom!). Now we wait eight months to a year for our magical meads to age and deepen their flavours and then we shall bring them out of the dark for sabbats, full and dark moon rites, and offerings to gods and spirits.

More Meady Goodness

Published July 17, 2011 Brewing , Cooking , Entheogens 18 Comments
Tags: home brewing, mead, mead making

There’s no such thing as too much mead… unless maybe you drank too much (in that case drink lots of water and go to bed). Yep, that’s all mead in the picture above – carboys of mead, bottles of mead, and buckets of new meads. Last week my magical mead conspirators came over and we committed murder – mead murder that is.

Into the carboys went the powdered white poisons and we stirred and stirred the meads. Some reacted violently and, as Saturn quoted, “did not go gently into that good night”. In other words we had a few mead explosions on our hands and had to move the carboys into the kitchen with towels wrapped around the necks to prevent the bubbles from spilling all over the carboy and the floor. They’ve now all succumbed to death except the Moon mead which is still fighting and might end up a bit carbonated because of it. After killing, we wait two weeks and then get together to bottle our efforts.

While honey lies in every flower,
it takes a bee to get the honey out

~ Proverb

I harvested a good amount of rose petals and buds on my last wildcrafting endeavour. I was going to dry them and use them for botanica goodies, but they smelled so good… I made a rhodomel. A rhodomel is a mead made with rose petals, rosehips, or rose water. I made a simple one with all the wild roses I collected, the rind and juice of one lemon and one orange, and a bag of rose black tea for the tannin. It will make two gallons if I’m lucky, but I might only end up with one.

Of course, by then I’d caught the mead bug and realized I hadn’t made any just for myself since my one gallon of huckleberry devil’s club mead last spring (which tastes lovely, btw). I decided to make a five gallon melomel (a fruit mead) and gathered up all the overripe fruits I had consisting of apricots, blueberries, cherries, and strawberries and put them in a big stock pot with a bag of frozen mixed berries and a bag of dried mixed berries. I also decided to make it a sack mead which means I’ll be adding more honey than usual to make it a sweeter and stronger mead – 20% alcohol here I come!

I cooked it all up until all the fruits had released their juices and the pot of berries turned into a pot of delicious-smelling liquid. I poured this into the fermentation bucket and added some cranberry and mango juices, the rind and juice of two lemons and three oranges, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, a couple black tea bags for the tannin, 2.5 kg of honey, about two cups of brown sugar (all I had left), and of course some yeast. I call it “Kitchen Sink Mead” ’cause it has just about everything but the kitchen sink in it! It’s certainly a good way to empty out the pantry and fridge!

After all that meady goodness I realized I hadn’t made a plain metheglin mead since my very first batch five years ago. It was sooo good (and long since drunk), so I just had to make a five gallon batch. A metheglin is just a plain mead, but with herbs and spices added to it to create more complex flavours. Metheglins were once used as medicine due to the herbal content so instead of feeling like a loser for drinking alone I can just say “momma’s having her medicine”.

Now a herbwife doesn’t make just a one-herb mead, no, she goes all out. Into the methlegin went sprigs of fresh bergamot, lemon balm, rosemary, thyme, and wild mint from the garden along with crushed fresh ginger root, dried licorice root, black peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, cloves, star anise, bay leaves, fennel seed, and three crushed whole nutmegs. I also added the usual suspects of rinds and juices of three lemons and one orange for the acid and black tea for the tannin.

In went the fresher than fresh local Similkameen wildflower honey and a packet of yeast. It smells like a giant batch of delicious herb tea. All those herbs compliment each other well and I hope it turns out as well as my previous herbal mead which I made with apricot juice (herbs + apricots in mead = drink of the gods).

After ten days all my new meads will get strained and put into carboys to keep on fermenting for six months or longer. It’s going to be a long wait until I can drink them, but it will be well worth it!

Wildcrafting and Insects

Published July 14, 2011 Folk Magic , Folk Medicine , Herbalism , Wildcrafting , Witchcraft & Magic 15 Comments
Tags: beetle, Burdock, crow, enchanter's nightshade, hedge bindweed, honey bee, insects, mead, Nootka rose, salmonberry, spider, st john's wort, wild harvesting

The old ones said to be careful of the creepy crawlies when I wild harvest and to try my best not to harm them. I’m an animist so I figure I’d better practice what I preach. Since then I’ve been trying my best to be aware of them and try my best to leave them in the wild not take them home with me in my bags of wildcrafted bounty. A few hide so well and still come home with me regardless. Others might think I’m a bit mad to pick up the beetles, earwigs, and spiders and put them back outside again. They don’t bite and they don’t run away – especially when you tell them you’re just putting them back outside. If you don’t want to touch them you can get them to crawl onto a piece of paper and put them in a box or tupperware container.

Maybe it’s because I was looking for them that I saw so many more insects than normal including ones I’ve never seen before even though I was born and grew up here. The tiny little turquoise beetle above wasn’t even in my insect field guide and neither were the shiny metallic beetles that really love St. John’s Wort – so much so they wouldn’t let go of the stalks no matter what – so I had to avoid wildcrafting the bits with the little beetles stuck to them. One still managed to hitch a ride home with me and is now in the front garden.

I wild harvested a good few ounces of wild rose petals and learned that honey bees REALLY like wild roses… in a sexual way. They rub their heads and bodies all over the rose pollen and do little happy dances almost like a courtship dance with every new rose they land upon. It was like watching public sex and I felt a bit of a voyeur. Considering how many other flowers were blooming with no honey bees gracing them, I figure honey bees highly prefer them over the other flowers. I would too, I mean the smell alone! Instead of drying the rose petals I collected for botanica products I admit I made a rhodomel, a rose mead, when I got home (Nom! Mead post is forthcoming).

When I was picking rose petals I saw some gorgeous black berries and thought they were actually very early Blackberries, but after eating one I quickly realized they were Salmonberries that were so ripe they had turned black. They were sooo good!

Further up the hill of wild roses (coincidentally named Primrose Hill) I found a huge Burdock plant that was as tall as me and three times as fat. I’d never seen one get this big before in the neighbourhood, I’d only ever seen the huge rubarb-like leaves. I hope no one hacks it down before it flowers! Now that I can easily recognize Burdock I’ll have to go out on a rainy day and collect some roots for medicines.

Further up the hill, my next destination was above a natural mountain spring to harvest some Enchanter’s Nightshade (not actually in the Solanaceae family and not poisonous). There are a few varieties in the world, the most common being the larger Circaea lutetiana, but the one I harvested was Alpine Enchanter’s Nightshade (Circaea alpina) which loves cool mountain environments and is a very environmentally sensitive plant I’ve blogged about before. In Scandinavian folk magic it was used to protect from elves and to cure elf-shot and elf-diseases. It can be easily confused with Sugar Scoop (Tiarella), so bring a field guide with you if it’s your first time looking for it.

Hedge Bindweed and purple and white Foxgloves were in full bloom along with the other wild flowers of the woods. It was a beautiful day for walking and wildcrafting in the forest. I harvested Nootka Rose petals, St. John’s Wort tips, Red Clover flowers, Alpine Enchanter’s Nightshade, and the Hedge Nettle I saw on my last outing. They’re all now drying in the kitchen waiting to become folk magics and medicines.

Back down the hill I saw the feather remains of a juvenile crow that had been eaten by a coyote. The crowlings are just getting a handle on flying right now. I guess it was a little payback for scaring away all the coyote’s meals…

Mead Mischief

Published June 29, 2011 Brewing , Entheogens 7 Comments
Tags: home brewing, honey, honey bees, mead, mead making, sabbat wine, Similkameen Apiaries

Yesterday evening my friends Holly and Tyson came over so we could rack and add more honey to the five 5 gallon batches of magical herbal meads we started at Samhain last year. Tyson had recently made a trip to the Okanagan and brought back some rich, thick, super delicious honey from Similkameen Apiaries.

The honey comes from various local wildflowers like clovers, Oregon grape, knapweed, milkweed, chokecherry, sumac, elderberry, and goldenrod. If that wasn’t awesome enough, the apiary, run by husband and wife team Blair and Cheryl Tarves, is certified organic. The honey was fresher than fresh and I felt like a little kid with the icing spoon when I got to lick the honey ladle when we were done.

Honey certainly isn’t cheap right now thanks to colony collapse disorder, but we managed to get a good deal on two 5kg buckets. Turns out the main reason our Canadian honey bees have been faring better than the American ones is that we tend to keep our bees in one place whereas the Americans move them around all the time in trucks renting them out to different farms. Bees are territorial homebodies (kinda like Tauruses) and don’t like to be moved.

A happy surprise was when Saturn (aka the Abysmal Witch) came over despite her painful back injury to say hello and see how our meads were doing. After gentle hugs we gleefully began siphoning samples of each of the five meads into a shot glass for her to taste. We were all pleasantly surprised as the last time we tasted the meads they tasted bitter, sour, dry, and very green. Now they have actually developed into wines with complex flavours and all the herbs have mellowed out – florals, bitters, fruits, and poisons.

We scrubbed all the carboys clean and transferred all the meads to their new containers leaving all the sediment behind (this speeds up the dying process) which we poured into a bucket to wassail the trees with. Through some clever juggling and measuring we managed not to add any water to the fermenting meads – I like to water down meads as little as possible. Then we put the meads away back in their places in my dining room and said our happy farewells… we’ll all see each other in a few days anyway for the dark moon.

Holly, Tyson, Sandra and my neighbours have all been successfully brewing their own meads at home for maybe a year now. I think this calls for a mead tasting and trading party this summer! If you want to try your hand at home brewing some delicious mead don’t forget I have a free PDF in my writings section of the blog: Basic Mead Making Method.

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Magical Meadery

Published January 30, 2011 Brewing , Entheogens 6 Comments
Tags: Brewing, home brewing, honey, mead, mead making, meadery, sabbat wine

Yesterday my lovely apprentice Holly and her sweet man Tyson came over to rack the five batches of magical meads we had made along with Saturn on the threshold festival of Samhuinn. Saturn couldn’t make it as she’s still recovering from her back injury, but she did send us a few texts while we were racking to be part of the action. That is 38 gallons of mead on my counter in the pictures above. We racked the Moon, Sabbat, Aphrodisiac, Blessing, and Saturn meads into clean carboys with more honey –fireweed for most of them and dandelion honey for the Saturn and Monsterberry meads. Of course, while we were doing all of this, I had my Bee Oracle incense burning in the cauldron.

We had enough leftover mead from racking the Moon and Sabbat meads to make a one gallon Loki batch. I blended the meads into the small carboy (really an apple cider jug) with more honey, mango-orange-peach juice, and a blend of spices: lemongrass, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, and peppercorns. It smells lovely and is very fruity –should be perfect for a summer sabbat. When the three of us had finished the racking, which only took six hours, we set ourselves to bottling.

First, Holly bottled her first batch of mead ever which is a lovely tasting apple mead. Afterward we all took turns bottling a batch of Salmonberry mead the three of us had made in May of 2009 after spending a day picking wild Salmonberries in the forest. It had finally died! Honestly though, we had to murder it. We finished it with a touch of Cointreau to add a rich smoothness to it as Salmonberries are watery and very mild in flavour. In 4-8 months it will be ready to drink!

But the mead making wasn’t over yet! In the morning I sanitized the rest of my bottles and set to work bottling my two gallons of Ginger-Lime mead and my one gallon of Huckleberry-Devil’s Club mead. My once empty mead rack has now been refilled – oh joyous sunny day! …And now to wait until I can drink all these new treasures *drums fingers impatiently*

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The Witch of Forest Grove

Posts Tagged 'mead'

Bottling (Half) the Magical Meads

More Meady Goodness

Wildcrafting and Insects

Mead Mischief

Magical Meadery

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