What you grab to quench your thirst can say a lot about you. Maybe you're a construction type who heads to the pub to have a quaff right after quitting time.
What you grab to quench your thirst can say a lot about you. Maybe you're a construction type who heads to the pub to have a quaff right after quitting time. There's always the wine bar for the fancy folks who prefer to sip something a little grape juice with more nuanced taste. A newspaper reporter would probably be right at home at any gin joint.
And then there's Tyson Schymizek. He's the owner of a home-based business called Black Knight Armory. Yeah, you guessed it. He's got a bit of a thing for the medieval. He does his own leatherwork and he has a fine suit of armour. He even goes so far as to participate in realistic – but not real – combats with his buds through groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism and Knights of the Northern Realm.
“Knights in shining armour. Swordfighting. Get the chance to beat your friend over their head with a stick,” he bellowed, all six-feet-plus of him.
His burly, scruffy presence makes him come across like a man clearly not to be messed with on a field of battle.
What would a guy like that drink, you wonder? Beer, wine and spirits just aren't his cup of tea, honey. He makes and drinks mead, the ages-old alcohol that we have bees to thank for.
Most people associate it with the Vikings, he said, but it has much deeper roots that extend several thousand years.
“Mead, as I've been told, has gone back as the ancient Egyptian times.”
For a guy who has the temper for something as meticulous as making chainmail (yes, he does that too), he prefers to keep it simple for his mead. It still requires patience but Schymizek should be the poster boy for promoting mead making.
“It's so easy!” he enthused. “You put your honey in, you add the water, and you add the yeast at the end. Just like making wine. That's all it is. It's just that simple.”
He starts out with a pail of honey, which can be the priciest ingredient depending on its quality. It also depends on what you want to be drinking at the end.
“The better the honey, the better the mead.”
He said that 3 kgs of honey would result in a batch of about 36 standard wine bottles' worth of liquid gold.
It really is a simple process. Pouring the honey can be slow, which is why he usually warms it up in a double boiler at first, “otherwise you'll be waiting and waiting and waiting. Of course, honey takes awhile to flow. The warmer the honey, the faster it pours.”
Then you get the yeast going in the water before you add them both to the honey. You could also add fruit to the process to make flavoured mead, which is classified as melomel, according to the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission's cottage wine industry regulations. There's also metheglin (mead fermented or flavoured with herbs and/or spices) and braggot, which is mead made with malted grains.
It then needs to sit for a few weeks before it gets racked from the primary fermenter to the carboy where it can stay for a month to a year, depending on what kind of mead you're making. It all depends on how strong you want it to be, Schymizek added.
The longer you let it sit, potentially the better it gets with aging. After it's aged long enough, it's time to pop a cork and have a taste. All of that waiting can now be savored with your very own mead.
“Mine doesn't last too long,” he admitted, with a knowing wink. “It's not meant to last forever.”
He said that the potency of his meads could range anywhere from nine to 12 or 13 per cent also. You could make it to be dry but he likes it sweet. It is honey, after all. One of his friends tasted it for the first time and loved it so much that he proclaimed, “Man, this stuff is like liquid candy!”
There's more good news to this delicious product too. It's a gluten-free product because there are no grains, and it's permissible for people of some cultures to consume it even if they are forbidden from drinking products of fermented grains or fruits.
“But they can get away with the mead, because it's just honey,” he continued.
It doesn't take much for equipment either, only a standard fermenter and carboy, a funnel, and a few other things like siphoning equipment. Of course, you'll also need bottles to cork up the end product. Packages of yeast are about a buck from Wine Kitz on Perron Street, but any standard wine yeast will do.
And the recipes can be found anywhere on the internet. Even in books.
Mead for all
There are a few mead wineries in the province that have been selling their products in stores and at the St. Albert Farmers' Market. It's nothing terribly new but it still seems like a novelty because the vast majority of alcohol sold in the province is either your standard beer, wine, or spirit.
“We've had it here for five years,” said Chris Peters, the manager at the Campbell Park Liquor Store. “It's definitely a slow mover for us.”
The store carries two meads, one called Maxwell Honey Mead out of Australia.
“That's our No. 1 seller. The Maxwell's got a little more sweetness to it and it's $13 cheaper.”
The En Santé Winery (formerly Birds & Bees) out of Brosseau also has an organic mead called Mellow Gold Honey that veers toward the drier side.
“Realistically, it's the price that scares people away. It's quite expensive.”
That product rings in at $32.95, he said, while the Maxwell is only $21.95.
“That's a huge difference for the consumer.”
