Week 11 | Bees | Contents
Tuesday | Poetry | Wintering
Wednesday | Fiction | Royal Jelly: Critical Consensus and Counter-consensus
Thursday | Music | Blow Job Betty
Friday | Chapbook | There There, by Daniel Payne
Saturday | Mixtape | Bonnie "Prince" Billy, by Jack Underwood
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
Margaret Mead
Mead is one of those ancient things, deeply old and established in so many cultures around the word. It is The Great Grandmother of All Fermented Drinks. As a result it holds a certain position in the market of language, with ‘fingers in many pies’. A great thing for those that take pleasure in the discovery of new pools of language.
You can see the full list of variants of mead here. However, below is a short-list of words you probably haven’t heard of before – ready for you to slip into any mead related conversation – or a poem perhaps.
• Acerglyn — A mead made with honey and maple syrup.
• Bochet — A mead where the honey is caramelized or burned separately before adding the water. Gives toffee, chocolate, marshmallow flavors.
• Braggot — Braggot (also called bracket or brackett). Originally brewed with honey and hops, later with honey and malt — with or without hops added.
• Capsicumel — A mead flavored with chile peppers.
• Cyser — A blend of honey and apple juice fermented together; see also cider.
• Hydromel — Hydromel literally means "water-honey" in Greek. It is also the French name for mead. (Compare with the Spanish hidromiel and aquamiel, Italian idromele and Portuguese hidromel). It is also used as a name for a very light or low-alcohol mead.
• Melomel — Melomel is made from honey and any fruit. Depending on the fruit-base used, certain melomels may also be known by more specific names
• Metheglin — Metheglin starts with traditional mead but has herbs and/or spices added. Some of the most common metheglins are ginger, tea, orange peel, nutmeg, coriander, cinnamon, cloves or vanilla. Its name indicates that many metheglins were originally employed as folk medicines. The Welsh word for mead is medd, and the word "metheglin" derives from meddyglyn, a compound of meddyg, "healing" + llyn, "liquor."
• Morat — Morat blends honey and mulberries.
• Mulsum — Mulsum is not a true mead, but is unfermented honey blended with a high-alcohol wine.
• Omphacomel — A mediæval mead recipe that blends honey with verjuice; could therefore be considered a variety of pyment (qv).• Oxymel — Another historical mead recipe, blending honey with wine vinegar.
• Pyment — Pyment blends honey and red or white grapes. Pyment made with white grape juice is sometimes called "white mead."
• Rhodomel — Rhodomel is made from honey, rose hips, petals or rose attar and water.
James Harringman
Editor-in-disbelief
