Berserker Mead - Drink Without Moderation

Thorsdays are still Thirsty

2011-12-05T18:43:00.000-08:00

So here we are, nearly a year since last posting? If you're reading this, you may wonder what has been going on. Here's the executive summary: Mead: Bottled. Several bottles: consumed. Tasting notes:...noted.

In a fury and frenzy of activity, we blasted through the bottling process. Our oh-so-stylish labels affixed, we arranged our finished product in the proudest, most grandiose of reliquaries: the boxes we got the bottles in, stashed in my basement. So clearly, refined presentation still needs some work. But my whole basement probably needs some work, so that goes with the territory.

Exciting news on the aging front: batch #1 has carbonation. Fortunately, very light carbonation, so that no bottles have exploded (yet). Nothing adds spice to a night of drinking quite like pulling your bottle from a potential minefield. And those little fizzy bubbles really help lighten up the medium-sweet mead.

And sweet it is. What we have ended up with is best classed as something like a dessert wine. Heavy alcohol content, best served chilled, and fairly sweet. At room temperature, still a bit raw and unrefined, though time seems to be curing those ills. We embrace the imperfections, consume the fermentations, and embark on new adventures. Are new batches coming soon? Well, there's been a lot of assorted life happening, but fueled by the boundless energy of Eddie's hoard of highly caffeinated beverages I'm sure we'll manage to get another batch set down before long.

Godt Nytt År

2011-01-03T07:25:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year from your friends at Berserker Mead.

Seeking greater clarity...

2010-11-19T18:20:00.000-08:00

So the mead has been sitting, lurking in my basement, yea these however many weeks it's been. Have not cracked the seal to check alcohol content, but I have taken a peek to see how it is progressing. A little bit of foam on top implies that there may be some last stages of fermentation going on, but no real bubbling out the air lock in any timeline that my gnat-like attention-span can fathom. The most exciting development is that the mead is definitely getting clearer. I doubt that the taste changes much from a clear to a cloudy mead, but it is gratifying to have it clear up for a more professional-looking appearance.

We're pretty much leaving it up to the weavings of the Norns as far as how clear it gets. Whether due to an appropriate viking fatalism, highfalutin notions about old-school, natural brewing, or just a last-ditch attempt to introduce some aspect of purity into lives of seemingly endless debauchery, we have opted not to use any added clarifiers. At this point, the mead contains its own destiny, and we are just here to make sure that nothing interferes with it.

-Ben Berzerker Rooney

Thirsty Thorsday

2010-10-21T21:23:00.000-07:00

Welcome to another thirsty Thors-day with the Berserker crew. This post is actually a week late, as we racked batch 00002: Pineapple Insanity into its carboy last week. But in the spirit of the day, we proceeded immediately to Frank's Place to celebrate another step on the road to mead-drenched Valhalla.

Frank's is our friendly neighborhood bar. How friendly? Well that depends on whether Jim the bartender is in a good mood. But the drinks are always strong and the prices are reasonable, so it is an excellent location to take refuge from the sober world. You meet colorful characters at Frank's. I was in there yesterday, and I kid you not, Jim said "the crazy lady who sits in the bushes came in the other day." Michael Vick tried to sell me some drugs one Saturday (I think it was Michael Vick...he was wearing the jersey anyway...). And always be wary if you see the Witch or Laszlo the crazy Hungarian. I should give Laszlo his due, he's got fabulous stage presence in his karaoke act, and he bought me a shot last Monday. It's nice not to be the weirdest guy in the bar. Though the cast is pretty colorful, it's usually pretty chill, so if you're not such a delicate flower that you quit reading our blog, you should be fine to go there.

But I digress...

Project Pineapple Insanity is coming along nicely. Looks like it will be even higher in alcohol content than batch 0001. A tasting confirmed that it was coming along nicely. The racking went very smoothly. Like any project, once you get it figured out the first time, repetition just makes things more efficient. Some sterilizing of equipment, a little mugging for the camera, a quick hydrometer reading and chalk up another victory for the berzerking bastards of brew.

Story by Ben Rooney
Pictures by Eduardo Lima *ahem* I saaaid...eh fukkit

Party like a Rack Star

2010-10-07T22:35:00.000-07:00

Yeah, the pic is old, but it gets the point across. That is my most estimable brother on the left.

Racking...Compleat! As of this Thorsday, 10-7-2010, batch 0001 has been racked into one of the glass carboys. Probably could have racked a little earlier, as fermentation is now nearly complete, but as a wiser man than myself once said "Let's not argue and bicker about who killed who." The task of racking was made incredibly easy by the auto-siphon I picked up from the good folks at our local brewing supply company, homebrewit.com. Unless you have mad siphon skillz or a lovely assistant who can suck-start a leaf blower, I highly recommend that particular piece of equipment.

Naturally the most important part of the proceedings was to take this opportunity for a little tasting of the merchandise. To give an appropriate air of gravitas to such an occaison, we busted out the prayer from the 13th Warrior:

Lo there do I see my father,

Lo there do I see my mother,

And the line of my people, back to the beginning.

They call to me now, and bid me join them

In the halls of Valhalla

Where the brave may live

Forever

Well, I won't keep you in suspense any longer...I am awesome. This stuff already tastes pretty good. Some aging to mellow it out, clarify, and smooth the rough edges, and I think that Batch 0001 is going to be a winner. It is translucent and kind of an iced tea color, in keeping with the dark wildflower honey. We're rocking a solid 12% alcohol by volume according to our amateurish-at-best use of the hydrometer. Whatever the exact number, it's got enough power to put a warm glow in your chest on the way down.

I now know how Dr Frankenstein felt when he cut loose with his famous, "It's aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!" To drink your own booze and have it taste good is pretty damn epic; I am producing a controlled substance in my basement. Bring on the zombie apocalypse, I can make my own alcohol.

-Ben Rooney

Wait for it... (2)

2010-10-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

We're getting ready to rake our first batch of awesomeness, but before we do, let's look at mead and how it relates to life in general.

Mead is life. The end.

(...)

Just kidding. Mead is actually the antithesis of modern life. Mead cares not if you're thirsty. Mead cares not if you need your booze fix. Mead cares not if you went on an all-night bender and need to wash the taste of cigars and hookers out of your mouth. Mead will be ready when mead will be ready, and not a minute longer. This ain't no Bud Light, folks! Now, that flies in the face of our modus operandi, does it not? Humans were too busy to stay in line for a cheeseburger on their way to work, and we invented drive-thru. We were too embarassed to go to our nearest adult bookstore in fear of being recognized as the deranged perverts we are, and we invented the internet. You see where this is going? At the ebb of our civilization, we have gotten ourselves into a damn hurry to accomplish even the most meaningless of tasks.

Cheeseburger-eating, porn-addicted beer drinkers

Mead drinkers

So, it comes as no surprise that meadmaking attracts those of us in search for an antidote for everyday life. The very process of preparing the ingredients, mixing them into a must, and watching it ferment week after week is in itself an exercise in patience and anticipation. It is also as close to alchemy as one gets, which is why we plan to brew our future batches dressed in robes and wizard hats. Now THAT ought to be a hit with the ladies, uh?

With that said, despite the relative unpredictability of meadmaking at the homebrewing level, it is OK to set goals. After all, what's the point of brewing this stuff if you don't get to consume it as much and as soon as possible? We're trying to remedy it by brewing batches in set intervals, to sort of 'cheat' our way into having mead available all the time. We expect our first batch to be drinkable around April, so we'll see. Mead cares not if it's Easter and you have friends over for dinner, but that's OK. If the mead is not ready, we'll just serve beer.

-Eduardo "don't-serve-me-that-swill" Lima

Much love, much love

2010-09-17T08:20:00.000-07:00

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who came before us and led the way towards the mead revolution.

The Compleat Meadmaker : Home Production of Honey Wine From Your First Batch to Award-winning Fruit and Herb Variations - props to Rooney for this great find. Unsure as for why the misspelling on the title, but let it not fool you: this is as encompassing as it gets. Tons of info, lots of pics, tables, comparison charts... a tome of vast importance if you want to experiment with various honey varieties and types of fruit. Essential!

Stormthecastle.com - If Ken Schramm's book is called The Compleat Meadmaker, Will Kalif's website is the Compleat Idiot's Guide to meadmaking. Step-by-step instructions on what ingredients to buy, how to prepare your must, and a plethora of knowledge (including videos) sure to make your wife hate you for spending hour after hour in your basement making booze -- all presented in simple to understand, idiot-proof prose that's at once informative and motivational. After reading Will's site, the question was not 'how to make mead': it became 'how can we not make mead'. A must! (pun intended)

-Eduardo Lima

Wait for it.........

2010-09-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

Unlike us, the mead is aging gracefully

Fate goes ever as fate must.

--Beowulf - Line 455

With two batches of mead started, we settle in to wait. And wait. And waaaaaaaait. Mead takes a long time by all accounts, which is why we are planning to keep starting batches as soon as we have a free ale pail to start fermenting in. We may, in fact need more ale pails. Or car wash buckets with trash bags taped over the top.

We should be able to rack (that's siphon for those of you not up on the secret lingo of ~~bootleggers~~ homebrewers) the first batch from the ale pail to the carboy in a few more weeks, once the initial fermentation is mostly complete. Once it is in the carboy though, we are talking about another several months at least before this stuff is at anything like what it is supposed to be. Some of these crazy characters have aged batches for years. I'm pretty sure that as soon as ours is remotely drinkable we'll be breaking out the two-story mead bong, setting up the table for mead-pong, and generally partying like it's 1999.

If we were relying only on our own brewing capabilities, we would have to do our waiting sober. That would be unconscionable. Fortunately, some of our old friends Mr.J. Beam, the intrepid Captain Morgan, and British gin-pimp Tony Sinclair have a decades-long head start on us when it comes to creating intoxicating concoctions. So we'll be attempting to reduce their supplies substantially, while our own supplies are, in effect, increasing.

In the meantime we're dreaming up newer, more excellent things to do with our mead. Should we age it in oak casks (that picture up there isn't just for show, I can totally get one) for a while? Take a gallon and freeze off the water, making some kind of high octane viking-shot? What kind of bottling apparatus will we need? Submit your comments so that we can ~~laugh at them~~ consider them as our mead ferments, the gears of fate grind onward, and the serpents gnaw at the roots of Yggdrasil.

-Ben "The Berserker" Rooney

Got mead?

2010-09-12T19:33:00.000-07:00

There is something truly fascinating about meadmaking. Being a 'foodie', I can appreciate the amalgamation of ingredients rendering their individual flavors towards a consolidated end product. But in the end, jambalaya is still rice, chicken, sausage, and various spices. With mead, though, you have water, honey, yeast and some type of yeast food - be it lemons, raisins, or something else -- becoming something completely different. Just as the alchemist of yesteryear, meaders are wizards of transformation.

I have toyed with the idea of meadmaking for many years, but it wasn't until I met my partner-in-crime Ben Rooney that the idea flourished into reality. Smitten by the mead fairy, we both set forth to create the most ass-kicking, mouth-watering concoction known since the Pathfinders were splitting skulls throughout the world. Berserker Mead was born.

Being from Indiana, we thought it would be a good idea to use only locally-grown, mostly organic products in our mead. For our first two batches, we selected pure natural honey from Dutch Country, an apiculture farm in Middlebury, Indiana that sells their amazing product at the American Countryside Farmers Market in Elkhart. Their primary honey is a wildflower honey and it has a strong, full-body texture and smokey fragrance, definitely stronger than any clover honey I have ever encountered.

Our mead uses between 3 1/2 and 4 gallons of spring water -- not drinking, purified-by-reverse-osmosis crap -- and we selected Absopure from a spring near Plymouth, Michigan. Absopure proved to be taste-free and pure, perfect for mead!
Organic lemons (batch 0001) and pineapples (batch 0002) were used as yeast food. It was our intent to make a batch of more traditional mead and a melomel (mead made with any fruit) using my favorite fruit: pineapple.

Prepping for making the must is the fun part of the whole process. We take the measurements, the timing, and the steps pretty seriously, but it has to be fun. After all, we're bootleggers, not scientists. I never heard of any bootleggers that paid much attention to the seriousness of boozemaking. In fact, you have to be out of your mind to be making your own alcohol, especially of the bathtub-gin kind.

Speaking of bathtub, that's where we warm our honey up. We don't boil our must. We find that adding heat to the process takes away some of the character of the honey and/or the fruit, or some other such nonsense. But the fact of the matter is, pouring cool honey will take you forever. And who has time for that? Those shots of Stoli won't drink themselves. Warming up the honey pre-pouring makes the honey flow much more freely and rapidly.

As the honey takes a bathee, we mix the yeast with warm-to-hot water. It's important to leave the mixture seating for around 15 minutes without whisking it. Let the yeast absorb the water and become active.

Rooney pretending to know what the hell he is doing

Sanitation -- very important! You don't want impurities, boogers, and other types of pestilence to infiltrate your nectar of the norse gods. Remember that mead is a fermenting beverage. Bacteria lives in it, broheim, and you don't want listeria doing the nasty with your Lalvin 71B-1122 (that's the yeast we use, for you, the uncultured plebes.) We sanitize everything: the ale pail, the hydrometer and thermometer, all the tools, our hands, and just in case, our nether regions. Nah, that sounds too much like a case of teh ghey. Scratch that. But basically everything that comes in contact with the must (the primary mix that will eventually become the mead) gets sterilized

We don't sanitize the fruit. In our pursuit to make our mead as authentic as possible in this health-hysteria-driven world, we find that there was no way Erik the Red was sanitizing the fruit in his mead. Hell, I don't even think Erik the Red would even have thought of using fruit in his mead, as to not appear too unmanly to his subordinates. But what can I tell you is this: we don't sanitize our fruit, and.we just wish we were as cool as our buddy Erik.

Then, it's time to mix the honey and the water. Because we don't boil or heat our must, we buy water at room temperature and warm up the honey to about 80 degrees. Somehow, that works like ~~idiot's luck~~ magic because our must achieves a temperature of around 70 degrees, which is perfect.

We hold the bottle a few feet from the ale pail so the honey oxygenates on its way down into the water. Oxygen and fermentation are great allies, especially in the beginning of the mead's life.


"Hey..hey pineapple!" "WHAT??" "Knife."

After we mix the honey and the water well, we add the fruit. I chose pineapple because I love it as a fruit and ~~like to sleep with one in my pants~~ and it is not too acidic. I was hoping to get a high ABV (alcohol-by-volume) and I read somewhere that pineapple is mildly acidic, which in turn helps to produce mead with a higher proof. As we also learned, the pineapple mass is higher than that of lemons, and therefore we used less water than in our first batch. So, more honey + less water + fruit less acidic should produce a sweeter, more alcoholic mead. And that sounds like music to our ethylic ears.

Then, the ceremonial yeast pitch. Now, if any of this sounds like a couple of morons making grog, this is where meadmaking becomes truly magic. Without yeast, it's just water and honey. I suppose that eventually this mess would ferment, but yeast turns this mixture into alcohol -- which is what, of course, this is all about.
For the ceremonial pitch yeast, I like to work myself into a trance and a state of total awareness. Odin and Loki would have no less. I pray an ancient prayer to the norse gods as I long for Ragnarok to submerge the world in water forever (at least, that what Wikipedia says.)

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

After a few more minutes whisking the final mixture, we lock the ale pail and add an airlock. Now, if you ever attempt to make mead and you lock your pale without an airlock, not only you'll have the equivalent of a mead bomb in your basement, but I will personally come to your abode and beat you to death with a carboy. The airlock helps you keep an eye on the fermentation without having to open the pail up all the time. You want your must to stay active and bubbly and the airlock allows you to observe that. It won't bubble right away, as I found out in total disappointment, but give it 12 hours and you should see the fruits of your labor bubble away.


Our first batch. We opened it to check its gravity and it exuded a beautiful aroma of lemons and dead kittens

There are some meadmakers out there that log their batches' specific gravity, ABV, and PH every 6 hours, and still they run into problems with musts that stop bubbling, low fermentation, and what have you. Bubble intervals? No way! We check it once a day and if they bubble every few seconds, we figure we're in business. We checked our first batch's gravity two weeks after it went into the pail. Now, don't think for a second we're careless. If something catastrophic happened, like a must that stops fermenting after a couple of days, we would take the appropriate measures to kick-start it back to life; but for the most part, we let nature take its course. After all, that's how meadmaking started: out of young shepherd's blind luck as his goats looked all fucked-up after drinking the water out of a puddle under an apple tree. And who are we to mess with that?

Berserker Mead - Drink Irresponsibly

2010-09-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

Let mead flow on Midgard, and let it begin with me
Let mead flow on Midgard, the mead that was meant to be
With Odin, All-Father, siblings all are we
Let me walk with my brother, while drinking merrily

Let mead begin with me, let this be the moment, now
Drinking deeply from Aðumla, the cosmic cow
To take each moment and live each moment inebriated-ly
Let mead flow on Midgard, and let it begin with me!

- Karl Donaldsson

This blog refers to the following subjects: Mead meadmaking grog home brewing honey wine ale beer meadery braggot chouchenn cyser great mead hydromel medovina melomel metheglin pyment oxymel sack meads tej viking mead of poetry. Drink mead without moderation