"A Lost and ‘Terrifying’ Medieval Mead" bochet recipe

[MilesBFree]

In case anyone else is tempted to try that recipe as written about by Atlas Obscura, here are some thoughts:

1. I am a little over 1 week in and did the first racking. At 3 days, you add the spices, and after another 4 days remove them and rack it. I sampled a bit of it to see what the flavors are like. I also tasted the individual spices since I had never tried long pepper of grains of paradise. Those are both predominately like black pepper with other notes as well, plus you add ginger and cloves. This sounds better in theory than in practice, at least at this early stage.

2. I used Kveik ale yeast which is giving it a completely different flavor than the basic mead I made. When as a kid I read about Vikings drinking mead I kinda thought it was a beer-like beverage (maybe colored by my first taste of alcohol being sneaking beers out of the grown-ups cooler at parties). I didn't understand it is honey wine until I read up on how to make it only recently. Making it with ale yeast makes it a bit closer to what I was expecting. Once it is done I will have to see if it will make a suitable beverage for raiding and pillaging

3. I have made a number of caramel and brittle deserts (baking is another hobby) so I added cream of tartar as one would do in making those, to prevent crystalization. Another bochet recipe suggested using lemon as the acid. I don't believe either of those is needed, since once you add the water and continue cooking the must for another 10 minutes, any crystals will dissolve.

4. I used a candy thermometer with a target of 300 degrees F but overshot it. Several of the recipes that people made based on the historic recipe in the AO article said to cook over medium-high heat for an hour or more, but in the pan I used on the big gas burner on our Monogram cooktop it hit that in like 12 minutes after it started bubbling. Luckily I was curious about the temp when it was getting pretty dark so put the candy thermometer in and saw it was a bit over. The flavor was very good though, and had some smokiness to it. The flavor in the must is nice. Next time I would keep an even closer eye on it though...

5. There is nothing magical about adding the water to the very hot honey and having it more or less explode, at least from a baking standpoint. All you are doing is adding water to get to the 1-gallon mark for fermenting. I pulled the pot of honey off the heat and let the bubbling settle for 1 - 2 minutes, then very slowly added the water. It bubbled up a LOT but not explosively. Then I returned it to the heat and boiled it for another 10 minutes. As long as the honey does not cool and set into a solid brick of caramel it will dissolve into the water as you continue heating it.

6. It is interesting from a historical perspective but I would go with different spices next time, or maybe just skip them altogether and make a more standard bochet/mead by caramelizing the honey, not rest of the 1393-era recipe.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-make-medieval-mead-bochet

 

[MilesBFree]

Update: I stand corrected - the flavors developed nicely over the past 6 months since bottling it. Given the spices like cloves, ginger, etc. it has somewhat of a holiday flavor so should be really nice around Christmas.

You definitely get ale notes from the Kveik yeast which is surprising in a really good way.

I use swing-top bottles for my wines and 1 gallon of wine fills 3 1-liter bottles plus a 1/2 liter one. I cracked the half liter open last weekend to see how it was coming along and was pleasantly surprised at the flavor.

It is lacking in acid, tho, so i may add a pinch of acid blend to the rest of the half liter when we finish it.

It doesn't need tannins; probably get the notes from the long pepper and heavily caramelized honey.

I may make it again, but as i mentioned I think I might add another spice or two and go full-on for holiday notes. e.g., maybe some cinammon sticks and citrus rind.

 

[bernardsmith]

Great to hear that your bochet is coming along well. Many folk burn their honey not knowing at what temperatures sucrose and glucose caramelize. Burn honey is an analog of burnt toast. There are some who eat burnt toast - perhaps for medical reasons but never, I think, because of the taste. Carbon is not toast, nor is carbon bocheted honey.
Not sure that "bochet vanished for centuries". Sounds like the author knows not very much about mead making..

 

[MilesBFree]

Agree on all points. Atlas Obscura posts on a lot of really interesting topics but not experts in many of them. I like reading them for exploring/learning about a wide variety of things then do further digging for the actual recipes, etc.

Also, in this case, they may have misspoken and either meant this particular recipe vanished, or maybe could have said it fell waaaaaaay off the radar rather than vanished.

 

[bernardsmith]

Agree on all points. Atlas Obscura posts on a lot of really interesting topics but not experts in many of them. I like reading them for exploring/learning about a wide variety of things then do further digging for the actual recipes, etc.

Also, in this case, they may have misspoken and either meant this particular recipe vanished, or maybe could have said it fell waaaaaaay off the radar rather than vanished.

Except neither vanished nor off the radar. I have books published in the UK at the beginning of the 20th C written by and for home wine makers that treat bochet as a standard mead and their standard meads typically included hops.