The Misadventures and Projects of Thomas de Marr'

Wine

Wines are simple and fun to create! Traditional wine is nothing more than squeezing grape juice out and letting it ferment by either adding yeast you desire or letting the wild yeast already on the grapes go to work. Another way to make wine is a sugar wine that lets the yeast eat the sugar you add for fermentation. This makes it possible to use things with low or no sugar to make wine such as flowers, herbs and many different kinds of fruits and vegetables. Here is a quick tutorial on how to make your own:

Mead

Mead is simply wine that uses honey as it’s source of fermentable sugar rather than granulated sugar or the natural sugars found in grapes. Also called a honey wine many today think of this as the drink of the Vikings but it was much more widespread than that, mead is found in Egypt and many other regions of the world beyond Scandinavia. Mead has many names and definitions mainly delineated by what other ingredients your add to the honey such as grapes, fruit, herbs or flowers. It is a very simple process with limitless creative ideas but the basics are water, honey and yeast.

Beer

This is an area I am just beginning to explore and will have an easy how to video in the near future. Beer is more complex in creation as there is a process and the order of operations is very important to how the end result tastes. I find it more daunting because there are more rules to follow making beer, compared to wine and mead where there are very few rules to follow. I do not bottle my beer that I have made but rather keg it for sharing. Where as I spend a lot of time and effort to bottle and label my wine and mead, beer has a shorter lifespan of about six months making it not worth my time. I am not a heavy drinker so I primarily brew it for events or to be paneled by the East Kingdom Brewers Guild.

Cordials

Cordials as I make them are really nothing more than flavor infused brandy or vodka. Due to distilling laws I am not in a position to make a cordial from the very beginning of the process so I start with the base liquor and go from there. Mostly what I make is not period brewing recipes but tasty experiments with fruit, herbs, sugar and brandy. In period cordials are often referred to as Aqua Vitae or Tinctures and were associated with medicinal purposes.

Non Alcoholic Cordials / Flavored Syrups

These are fun for the whole family and a healthier alternative to sodas! I starting making these because my children wanted to make cordials with all the adults during our Canton project nights. Since then we have made this a competition at the Feast of Saint Sylvester where the children enter a roundtable, the adults have a roundtable and then a populace vote with all entries together. We use the syrups with our Soda Stream, over ice cream or watered down as a juice for summer events. Here is a quick how to:

Bottling & Sealing Your Wine or Mead

To preserve my wine and mead while emptying my carboys for making more brews I bottle. The fun about this method is that you can preserve what you made and open a new bottle to see how the flavor has changed over time, even over years, of aging. They also make great gifts and are easy donate for feasts and Royal encampments. I use wax to seal my bottles because it’s cheap, looks great and keeps the corks from drying out. Using 2 color waxes I can tell at a glance before reading the label if it is a wine or mead. Black is my wines while Gold are my meads.

Now to level up your mead making skills try making some over the fire in true medieval fashion!

I do two types of brewing, Period recipes from documented sources and modern recipes either I make up or find written somewhere. To lessen the confusion I have separated out the recipes for you, each on their own page.

• Period Recipes
• Modern Recipes