An unlikely occurrence of Mead

A somewhat strange occurance last night at my favourite local.

After a successful meeting in Mabels Tavern, which (to a degree) represented the culmination of a years worth of conspiring to set up a new Peace & Disarmament network. A wee bit merry and by random chance I suggested getting together at the Oakdale for a few more beers.

The Oakdale is a strange pub. It’s a back street local but a most peculiar one. They do agood beer from the Milton brewery, a fine range of malt whiskeys and as I discovered a range of meads.

Also the landlord also is one of the tallest Goths I’ve met, and used to (I think) organise ‘synthetic culture’ back in the day. Of late the pub has installed great big aquariums full of Lizards, and on occasion the landlord encourages them to sit on patrons, which is kind of surreal. The juke box is full of old goth classics, and in case you can’t tell I like it here.

Anyhow last night I bought a beer, settled down for a drink and a chat. The bar tender then turned up with a couple of shot glasses as a free gift (you see it is dead nice here). Somewhat confused I looked at them, wondering what and why. My friend started to question if they were a mead, they were, and a familiar sweet smell suggested something strange.

The bar tender pointed out they weren’t shots but glasses of mead. My mind boggled as my friend suggested I was the biggest mead geek in history. I explained about this site and the bartender described the range of Moniack (a Cornish mead??), Gales and I think others.

The mead he’d donated to us was the Monaick and recognizable as such, after all I have drunk a fair amount of the stuff at various Witchfests.

But still completely surreal. My local real ale come Goth pub donating shots of mead on a Friday night. What great start to the weekend, and perhaps the Mead revival is not inconceivable.

Next time I’ll order a pint.

George Gales Mead

Another new experience and perhaps an intriguing beginning.

The mead itself was from Gales country wine range, and wasn’t anything special. It looks like they're produced/distributed by Fullers and I’d seen a bottle in the brewery shop next to Harveys brewery on the way to the Mead (and cider) Mecca that is middle farm. I’d been in enough of a hurry not to bother going in.

What was interesting was that it was on sale in a pub, which is something I’d been looking out for as I have an idea of a direction this rambling quest for mead could go.

The taste of the mead was an uninspiring sweet honey like drink. An ordinary mead, by anyone’s standard, that would have pleased me 6 months ago but now is nothing to my jaded taste buds. The usual bitter after taste was in evidence, perhaps more sweet than most and all together not a bad drink.

The landlady suggested she quite liked a tipple, every once in a while, but I wonder if Mead could be popular in pubs if it wasn’t quite so sweet. It’s hard to imagine people drinking it by the pint, whereas in days long gone that must have been exactly what happened.

Given the massive revival of cider that has followed in the wake of Bulmers producing Magners and then Bulmers to be served over ice, I wonder if something similar could plausibly happen with Mead.

And/or as a sister organisation to CAMRA, APPLE exists for the promotion of real cider drinking. Is there scope for a subset of CAMRA devoted to the drinking of Mead? Am I alone in this madness or could I persuade others to join me? Could we start with an annual Mead award, and then move onto the promotion of Mead drinking in pubs?

A wee while ago I joined CAMRA and they have some sort of internal forums, so perhaps when this blog has matured more I’ll open the subject on one of those forums and see where the conversation leads.