I’ve been enjoying the first few episodes of a show on Netflix called “Ragnarok.” I’ve always been mildly interested in Norse Mythology, and this modern rendition of those themes is fun. <\/p>\n
In the show, a kind but somewhat depressed and not terribly bright teenager finds himself in the middle of ancient conflict in the small (fictional) town of Edda in western Norway. (You might recall the Prose Edda<\/a> by Snorri Sturluson — if you took those kinds of classes in college.) <\/p>\n The bad guys know there’s something different about this boy, and they want to find out what it is, so they have him over for a dinner party and stuff him with food and drink. Including mead. <\/p>\n The show seems to want you to believe that mead is some really powerful stuff. <\/p>\n From an ABV (alcohol by volume) perspective, mead can be comparable to a light beer (around 4%) up to a strong wine (15% or so). It’s just fermented honey water. While it has a reputation for delivering serious hangovers, there’s nothing all that powerful from an alcohol perspective. (Mead is supposed to give legendary hangovers, possibly because some meads are very sweet, but also possibly because mead doesn’t have the same vitamins that beer has. To avoid a hangover, (1) don’t drink too much (obviously), (2) drink lots of water, and (3) take B vitamins and aspirin before you go to bed.) <\/p>\n Mythologies often attribute strange powers to alcoholic beverages. There is, for example, the Mead of Poetry,<\/a> which causes the drinker to become a skald (poet) or a scholar, and to be able to recite any information and solve any question. (That would be handy!) <\/p>\n Mead is often called the drink of the gods. I’ve always thought that was simply because mead is one of the oldest, if not the oldest fermented beverage. But there might be more to it, so I’ve been looking around. <\/p>\n If you come across any interesting information about special properties of mead, please let me know. (No, of course I don’t believe it has such properties, I’m simply interested from a literary \/ historical point of view.) <\/p>\n Oh. I should also mention that I have made a braggot (fermented honey + barley) that would make the gods jealous. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been enjoying the first few episodes of a show on Netflix called “Ragnarok.” I’ve always been mildly interested in Norse Mythology, and this modern rendition of those themes is fun. In the show, a kind but somewhat depressed and not terribly bright teenager finds himself in the middle of ancient conflict in the small … Continue reading “Mead ain’t all that!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":366,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions\/366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}