The Quest to Recreate a Lost and ‘Terrifying’ Medieval Mead

You should be able to get a water report from your municipality, listing any treatments they perform. Chlorine and similar can be removed with Campden tablets, available at your homebrew store. I've never heard of fluoride causing a change in a fermented product. I know plenty of breweries that just use fluoridated city water.

Note the special lid on that mason jar for allowing off-gassing. Fermenting in a mason jar with a standard lid is a recipe for exploding glass.

I'm not sure what to make of the fermentation time here. Meads are usually fermented longer, older recipes tend to have very short fermentation times. Especially older, low gravity recipes.

If you don't want to play the guessing game on fermentation time, buy a hydrometer or refractometer.

I have never made mead myself however. Are the spices of so little consequence to the final flavour?

I cannot speak for how authentic is the modern day recipe compared to what the author found. But it’s a mead. It’s sweet and contains alcohol :)

Btw (bitter) beer mixed with mead makes for one delicious drink!

Really? Mansplaining in the 14th century? Is that how historical subjects are going to be treated now?

> An anonymous French writer penned an exhaustive guide to etiquette, moral conduct, and the practical concerns of a young bride, from choosing servants to throwing feasts: Le Ménagier de Paris (The Good Wife’s Guide). “It’s a ridiculous book,” says Verberg. “It’s micromanagement. I would not have wanted to be his wife.”

Nor would she (or he) have wanted you as her husband (or wife), she (he) would possibly not even have recognised you are a marriage-worthy candidate. Times change, attitudes change, mores and morals change, that is what makes history so interesting. Knee-jerk virtue signalling is not a sign of a good historian.

Read Machiavelli's The Prince for another detailed manual on how to behave, in this case on how to become an effective prince. Was Machiavelli mansplaining as well, seeing as how he wrote the book to instruct another male?

Let history be history and study it for what it is, the past which eventually led to the present. Rest assured that once we are history many of our cultural traits will seem strange as well. Rest assured that what is considered virtuous now will be considered something totally different in a few centuries - if not a few decades.

Also, stop using labels like mansplaining, it adds nothing to the discourse and only leads to polarisation of the 'he is not in my camp' type.