Microbrewed Adventures Page 14
“May I speak to Mr. Gayre, please?”
“This is he.”
I was a bit dumbfounded. I had anticipated a secretary to answer. It was Lieutenant Colonel Gayre. The guy who’d written the book I was holding in my hand, published nearly 40 years ago. My mind briefly flashed back to New Zealand and that original unassuming conversation with the brewmaster at RocMac Brewery, the impulsive trip to visit Havill’s meadery and a freak finding of an original copy of this book. Now, several years later, I was speaking with the author.
I briefly explained who I was and where I was from, and asked whether he would consider attending our convention to speak on mead. I had no idea how old this man was (he was 76 at the time). He simply replied, “Yes I would.”
Seventeen passionate friends of mead privately donated $1,200 in order to cover the expenses of his travel to Colorado, as the American Homebrewers Association was in no position to come up with that kind of money at the time.
Colonel Gayre attended the 1985 AHA convention, and from that visit the Association of Brewers made arrangements to reprint his book, retitled Brewing Mead. Before he departed, the colonel gave me two picture postcards of his castle and invited me to visit, should I ever be in Scotland.
That was in 1985. For eight years a visit to the castle had been on my list of things to do.
This is the abbreviated story of my visit to the home of the 20th century’s most knowledgeable, passionate and accomplished mead maker.
I arrived at Minard Castle on a cool, rainy and typically Scottish spring day. The imposing castle gate heightened the promise of what might lie within the high walls.
Minard Castle
With a view of Loch Fyne bordering the “backyard,” Colonel Gayre’s son, Reinold, and Reinold’s wife, Marion, graciously received me. My arrival turned out to be quite auspicious, as no sooner had I been shown to my room (which was nearly the size of my own house) than I hurried down to one of the castle libraries, where a small celebration of the colonel’s 86th birthday had commenced.
Unfortunately, the strokes he had suffered several years earlier had left Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gayre in poor health, but he continued his tradition of enjoying a glass of mead with lunch every day. I had brought two bottles of my own mead to share with him. Little had I known they would be birthday gifts.
I spent two full days with the Gayre family. Their hospitality was gratefully received, and Reinold and Marion’s help in locating what was left of Colonel Gayre’s mead files led me to some important insights about mead.
I had the freedom to roam among the castle’s numerous rooms, most filled with antiques, artifacts, paintings, books, cantilevered staircases, majestic fireplaces, long carpets and coats of arms. Every room seemed appointed with history. I learned much about the colonel during my brief stay. Mead was a relatively small part of his long and active life. During World War II he worked in military intelligence against the Nazis in Germany. After the war he was assigned as Chief of Education and Religious Affairs for Germany. He had held a similar position in postwar Italy as well. His specialty was ethnology with related study and work in anthropology, archeology, biology and genealogy. In the late 1940s he published his book Wassail! In Mazers of Mead, a cultural and ethnological study of mead tracing its origins back to the Middle Ages and beyond. At about that time Colonel Gayre established and assumed the role of managing director of Mead Makers Ltd. of Gulval in Cornwall, England.
Lt. Colonel Robert Gayre (left), son Reinold Gayre (right)
Mead Makers became a commercial meadery, flourishing for several years before its demise in the mid-1950s. Housed in a refurbished abandoned flour mill, the company grew herbs, made mead, sold mead-making kits, showcased their products in a visitor’s center and operated a grand mead hall, where exotic banquets were offered combining mead cookery with melage (vintage) meads. Melages were always assigned to the company’s mead. St. Bartholomew’s Day, on August 24, was celebrated annually with great ceremony.
Sack mead, metheglin, sack metheglin, pyment, hippocras, sack brochet, cyser and melomel were regularly made at Gulval. Preaching that mead was the liquor of the upper classes and the gourmet, Gayre promoted the tradition of old English mead cookery and mead at every opportunity. An old copy of his booklet Mead Hall Cookery describes in appetizing and fanciful detail several recipes such as Prawn Sack Mead Soup, Pheasant Hippocras Soup, Cyser Cream of Sole Soup, Oyster Pyment Soup, Rabbit cooked in Melomel, Cyser Omelet and Trevylor Mead Sauce.
Gayre noted in one of several articles he authored in the 1940s that “ambrosia” and “nectar of the gods” referred to ancient meads and were the terms used to describe the best of the best. We still use these terms today, but forget they originally referred to mead.
Mead Makers also harvested their own honey and used it until the price of imported Australian honey could be had for one-hundredth the price of the lighter and more delicious English honey.
Success at Mead Makers lasted only a few years. In 1955 the mead hall, herb garden and meadery and the brief popularity of mead were abandoned, it is thought due largely to the reduction of imported wine tariffs. While these events surely had a profound effect on the popularity and sales of Gayre’s mead, Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey told me that during the final years of the meadery, inexpensive and strongly flavored Australian eucalyptus honey was used in Mead Maker’s mead. The unusual flavors, he thought, might have contributed to mead’s falling out of favor with the English.
Silver Mazer Mead Chalices
Gayre’s autobiography mentions only briefly his mead endeavors, attributing their failure to quarreling among the directors of the company.
Regardless of the reasons for its demise, Mead Makers and Gayre brought great attention to mead and mead making. Several stories about it were published in magazines of the time. The spirit of the articles mirrored the current enthusiasm and attention given to today’s microbrewery phenomenon in the United States. Except among a few friends of mead, the western world was to forget Gayre’s great accomplishments and abandon the culture of mead. Gulval had been the center of a brief revival.
I recall how Colonel Gayre sparkled during his visit to Colorado in 1985 when he appeared at the American Homebrewers Association National Conference. His small audience was avid and appreciative. He discussed his experiences and mead wisdom, much as he must have done 35 years earlier when he addressed a meeting of beekeepers in England. At the American Homebrewers Association conference he emphasized the need for sanitation and strong yeast strains and the destructive nature of oxygen and oxidation. The following excerpt from a presentation Gayre made in 1950 indicates the passion he had always had for mead:
One of the characteristics of mead is that it is drinkable at a much earlier stage than would be wine. One reason for this is that in honey there are practically no toxic properties whatsoever, whereas even in the making of the finest wines there are derived from pips, leaves and stems, all of which in most cases at one time or another come into contact with the juice. The result of this is that mead never appears to affect the head in the sense of giving a headache—what is commonly called a hangover—nor does it affect the liver and make for much the same effect with feeling of nausea or sickness. There is from an excess of mead drinking—and all good things can be abused—a tendency for a certain irrational rationality! That is, a person may do a most irrational thing in the most rational way, and be fully conscious of it both at the time and afterwards. There is not that sort of blackout with failure to remember what has been done. Traditionally, mead is able to affect the legs rather seriously when taken excessively, and there are instances known to the writer where the drinkers have said that, after a prolonged session at mead drinking, they have had some difficulty in rising. The moral of this is not to drink in excess, or, if you are determined to do so—in which case no one will be able to stop you—the thing is to drink where you intend to sleep!” (Excerpted from The British Bee Journal, July 22,
1950)
Irrational rationality and difficulty in rising! I’ve never known anything closer to the truth.
The stone walls of the castle within which I undertook my brief research were imposingly silent in the vastness of Colonel Gayre’s home. The wide Victorian main stairs spiraled to the second floor. The halls were decorated with larger-than-life-size paintings of European dignitaries in times past. Thousands of books from all over the world lay on shelves seemingly extending forever. They were all perfectly dusted. In one room, a large kitchen with a long table bore a full complement of pewter plates, drinking vessels and silverware. The kitchen hearth set out as it may have been two hundred years ago. A stacked pyramid of grapefruit-size cannonballs lay in a corner, a small triangular metal corral called a brass monkey keeping them from rolling away. (Now I understood where the phrase “cold as balls on a brass monkey” came from.) Full sheaths of armor, swords, hunting bows, muskets, lanterns and other ancient paraphernalia filled the room.
Gayre was indeed a collector of stuff and I admired that, being a collector of stuff myself. Nothing seemed spectacularly valuable, but there was a lot of it. And all of it was very old, mysterious and intriguing. Somewhere in this vast collection of stuff I was searching for information about mead. But I couldn’t help being distracted by the tall and rippled windows peering out over this Scottish estate.
Outside, a walled garden flourished under the caretaking of John the gardener. I learned he was also an avid all-grain homebrewer. Orchids grew in several corners, while fruit trees and exotic grasses grew elsewhere. Beyond the walls the Gayre family had planted spruce trees, planning to sell them as Christmas trees in years to come. The sun shone briefly as I took advantage of the fleeting glimpse of blue sky to don boots and walk about the castle grounds. The grass between the loch and the castle was a rich, soggy deep green as I peered back and contemplated the stone walls and the secrets of mead.
In my room that night, I typed my thoughts and transcribed a few records and recipes onto my notebook computer, which posed a strange contrast of 20th-century technology with medieval surroundings. Outside the rain was driven by gale winds, yet I could not hear any sound through the three-foot-thick walls. Despite the eerie silence and a permeating coolness, I slept well that night.
After a morning walk I returned to my research within the walls of the castle. My wanderings found me in a room I had not visited. Toward the rear of the castle and beneath a set of cantilevered spiral stairs is a small room that served as the wine cellar. I entered through the small door with anticipation that was soon to be rewarded. Scattered on the floor were boxes of marked and unmarked bottles of mead and a dusty wine rack silently upholding several more. As I was very carefully sorting through these relics I discovered what remained of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gayre’s stash of commercial and experimentally homemade mead. Bottled in the years 1944 through 1949, there were perhaps 40 labeled bottles remaining of sack mead, sack metheglin, cyser, melomel, brochet and hippocras.
I also discovered a box on the floor containing 16 bottles of mead, some of which were hand labeled. All seemed to be from about 1944, when Gayre was experimenting with various recipes as well as beginning his career working for military intelligence against Nazi Germany. I held this mead and thought of how only eight years earlier, in 1936, Gayre had met with Hitler in Berlin, Hitler having been interested in his ethnological ideas. Now it was August 1993 and I was sorting through several cysers, metheglins and melomels.
Most of the bottles were still intact, though a few had oozed part of their contents through failing corks and broken wax seals. My intent was to take a few photographs of these rare bottles and bring to the attention of Reinold and Marion the significance of what was in their basement.
Remaining mead from 1940s Mead Makers Meadery, Gulval, Cornwall
Over the years various castle residents may have squandered much of what had been there. Who was to know? Now only a few bottles remained.
As I took stock of the small inventory, Marion brought in a steaming plate of lightly sautéed chanterelle mushrooms, along with a complement of several wineglasses and a corkscrew. I was about to be immersed in mead heaven. Reinold joined us and invited me to open two bottles of melage mead.
The first was a 1948 melomel made by Mead Makers. The bottle had leaked. A quarter of its contents were gone, replaced with air. There was very little hope that the contents would be good. The cork disintegrated as I pried it out. To our astonishment the mead was not only drinkable, but quite good. It tasted very rich and dense, almost salty from the concentration of solids due to evaporation; it was very sweet, sherrylike and somewhat spicy in character. There was very little suggestion of oxidation and no acidification had taken place.
The next bottle we opened was a 1948 bottle of sack metheglin. It was in perfect condition. The aroma was herbal and honeylike. There was not the slightest evidence of oxidation. The label stated that the contents were no less than 14 percent a.b.v. The character of this sack metheglin was deep and complex; it was crystal clear, bearing no sediment. The aroma also expressed a slight lavender/herbal character. The taste mystified me. My mind continued to unravel the flavor. After several sips and savoring the long aftertaste, several characters unfolded themselves. I thought I could identify lavender, thyme, rosemary, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg, though they were all interwoven into one marvelous and unifying expression. Curiously, it was the aftertaste that really helped unravel the flavor for me. It still lingered 30 minutes later, and it was at that time that a rosemary-and-thyme (almost oregano-like) character became clearly evident.
I later learned from reading Gayre’s mead notes that the gruit (herbal mixture) from which metheglins were made consisted of those herbs I had perceived, as well as a long list of others.
A slight burnt and smoky flavor contributed to the overall character. I would guess that this might have been the result of certain root herbs such as orris (powdered Florentine iris, of which Gayre writes in one of his herbal books: “a most valuable ingredient in flavoring fine metheglin”) and of being aged in oak for a year or two before bottling. There was also a soft acidity blessing the overall character.
We tried no other meads, though I could hardly contain my desire. I noted that the melomels and hippocras and particularly the cysers all had deposits in the bottle, likely from the tannic additions from grapes, apples or other fruit.
The experience of enjoying Colonel Gayre’s mead must have had a mystical effect upon Reinold, for as soon after we had sampled the meads, he mentioned that there was a journal in one of the bookcases of the library in which the colonel had kept notes on his mead experimentation. I searched the rest of the day, but it wasn’t until the next morning that I discovered it. I was leaving later that morning and had little time to view it, though. I did quickly note a few handwritten formulations. The first was for an early sack metheglin, surely a less potent predecessor of what I had experienced the night before:
for SACK METHEGLIN
18 quarts [Imperial, or approximately 5½ U.S. gallons] of water, 9 pounds of honey and 2 tight handfuls of gruit. [the gruit consisting of] 1 handful of fresh fennel and equal parts [to make up the other handful] of lemon balm, thyme in flower and sage.
Another formulation for gruit appeared later in his journal and may be more indicative of the gruit of which the sack metheglin from the previous night had been made. Question marks appear where the handwritten notes were not quite legible.
3 parts: bog myrtle (sweet gale)
3 parts: rosemary
3 parts: yarrow
1 part: ginger
9 parts: fennel
1 part: rue (ceaser?)
1 part: thyme
2 parts: sweet criar(?)
1 part: tansy
2 parts: balm
1 part: peppermint
Here is another recipe for gruit, in which Gayre apparently experiments with clove, cinnamon and nutmeg:
Metheglin
for 5 imperial gallons [6 U.S. gallons]
2 oz.: fresh fennel
2 oz.: lemon balm, thyme and sage in flower
2 oz.: elder flowers, fresh
1 oz.: bay leaf, tansy (fresh), parsley (fresh) and mint
½ oz.: clove, cinnamon and nutmeg
The first formulation for sack-type mead related to the above gruit formulations indicates the use of 2 pounds of honey per imperial gallon. This must have been an earlier experiment, as further on in his journal Gayre refines his formulations to become more indicative of a truer sack mead with ratios of 5 pounds (2.3 kg) of honey per imperial gallon (1.2 U.S. gallon, or 4.6 l) for sack mead and 6 pounds (2.7 kg) per imperial gallon for melage sack mead.
To assure the cessation of fermentation, Gayre would add spirits (alcohol), fortifying some of his concoctions.
While experimenting with yeast, he noted that he isolated some of his yeast cultures from fresh apple juice: “add ¼ bottle of whisky to 2 gallons of apple juice and 12 # honey…” I wondered, did the whisky inhibit bacterial organisms, while wild yeast survived? Did the wild yeast encourage a more complete fermentation?
Gayre must have experimented with various gruits until he was satisfied, for a later journal entry describes a grander production of metheglin. A large volume of gruit was formulated thusly:
10 lbs.: heads of elder flowers
1 lb.: heads of hawthorn
3 oz.: rosemary
2½ lbs.: fennel [probably not seeds]
4 oz.: thyme
9 oz.: balm