2016 friends treated me to birthday celebrations at Aberdeen’s only Polish restaurant "Biggos" on Union Street, my first ever taste’s of Polish food followed by my introduction to traditional drinks from Poland, Mead is a favorite, this bottle was presented to my friend by the restaurants owner to recognise the numerous times he had purchased the drink when visiting the restaurant, here’s the story behind the well known Polish drink.
MEAD.
Mead is one of traditional Polish alcohols. It is produced by fermentation of lime honey. Meads are sometimes made with various juices to improve the taste, as well as with herbs and spices. Mead made from pure lime honey was peculiarly valued.
This drink is manufactured and drunk in Poland since the Middle Ages – in the early history of the state ruled by Piast dynasty, wine was not cultivated. Hence, Poles needed some more easily available alcoholic beverages. In this way a tradition of brewing beer and production of the mead rose.
Meads were pleased with a great renown, but were drunk rarely, most oftentimes during important celebrations like at weddings.
It was a luxury and expensive alcohol, with time mead lost on meaning, because of cheaper and easy to produce vodka. It kept the popularity longer in Podhale region and in Lithuania, however, in the scale of the entire country at the end of 18th century, mead was already a real rarity.
"Mead was also popular in Central Europe and in the Baltic states. In the Polish language mead is called miód pitny, meaning ‘drinkable honey’. In Russia mead remained popular as medovukha and sbiten long after its decline in the West.
In Finland a sweet mead called Sima (cognate with zymurgy) is still an essential seasonal brew connected with the Finnish Vappu (May Day) festival. It is usually spiced by adding both the pulp and rind of a lemon."
From 2008 Polish meads are registered by the European Commission and officially treated as a traditional speciality.
Mead, along with vodka, was once prepared in all Polish homes, today, few producers remain, and only one mead maker in all Poland still uses the traditional recipe.
This producer, Maciej Jaros, is a giant of a man with huge hands, blue eyes, and a droopy handlebar mustache. Jaros lives a few kilometers from Warsaw and has made mead commercially in his family business ever since the Polish government removed the ban on small private enterprise in 1991.
The best honeys for mead are heather or fir.
Many types of mead exist, varying in quality according to the proportion of honey to water—from one part honey to three parts water, to two parts honey to one part water. The latter version, called półtorak, is the most precious. The more honey used to make the mead, the longer it can be aged. The minimum aging time is four to five years, but bottles aged 15 and even 20 years still exist.
The preparation of Polish Mead begins by boiling honey and water mixed with local herbs. The mixture is then fermented and aged in large stainless steel barrels. Some varieties of Polish Mead are traditionally flavored with raspberry, apple, or grape juice.
The authentic recipe for Polish Mead has been saved by generations of artisans,traditionally, women always produced the mead, while men were responsible for the apiaries.
The hand-made ceramic bottles in which Polish Mead is sold are also characteristic of the product. Glass was often too expensive for poor families, and they baked their own jug-like bottles in small kilns.
Posted by DanoAberdeen on 2017-02-13 21:58:39
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