At Snoremark, in collaboration with the National Museum of Denmark, we have recreated the mead that two Danish famous and distinguished ancient women brought with them to the grave.
One was the Egtved girl from Vejle and the other the Juelling woman from Lolland, they are both exhibited at the National Museum together with the many grave gifts they received on the journey to the afterlife.
Although there are 1,500 years between the two being buried – and there are many hundreds of kilometers between the two burial sites, the analyzes show that they both got a mead with them, which was brewed according to the same recipe with cranberries, porse, barley and honey.
The Egtved girl lived in the Bronze Age and therefore we assume that her mead is brewed on large teracotta jars coated with beewax, while the Juelling woman is from the Iron Age, therefore her mead may have been brewed on an iron-plated oak barrel, which may have had an effect on the taste. At Snoremark, we have chosen to brew Egtvedmead on our large Italian teracotta jars.
We are often asked how the mead tasted in the Viking Age. We do not know because unlike the Bronze Age and Iron Age, the Vikings drank their own mead. They knew (qua the ase religion), that Freya offered the dead a glass of mead when they arrived at Valhalla, therefore there was no reason to give Vikings mead in the tomb.
Egtvedmead is the mead version that comes closest in time to the Viking Age. The Juelling woman died about 500 years before the Viking Age.
Among the researchers, there has been a discussion about whether it was mead or a beer, that the two women brought with them to the grave, because the mead contain traces of sugar from malted grain, which is the basis of beer production. They have not been aware that the mead type braggot has just been brewed on a mix of honey and malted grain.
If you want to get to know more about the two distinguished women who got mead with them in the grave, you can read more on the National Museum’s website:
Taste:
Egtvedmjøden is of course completely its own, but in style it can best be compared to a semi-dry rose wine with notes of licorice (from the porse), slightly bitter and a hint of smoke from the malt. It is slightly sparkling.
Durability:
After opening a few weeks.
