Microbrewed Adventures - Charles Papazian [57]
Little tastes, little flavors, notions, whims, fancies and small gestures. This time they’ve complemented a journey I will never forget. This seems always to be the story of mead and its mysteries. A friend of mead is a friend indeed.
One year after my visit, Brother Adam died. His passion surely has left an indelible mark on these lives we still live.
Minard Castle,
Argyll, Scotland
FROM THE DEVON COUNTRYSIDE I journeyed north to the brisk and rustic landscape west of Glasgow, Scotland. Mead had been foremost in my mind for a week, and now I had arrived at the beginning of another adventure back in time. I found myself sipping 45-year-old mead in the wine cellar of a centuries-old Victorian castle. In my hands I held experimental meads brewed both before and during World War II. The walls of the castle were several feet thick. The silence of the room was total, though the rain and gales blew outside, scouring the Scottish countryside.
I had to remember to breathe as I excitedly found myself poring over the original notes of perhaps the 20th century’s greatest mead historian and professional and amateur mead maker.
What else would I find inside these castle walls? Were there other bottles of old mead hidden? Very few knew for sure, until I discovered a dusty rack and a box full of mead made over 50 years ago.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For a moment I need to impress upon you the small gestures and the impulses of a moment in 1983 that had led me to the opposite side of the world seeking whatever knowledge of mead might exist.
It was December, and I wanted to be somewhere warm and have the time to appreciate it. I had totally dedicated the previous summer in Colorado to researching and writing the manuscript for my book The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. I had rarely seen the light of day. With my manuscript off to the publisher, I fulfilled the promise to myself to go somewhere warm.
Two weeks into my stay in New Zealand I found myself at the top of the South Island, near the town of Nelson. I had been visiting the recently established RocMac Brewery, the nation’s one and only microbrewery at the time. For one reason or another, the brewer and I had begun a discussion about mead. On a whim, he suggested I go have a look at the stock of wines carried by the bottle shop across the street from the brewery.
“I’ll be a blue-nosed gopher,” I thought to myself as I discovered a bottle of something called Havill’s Mazer Mead. There was a telephone number on the bottle and I did not hesitate to ask the shopkeeper if I might make a call to this meadery.
Within minutes I was on the phone talking to Leon Havill. “Where is Rangiora?” I asked, as that was listed on the label as the bottle’s source. Leon had only to reply “near Christchurch,” and I was making air reservations five minutes later. I was suddenly leaving the next day for a part of New Zealand I’d originally had no intention of visiting. Christchurch? Rangiora? Havill’s Mazer Mead? Was I nuts? I had second thoughts, but it was too late.
The visit with Leon and Gay Havill was the beginning of a long and warm friendship. Leon’s mead was excellent, and his knowledge and experience were inspiring. During the telling of many tales (all true, I’m sure) he showed me a book about mead he’d found, written in 1948 by a Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gayre, called Wassail! In Mazers of Mead. I was fascinated by the depth of historical knowledge this book contained.
It was over a year later that I found a copy of Gayre’s book through a rare-book search service. The price seemed high, a painful $80, but I wasn’t about to lose the opportunity. I read it with great interest. I continued my own mead-making, somewhat more inspired, but it wasn’t until 1985 that I had a strange impulse to wonder if this Lieutenant Colonel Robert