Microbrewed Adventures - Charles Papazian [59]
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