Real home-brewed ginger beer has a kick to it. With it’s strong, but not overpowering, taste of ginger. My ginger beer is perfect in a dark’n’stormy or to drink on it’s own as sodapop for adults.
I have now made it several times and are ready to share my recipe. Some of you might have read my tales of ginger beer. The big lesson learned from my first tries was – use plastic bottles – really do!
On the blog I have talked about medieval spiced wine before. My boyfriend and I have decided that we want to start going to medieval reenactment markeds as spice wine merchants. To do this we of course had to get the clothing and gear, more about that in another post. We are going to our first marked in little under two weeks.
For the last month I have done experiments to source the best (cheap) wine to use for the spiced wines.
Lutendranck was the first historic spiced wine I tasted. Lutendranck is a medieval sweetened and spiced white wine that was typically enjoyed cold. While Kasper thinks the name means lute drink – or he puts it “gitar wine”. It sadly isn’t the meaning, rather it means something like clarified wine – which makes sense since it has been put though a sive to remove the spices. But it is less of a good story. It is sweet and spiced and totally yummy. The batch I made last week started tasting kind of like good mead and now tastes very spiced but still totally delicious. The wine could be drunk for fun or as a medicinal drink that could cure mental problems such as: longing, cantankerous, misery and melancholy. It could also be used to clean the chest and against coughs.
My boyfriend and I are talking about doing some reenactment markeds – at some point in the future. We are talking about the possibility of going as spiced wine merchants. In the past I have made a spiced white wine, lutendranck, which is really tasty. So when I had two liter of red wine sitting around and ran into a recipe for hypocras I of course had to try it. After making both I have started collecting different recipes for both wines.