Long story short: the beer’s good. The bread failed up front. The mead didn’t take off.

There was a medieval brew day with a few goals in mind:

  1. Make ale
  2. Make mead with yeast harvested from the ale barm
  3. Make bread with the yeast harvested from the ale barm

OK, well, a few days; the ales were made 1 and 2 days beforehand in order to try and time things for harvesting the barm.

The mead, specifically, was the driver for all of this; the original recipe mentioned using ale barm so that led to making ale to get barm, then using the barm in the mead and, hey, why not also a bread?

The bread didn’t rise and the mead didn’t ferment.

…but the recipe also didn’t actually say to use the barm. It said to use the lees…which…yeah, that would’ve worked out much better ;)

So…hey, at least I have 10 gallons of 1503 ale kicking about. I think I’ll add some of it to some meat pies, add some to bread, etc. and get some plausibly medieval uses out of it. I can harvest the lees, too; the mead still needs to ferment, so I could see about getting the lees to the mead (2+ hours away) or start another here (which would be much easier).

Shame it didn’t all work out…but that’s the great thing about projects like this. We knew it wasn’t one-and-done but more likely the first of a series…