The brief

To create the label for Pirate’s Grog No. 13, a new 13-year-old golden rum from the Caribbean island of Roatán.

The approach

The Pirate’s Grog team scoured the internet and found Romania-based illustrator Rob Forest who was given a rough sketch of the beach scene complete with pirate paraphernalia, logo and strapline to work on.

Marketing Director Beth Jones says the printing had to be ultra-premium and the design team was given a crash course in printing techniques including foil blocking, die stamping, blind embossing and die cutting before choosing to use die stamping on the label.

She says: “We really liked the 3D effect of the die stamping and decided to use two different gold Pantones to add extra depth. The printers use very traditional heavy die stamping presses after their skilled craftsmen have engraved steel dies.”

The rum comes in a black crock bottle, which allows the liquid to breathe and continue ageing after bottling.

Do you have a thing of boozy beauty you’d like to share with our readers? If so, please email simon@www.hotrumcow.co.uk

I touch down in New Orleans at 4am UK time. The local time, judging by Louis Armstrong International Airport, is 1998. Preparations for my first night in the US haven’t gone to the simple plan. Drink through flight one, sleep through flight two worked except for the sleeping part, so everything starts from a skewed perspective and skews further.

A cab heads for the French Quarter passing essentially everything I currently know about New Orleans – the river, the Superdome, Tremé. It skirts some spectacular lightning storms too. Maybe they’ll clear this ludicrous steamy atmosphere. The cabbie says he’s not busy as the summer’s too brutal for folk to stick around and this is the third time I’ve had this warning from a local already.

Emerging onto the streets and, in its look and feel, New Orleans is unlike anything I’ve come across in a US city before – indeed, it is often referred to as more of a Caribbean city than a US one. The second thing you notice – after the steam – is that Saturday night New Orleans smells. It smells wonderful, and then catastrophic, and then acceptable, then suspicious again, and then like a bin full of sick, and then of drugs, and then of spices. If you don’t like the smell you’re in, just keep walking; there is a new one coming along in around four paces.

It’s one of only a handful of places in the US that allows drinking in the streets and it makes for a spectacular scene – not always in a good way. The pleasures and perils of drinking spill onto every corner. Being guided down the neon explosion of Bourbon Street it’s hard to know where to rest your eyes. It’s rude to stare, but there’s so much to stare at – so much flesh and excess and joy and tack and gyrating and mess. And booze, of course – luminous Hurricanes, ‘huge-ass beers’ and Daiquiris swilled from plastic pipes resembling bongs. Is there really another gear reserved for Mardi Gras?

We repair to a dive bar where they’re cooking up a crawfish boil for the bartenders coming off shift. The crawfish, potatoes and sausages are being tortured in an enormous steel bath out the back and it’s the best smell since the last great smell two blocks ago, just before the two abominable smells. The bar owner introduces me to his live crawfish and warns me never to pronounce the ‘e’ in Orleans again.

I try to get someone to define a US dive bar for me as it’s a description that’s obviously worn as a badge of honour, unlike with pubs at home. 
I don’t get a satisfactory explanation but conclude that I like a US dive bar better than a UK one because you get freshly cooked seafood and friendly faces instead of crisps and surly alcoholics. Then, as if to make me feel more at home, I’m warned not to walk two blocks in any wrong direction or I’ll definitely be stabbed, or shot.

Taking renewed care to walk in the correct direction, I find my first official Tales of the Cocktail event. I am late to the event, it is late in the day and late in the week. It is in a very smart hotel, there is a lot of whisky and a jazz band and air conditioning and a lot of people who are very well dressed but also wear the haunted expressions of those who have already been doing this for a week and need to get back to their normal lives. It dawns on me that my body clock is fast approaching breakfast time and that whisky, no matter how rare and exalted, is not the breakfast of champions.

It is only day two for me. For Tales survivors, it is the end of a long week of buying and selling, teaching and learning, posturing and positioning. I seek to squeeze the last drops from the festival at the famous Pig and Punch party. It’s soon apparent that I have arrived at this party four hours too early and I stride off to explore the city. It’s soon apparent that it is far too hot to stride anywhere and, like everyone else, I beat a hasty retreat indoors to drink and be air conditioned.

The Old Absinthe House boasts a 200-year history serving the likes of Oscar Wilde, P.T. Barnum, Robert E. Lee and Liza Minelli, but they aren’t in today so I make do with propping up the bar and supping reasonably priced beer and maniacally priced bourbon (I guess there’s a tax for drinking bourbon on the corner of Bourbon Street). The TV in the corner is screening sport – from this distance it looks like The Hunger Games may already be a real thing in the US but fortunately there’s plenty more to distract. From the ceiling hang eerie, empty American football helmets and on the back wall is a digital read-out that appears to provide the correct date of birth for underage drinkers looking to hoodwink the bar staff about being 21. The walls are plastered with thousands and thousands of business cards stapled there by drinkers. The bar’s motto is apparently: ‘Everyone you have known or will ever know, eventually ends up at the Old Absinthe House’. It’s a chilling warning. I leave before some dickhead from my past arrives.

All the punch is now gone and the people who drank it have been swept away by a sousaphone

To Latitude 29, the Tiki den for Jeff ‘Beachbum’ Berry, where I am warned off starting the day with a Zombie. Not wishing to admit that I have already started the day, I opt for a Latitude 29, which is the perfect accompaniment to an incredibly positive conversation with a man in a Hawaiian shirt sipping from a glass like a goldfish bowl while Mancini’s Baby Elephant Walk plays in the background. I enjoy drinking in a Tiki bar as only someone who usually lives in a perma-cloud in a pathologically grumpy country can.

Returning to the Pig and Punch party you can sense the city swinging back into gear again. All the punch is now gone and the people who drank it have been swept away by a sousaphone. In the aftermath I join some other air-con refugees in a nearby house where the informal rolling business of Tales continues even at this late stage in the week. Producers talking to distributors, talking to bartenders, all looking for opportunities, all talking in the jargon that every industry protects itself with. It’s impressive that amidst all this drinking, late-night carousing and early morning antacid munching, many new relationships and deals are forged. It’s a week long piss-up, but it’s a high-functioning piss-up.

Moving now with purpose towards dinner we duck in and out of bars on Frenchmen Street where every third person seems to be blowing a brass instrument, before diverting to a warehouse dedicated to hot sauce (I like hot sauce but I cannot envisage any scenario that would require or excuse 400 slightly different varieties). As befits The Last Supper of a cocktail festival, dinner at Cane and Table (a ‘rum and rustic colonial cuisine’ joint) is as much about exploring and dissecting the drinks menu as it is the food it washes down.

And so to the Erin Rose Bar for the first time. The Hotel Monteleone may be the official hub of Tales of the Cocktail but the Erin Rose is undoubtedly where you will find more drunk industry folk sculling pints and Frozen Irish Coffees (like an extra-thick McDonald’s shake except with mystery booze and caffeine – served from a slushie machine). Just to hammer home the diversity of cocktail culture on offer in New Orleans we shift from here to The Sazerac Bar in The Roosevelt. This is where the politician Huey ‘The Kingfish’ Long used to enjoy a Ramos Gin Fizz but the crowd we’re now with (which includes, I am excited to find, an official Disney mixologist) is working to the theory that the bar holds some claim to making the original Sazerac, so that’s what we go with. On this probably mistaken basis I drink mine in a reverie as if it’s The Original Sazerac before we’re all kicked out for closing time.

Anyway, it has long passed the hour when one is in need of a bar made of African walnut surrounded by Paul Ninas murals – let’s get back to the Irish bar with the alcoholic frozen coffee.The last bout in the Erin Rose is frantic and frazzled but a great advert for the American people at play. I can’t be sure if this bar at this time represents in any way a cross-section of the US drinking population, but if it does, their positivity and curiosity and diversity make a fantastic case for drinking in US bars with strangers. I discuss family relations with an LA barman, how everyone despises North Texans with a North Texan, and round off the day on politics and race relations with a Baton Rouge cop, who makes axes in his spare time …

The bar staff call a fake last orders at around 3am just to flush out anyone who doesn’t really intend to have gout by sunrise. By sunrise I have suspected gout and pins and needles in my face but it’s OK, by teatime I will be in Charleston where I’m told they used to hang the pirates rather than hail them, so that’s got to be a more sedate city, right?

Bubbles improve life. They float, they explode, they make drinks fizzy. As you tip a glass to drink, they burst forth from the surface shooting the aromas of the booze up your nose. And as you quaff back the liquid, they dance around your mouth and tease your tongue. Hot Rum Cow’s twelfth issue celebrates the bubble in all its forms.

It’s positively fizzing with:

The merry-making magic of bubbly booze – from royal scams to nitrobrews, discover the history of how we fell in love with fizz 

The drink that shook a city – explore the explosive life and enduring effervescence of the Fizz cocktail 

Pure kvass – the Russian classic and how to make it

Wine from the wild side – rehabilitating Lambrusco

The Grandes Dames of Champagne – a toast to three legendary wine widows

Plus, there’s tipsy travelling, the drinks that rose from the grave, a death-defying trip round the best street food in Paris and an explosive experiment with eight strong drinks and a vintage SodaStream machine.

Order your copy now and you could be in with a chance of winning a bottle of gin!

Lovely bubbly!

The liquor started out as plain corn spirit, distilled by Kentucky’s first white settlers as a way of preventing grain spoilage. Later, it was sent down the Mississippi in oak barrels (charred clean), its destination New Orleans. What arrived some weeks later, although still rough at the edges, delighted. Neat or mixed, bourbon fast became the drink of the masses – as good for General Ulysses S. Grant as Bourbon Street’s lewdest ladies, and every gun-slinging, ivory-tinkling, private-eyeing caricature in-between.

In tribute, then, to the enduring mark bourbon has made on the world of drinking, we’ve picked four classic serves and designated two bourbons to each – an affordable, ‘bang-for-your-buck’ number, and a more premium, ‘ace-high’ recommendation. Shoot the liquor to us, barkeep.

The Bourbon Soda

{ bourbon / club soda / ice / lime slice }

One of the first and most underrated cocktails out there; an honest, clean and tall libation that lets the right bourbons truly sing.

What to shoot for:

Given the inherent tartness of club soda, this serve yearns for something sweet. We’ve picked two classic ‘wheaters’ here, for the simple fact that in the world of bourbon more wheat equals more sweet.

Bang for your buck:

Maker’s Mark is perhaps the most famous in the wheater stable. Met with soda water, it comes over all grassy and earthy – but also a little tame. That said, of a balmy evening we could drink this ’til the cattle come home.

Ace high:

A smooth, caramel-forward wheater is Larceny, with sweetness in spades. There’s something of the cream soda about this combination. The bourbon stays firmly in the saddle against the tartness of the soda water.

Method

Mix one part bourbon to four parts soda over ice. Garnish with a lime slice and serve.

The Old Fashioned

{ bourbon / bitters / water / sugar / ice / orange peel }

So called because this was considered the original mixed drink. A potent, feisty and aromatic number with charisma aplenty.

What to shoot for:

Rye is the traditional call here, so reach for a bourbon with plenty of that to the fore – and make sure it’s got enough gusto to rival the unforgivingly potent aromatics it’s being partnered up with.

Bang for your buck:

Bulleit is a readily available and revered bourbon with a trademark high rye content. It’s a straight-up winner in Old Fashioned situ: spicy, sweet, smooth, creamy, amber, wonderful. Quickest draw in this showdown.

Ace high:

Another high-rye bourbon is Four Roses Single Barrel. Seriously potent and flavoursome liquor with more than enough buck to stand out when mixed. Next time we’ll garnish with a toasted marshmallow.

Method

Combine ½ teaspoon sugar with a double measure of bourbon. Add one large ice cube, a dash of water and a few drops of bitters. Garnish with an orange twist.

On the Rocks

{ bourbon / ice }

Way back when, the classic bourbon serve was up as a shooter against the bar. Now, though, the best way is to meet it neat and sip it slow.

What to shoot for:

Quality is everything when it comes to neat bourbon; there’s no hiding any blemishes, not even over ice. The good news is that there’s no shortage of such offerings out there – and you needn’t reach deep.

Bang for your buck:

Buffalo Trace ranks among the very best in its price bracket for an everyday, on-the-rocks sipper. Consistent, not overly strong, and brimming with butterscotch and maple syrup. Real purty stuff.

Ace high:

Another single barrel bourbon, Blanton’s is the Southern belle of the posse. It looks the part, smells as good and tastes beautiful. It’s a touch too meek to get its knees properly dirty, but a fine bourbon no less.

Method:

Add ice (if using) to glass, and fill with bourbon.

The Boilermaker

{ bourbon / beer }

A DIY cocktail, whether that’s in the stomach or the glass. Get the right hop juice and this is one of the surest ways to enjoy bourbon.

What to shoot for:

Once a humble workman staple, the ‘shot-and-a-beer’ is opening up a world of opportunity to the bourbon fan. You want a classic ‘well whiskey’ or a mouth-coatingly viscous bourbon – and beers to complement.

Bang for your buck:

Jim Beam and Pabst Blue Ribbon represent the high (or low, depending on the colour of your collar) watermark in consumable Americana. There’s nothing poncy about this union, nor should there be.

Ace high:

An immensely mouth-coating bourbon with corn oiliness in abundance and a gorgeous rose-gold glow. Follow with a bittersweet, palate-cleansing sip of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and you’ve got quite the showdown.

Method:

Sip both, or sip the bourbon and ‘rip’ the beer, or down both in tandem, or combine both.

Name: Robert/Robbie/Rabbie Burns, AKA The Ploughman Poet, The Bard of Ayrshire, Scotland’s Favourite Son

Age: 37 (1759–1796)

Cause of death: Unknown, but possibly rheumatic fever. Or ‘a dissolute lifestyle’, if you believe contemporary rumours.

Spouse: Jean Armour (1765–1834), mother of nine of Burns’s children.

There were more? Three more, all illegitimate.

Where did he get his energy from? He liked a drink.

How do we know? There’s a clue in his poem ‘Scotch Drink’, where he eulogises alcohol’s possibilities as an ‘emotional lubricant’: ‘Food fills the wame [belly], an’ keeps us leevin; / Tho’ life’s a gift no worth receivin, / When heavy-dragg’d wi’ pine an’ grievin; / But, oil’d by thee [Scotch drink],/ The wheels o’ life gae down-hill, scrievin [careering], / Wi’ rattlin glee.’

That sounds a bit irresponsible Not all of his contemporaries approved of Burns’s ‘well-lubricated’ lifestyle. But he wasn’t an advocate of reckless boozing, as his famous poem ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ shows.

(image: creative commons)

What happens to Tam? After a long evening of ‘bousing at the nappy’ (boozing on strong ale) the incorrigible souse very nearly comes to a sticky end after drunkenly cat-calling a witch, while she is engaged in a satanic bagpipe fest. As he makes his narrow escape, his horse’s tail is wrenched off by the furious witches.

What’s the moral of the story? ‘Whene’er to Drink you are inclin’d, / Or Cutty-sarks [short skirts] run in your mind, / Think ye may buy the joys o’er dear; / Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s mare.’

It doesn’t sound like he took his own advice No, not really. In his poem ‘No Churchman Am I’, he reassures us repeatedly that ‘a big-belly’d bottle’s a cure for all care’. And he did like the ladies – 12 children in 11 years.

So what’s Burns Night all about? First organised by his friends on the anniversary of his death, Burns suppers are now celebrated on or around his birthday, the 25th January. The evening is a celebration of his life and, as such, involves food (haggis), banter, and lots and lots of whisky.

Every religion needs its dogma, its holy relics, its saints and martyrs and fallen angels. And to emphasise the good in every believer, it helps to have a heathen. If booze were a religion, Bryan Davis would be its willing heretic, gleefully smashing up commandments carved in oak.

Since 2010 he has been trying to tinker with time itself, challenging the “inherently conservative” drinks industry by hacking the maturation process to produce, in a matter of days, spirits that are almost identical, chemically, to those that have been lovingly stowed in barrels for decades.

“People treat booze like a religion,” says Davis. “So it’s really fun to go play with it like you’re Dr Moreau, challenging its fundamental moral belief structure.”

H. G. Wells’s titular doctor, whose scientific ambition pushed him headlong through cultural and moral boundaries, is a recurring character in the Lost Spirits story. Davis jokingly describes Moreau, who created human-like hybrid beings from animals, as a “source of inspiration”, spurring him on to challenge the accepted rules.

Visitors to The Lab in Charleston, South Carolina, where Lost Spirits has recently relocated to partner with two other producers, enter a clinical white room with fingerprint-locked doors, a large two-way mirror and a single central plinth, upon which sits a first edition of The Island of Dr Moreau. They are greeted by the voice of the lab itself, Tessa (the computer system which runs the distillery), and eventually ushered into what at first appears to be a more conventional distillery space. Conventional, that is, before they later stumble upon the three time machines (the Targeted Hyper-Esterification Ageing – or THEA – reactors), the Egyptian Gods, the dragon’s skull and the megalodon remains.

“I guess Jurassic Park was the 20th Century remake of The Island of Dr Moreau, where scientific ambition overrides the moral sensibility of what is ‘a wise idea’,” says Davis. “But the beauty of this is that we’re making booze, so it’s not actually messing with the human genome.”

The drinks industry is a safe space to use his creativity and knowledge of chemistry to play God without the need to splice man and leopard …

But that’s not to say that there’s not a lot at stake for the future of the drinks industry – practically, financially and in how we measure and define quality. What has already been achieved, and what Davis is predicting is possible with the technology, has the potential to revolutionise aspects of the industry.

“People treat booze like a religion, so it’s really fun to go play with it like you’re Dr Moreau, challenging its fundamental moral belief structure.”

If you don’t have to wait 20 years for a spirit to taste like a 20-year-old spirit, would you still wait because that’s what has always given the sense of luxury and craftsmanship to the drink? Does the tradition and the patience, effort and forward planning of the maker contribute to our enjoyment of a drink? Perhaps more pertinently, would you be willing to pay the same luxurious price if the producers were turning the product round in a week with no costly barrels, warehouses and evaporation to worry about?

There will always be a debate about how completely one process can replicate the drinking experience you will enjoy through another process, though there have been plenty of educated palates convinced by the taste of what Lost Spirits has produced. However, one of most the exciting things about developing quick-fire maturation is the opportunity it presents for experimentation by reducing prohibitive overheads. Big producers can’t afford to invest in unusual new drinks and wait 20 years only to discover they don’t sell (one reason for their conservatism). But producers, including small-scale ones, using THEA reactors will be able to afford to try, and fail, and then improve. They will also be able to react quickly to changing tastes and trends. So, how does the process work?

The Time Machine

Davis’s method involves running new spirit through his THEA reactors with pieces of wood to try and force the same chemical reactions as those taking place during maturation in oak barrels, extracting new chemicals from the wood and bonding alcohol and phenol with acids (esterification) to produce the esters responsible for the flavours and aromas of aged spirits.

“We had to understand what the hell actually happens in barrels and it sounds really simple, but people didn’t really know,” he says. “We approached it by saying we need to understand systematically, piece by piece, what it is that makes a bottle of aged booze, a bottle of aged booze. What changed? How did it change? What were the steps? Where did the precursors come from? We did that by taking samples of different barrels, of rum in particular, that were different ages, running chemical analysis and mapping their chemical signatures.

“We mapped that through to see how it was evolving and started to come up with hypotheses for the different ways that was triggered chemically. Once we had our guesses mapped out we started to ask the simple question – how could you trigger that in a lab?

“There’s no one silver bullet for all. So we set up years’ worth of experiments to find ways to force each one of the reactions and then put them all in a sequence. First we force all the raw acids in the white spirit to bind to alcohols; that’s going to get rid of all our off flavours and create fruit flavours. Then we’re going to take that and the wood with it and we’re going to put it into a glass tube and fire a super high-intensity light at it which is going to break apart the polymers in the wood.

“Then we’re going to take that, put it back in an esterification reactor with the catalyst that we figured out how to extract from the oak, and warm that up to the right temperature where the catalyst can do its job. Then bind all those pieces of wood that were blown apart into everything else and dial it and tune it until it puts all of the pieces together in the right sequence and at the right proportions to match what would happen naturally in a barrel over the course of decades.”

As simple as that …

“We actually published the forensic chemistry … at a level of sophistication that would be court-admissible evidence in a murder trial”

Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry are used to demonstrate the chemical similarities between aged spirits and those which have been through Davis’s process. Writing in Wired magazine about the first product to undergo the rapid ageing process – the Colonial American Inspired rum – the tech (and drinks) writer Christopher Null said ‘The chromatograms that compare this rum to very old stock (like Port Mourant 33 Years Old) are uncannily similar’.

“We sent out bottles for all the critics to review and had them assess them independently before we told them what we did,” says Davis. “And then we told them … which was pretty fun. And that went well. We actually published the forensic chemistry and we did it using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. We did it using equipment and a level of sophistication and technique that would be court-admissible evidence in a murder trial. We figured, you can’t really take it further than that.”

But, of course, it remains a learning process. There are still questions over replicating different styles. Davis says they are working through whiskeys and each one presents different challenges. While he agrees it’s potentially lucrative to replicate these existing styles, he says it’s not his top priority.

“It doesn’t matter to me at all, except I feel like I need to, at least, make something that’s very close on each category that I go into, once, if not again, just to be able to run the analysis, put my data out and make the point.”

Two other areas where they are still trying to make progress are: degrading the polymers in the wood, so they can replicate stages in between 0 and 20 years old (“We don’t care but it could be particularly valuable to big players in the industry”); and recreating the angels’ share by sucking out the water and ethanol to concentrate all the flavour.

The Wonderful Visit

In New Orleans at the Tales of the Cocktail festival for the release of the first new products since the move to Charleston it is apparent that the success of early releases like Leviathan – a heavily peated whiskey – and the range of rums has certainly created anticipation. Davis and his business partner (and girlfriend) Joanne Haruta are returning to the week-long drinks industry shindig with new products for the first time since shutting down their Monterey distillery while they effectively became a tech company, licensing out their reactors to producers.

There’s genuine excitement from bartenders and distributors about the launch of new rums and whiskeys under the Lost Spirits, Rational Spirits and Rattleback Rye labels. In the company of other booze geeks, Davis is a bit of a rock star booze geek. You may know one end of a still from the other but you probably didn’t watch all of the MIT chemistry classes online and unravel the mysteries of rapid-fire ageing using Wikipedia and PubMed.

Spending time with him you can see an unwillingness to leave questions unanswered. Conversations are regularly stalled halfway while he consults his “second brain” to clarify some point with Google. This is probably torture to live with (as Haruta confirms) but it undoubtedly has an important part to play in his success to date and the myriad directions mapped out for the technology in the future.

When the Sleeper Wakes

A career in drink began for Davis with a simple, but unusual, need. At Burning Man he needed a way to bribe his way onto the art cars – and homemade absinthe was his answer. From here, he and Haruta set up a company making absinthe in Spain, capitalising on its legalisation in the US. The relationships forged during this period have endured, with a number of important spirits executives now sitting on the Lost Spirits board. But their Obsello brand struggled as the market for absinthe dipped and the couple sold up and focused their sights on the thriving brown spirits category.

Having announced their technological breakthrough to the world, the company spun off in a different direction

Davis says: “I have a sculpture degree, which is about as useless as you would expect in this task … or not, and that’s sort of the weird part. I’m a pretty creative person and I think when I came to this project and I realised that if I wanted to make whiskeys and rums and brandies, then this was different to the absinthe. Because absinthe was cooking. You’re mixing herbs and spices together – it’s like jam. You’re making a flavour the way you cook a dish at home. Whereas this was all chemistry. There are things you’re going to taste that are really bad that are precursors to things that are really good. And you have to know how they’re going to react and how things change in order to create a beautiful rum or a beautiful whiskey. My approach was I needed to teach myself how to use chemistry, but I really viewed chemistry in the same way that you view learning how to sculpt clay.

“I want to make something that’s really avant-garde that surprises people or takes you in a weird direction. But I want to have artistic control over my medium. I want to be able to say – ‘I want it to have this structure, I want it to do this thing’. So when we made the Navy [rum], that was the first project where we started really having artistic control. I needed to understand the chemistry as a means of being able to sculpt whatever I wanted to make.”

What he wanted to make was whatever the team thought the rum in Pirates of the Carribbean tasted like. But, having achieved this, having honed the control over several more releases, and then having announced their technological breakthrough to the world, the company spun off in a different direction. They went from producing spirits to producing spirit producers by licensing the reactors out.

The World Set Free

The Monterey distillery was shut and the team moved to Silicon Valley to build a machine to turn loose on the craft distilling world. “The initial thinking was, let’s watch the industry get shaken up a little bit – I mean, it’s overdue for it anyway,” says Davis.

They were approached by 90 different distilleries: a mixture of new or would-be producers, unsuitable or struggling distilleries and big players looking to stay ahead of the cutting edge. For a time Lost Spirits was replaced by Lost Spirits Technology.

“I first opted to pick the guys I wanted to have a beer with and found interesting,” says Davis. They were Alex Burns, who founded Rational Spirits after a successful career in finance, and Wynn Sanders, a former airforce scientist who founded Rattleback Rye along with Théron Regnier. But it quickly became apparent that the time and effort required to create the conditions for the reactors to produce good-quality drink was greater than expected.

Davis says: “Pretty quickly we ran into our issues and they (Rational and Rattleback) ran into theirs. It created the need to have an alliance. They were new in the industry and making a lot of common mistakes. They’re really smart guys, they’re well funded – all that stuff, but they didn’t know some of these problems were problems or how to go about solving them. For us, the cost of on-boarding a new small distillery was far more than we could really afford to sustain if we were going to try and scale up the business.

“The market had done something interesting too. Consumers didn’t mind the reactor itself when we did it – historically they got excited about it. But they weren’t extraordinarily excited about spirits that they could already buy, but done a different way to match the chemistry. They were fine with the idea of the tech in an avant-garde distillery setting but the licensees are not guys who’ve spent their entire life around esoteric booze. They realised pretty quickly this was a problem.”

In the meantime Davis says he was under some pressure from people within the industry to “cool it” on taking on more licensees, and Rattleback needed a new location to produce in. The solution was for everyone to gather under one roof (Rational’s) in Charleston, joining forces to create The Lab – a place for science, art and innovation, or as Davis otherwise puts it, “a sculpture studio for booze”.

The Research Magnificent

“Let’s throw thousands of noodles at the wall and see which ones will stick and do something cool, and which are terrible. But without the economic risk of one mistake ruining the entire place. That’s what we’re building around. That has a right to exist,” says Davis.

Crossing the threshold of The Lab Davis is evidently in his element, as he is when discussing the most out-there of his ‘noodles’. The whole place is automated because it leaves more time to think of hair-brained schemes. While there is obviously considerable financial backing for the whole project, untold riches don’t seem to be the motivation. Financial success often comes from finding the right activity and repeating it until the money rolls in. But with Davis there seems no desire to iterate – it’s all about the next thing.

Discussing where his boundaries lie he considers ruling out some areas as too gross to experiment in, such as using the cadaver plant (titan arum), which smells of rotting flesh. But he quickly concludes that using the carboxylic acids in a carcass plant dunder to make a ‘cadaver flower liqueur’ would actually be worth a go.

Already underway is a plan to recreate mid-19th century whiskeys like those held in barrels made from American chestnut (before disease made the trees functionally extinct). Antique furniture was picked up at auction, pulled apart and stripped of its varnish to supply enough chestnut wood to run through the reactor. “We went through all this work and were gathered round,” says Davis. “We said, ‘This is the day, we’re about to be the first people to have had an American chestnut whiskey in more than a hundred years.’ And we poured four glasses and toasted and all promptly spat it out because it was horrible. I have no idea why, but it will be fun to figure it out.”

Undeterred, the experiment continues and Davis also has a list of oak trees from around the world to try out, most of which are unsuitable for making barrels, but suitable for his purposes. In a patch of land behind the distillery he hopes to cultivate Amazon fruits and carnivorous plants to make brandy. That’s unless the same patch of land is turned into a doughnut-shaped heat sink to allow visitors to float on boats to a tasting room in a glamping tent. “It all screams, why not?” says Davis.

The Dream

Davis’s dream project, and, he says, the hardest to execute is the resurrection of lost spirits by creating their chemical (if not spiritual) clones.

“This would be a cool opportunity to try this crazy esoteric, so rare, so expensive, so absolutely off-limits that even the person who bought it won’t drink it thing,” he says.

The example he gives is the Wray and Nephew 17, required to make the original Mai Tai. Remaining bottles sell for tens of thousands of dollars, so Davis’s plan is to syringe a sample before resealing (overseen by Sotheby’s). From an analysis of this he believes he can come up with an estimate of what the white spirit would be like, then run chemical analyses on white rums from all over the world to work out which blend would match the computer-modelled chemical signature of the original. All that remains is to run this through the reactor with every different possible kind of wood combination to come up with a blend that would be closest to the original. As simple as that …

“I could take a year of my life off to do this. How fun would it be to just make three or four pallets of the stuff, do a road trip to all the Tiki bars and have a show that you could buy tickets to, have Jurassic Park Mai Tais through the night and then make them extinct again?”

The Undying Fire

You may not enjoy his drinks. You may doubt his methods or question the impact his findings will have. But you couldn’t accuse Bryan Davis of a lack of ambition or creativity. In The Lab each fermenter is named after a Hyksos king, the Hyksos being a tribe who invaded Egypt and conquered it with a small number of people using better technology. It’s a nod to Davis’s intent, which seems to me to be disruption for the mischief of it, experimentation for the creativity of it and having fun with booze because it’s one of life’s pleasures and not a religion.

Davis has hinted at plans to address the “misappropriation of his skills”, by turning his talents away from booze and towards developing a drug to address a very specific medical problem. If he does ever move on from booze, let’s hope curing disease is his new focus, lest his inner Dr Moreau is released …

The brief

A series of retro beer posters to explain the delights of unpasteurised Tankovna beer to bartenders and drinkers. The posters had to show how Tankovna should be served, emphasise its freshness and introduce tapsters – the brand’s beers champions.

The approach

Inspired by the brand’s history, Purple Creative researched 1920–30s Czech matchbooks and worked with illustrator Marcus Reed to create the posters.

David Walker, Senior Designer and Purple Creative, says: “Branded point-of-sale material is notoriously difficult to get sited in bars, so the posters were designed in an artistic Czech retro style so that bars actively wanted to put them on their walls

“We realised there was a need to educate drinkers on its perfect serve because it’s so different from how other beers should be served. The brand is about authenticity, so rather than simply invent something, we took inspiration from the early Czech matchbook designs.”

It sounds reasonable enough, but, in fact, no one is really sure what an early medieval ale tasted like. It may have been awful, the last thing you would want swilling around your tongue as you breathed your last. Beer histories wax lyrical about the drink’s ancient and illustrious lineage, but it has been a long evolution from ancient Sumarian bread-beer to a crisp pint of lager. Would we even recognise what Columbanus was drinking as beer, let alone like it? How would a medieval ale compare with, for example, a modern IPA?

I would like to find out and to help me I enlist the help of Dr Kristen Burton, a researcher at the University of Texas who has written argumentative essay topics on, amongst other things, beer in England in the middle ages and early modern period. She kindly supplies me with a recipe and instructions based on her research, and a bit of a briefing on the ins and outs of medieval beer.

The first thing to be clear on, she explains, is that, in the middle ages, ale and beer were totally different drinks. In today’s usage, 
‘ale’ typically means a beer which is ‘top-fermented’ – as opposed to lager, which is ‘bottom-fermented’, with a different kind of yeast. For medieval English drinkers, however, ‘ale’ was a traditional drink flavoured with herbs, and ‘beer’ an innovation from the continent flavoured with hops.

This apparently small detail had a huge impact. For a start, Burton says, adding hops gives “radically different flavours”. Today, almost all beer styles are hopped, even those, such as Mild, which are not particularly bitter. It’s therefore difficult for us to imagine how an unhopped ale might taste, but we know that the difference was significant because evidence shows the English initially rejected ‘beer’ when it began to appear in the 1400s. Hops also contain preservative resins, which prevent the beer from souring, potentially for months. An unhopped ale, in contrast, had to be drunk within a couple of weeks.

Brewing records also suggest that beer required much less grain than ale – while one bushel of malt would typically produce around eight gallons of ale, the same amount could be stretched to up to twenty gallons of beer. Beer was, consequently, an economically superior product, lending itself to large-scale production, storage and even export. Ale, which had typically been brewed up in the home in small batches, could barely compete.

This is probably why beer eventually went on to eclipse ale. English drinkers, in spite of their initial grumbling, soon became used to and acquired a taste for hops, and as the sun set on the middle ages, humble, traditional, kitchen-brewed ale began to disappear. Now, six centuries later, it is but a faded footnote in history. Can we resurrect it?

Detailed written records about domestic brewing are relatively scarce and Burton warns that a lot is not known. The gaps have necessarily been filled in with supposition, based on what we know was available. Even so, the instructions seem ludicrously simple. Far from the world of contemporary home brew, with its boilers and mash tuns and wort chillers and hydrometers and temperature control units, all that is needed is a big pot, a stove, a bucket and a bag. It seems so easy. What could possibly go wrong?

The first thing to come to terms with is a total lack of sterilisation. With no concept of microbes or bacterial contamination, looking clean was clean enough, and a scrub with a brush and some hot water is all that’s allowed. For a contemporary home brewer, for whom sterilising solution is the near constant companion, this is some mental hurdle to clear. My scepticism is doubled when I see the ingredients list – a barley-heavy mix, with a bit of wheat and rye thrown in, weighing in at just 2.5 kilos, for a batch of 20 litres. A modern-day recipe for homebrew would use more like between four and seven kilos. It’s a struggle to imagine how the ale is going to be anything other than watery and rancid.

But then comes the exciting part. Before hops boringly conquered the beer world, brewsters apparently improvised with just about whatever they could find in order to enhance, or maybe mask, the flavour of their ale. In his book Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Richard W. Unger gives a list of known additives which would give the most attention-seeking ‘experimental’ craft brewers a run for their money: ginger, cumin, mint, sage, acorns, bay leaves, ground ivy, thistles, wormwood, juniper and tree bark, among others.

The most common additive, however, was ‘gruit’, a specific mixture of herbs, which remains a mystery to this day. Medieval documents are full of references to gruit, which was so important that they even introduced a gruit tax, but no one knows exactly what it was – Burton says that individual recipes were prized, and a closely guarded secret. Bog myrtle is thought to be one important ingredient, along with rosemary and yarrow, although no one knows for sure.

Burton recommends using these three herbs in equal parts, mixing them up with the grain in a mesh bag. The bog myrtle – which turns out to be surprisingly difficult and expensive to get hold of – has a pungent, musty smell. It reminds me of mistletoe. Yarrow smells a bit like tea. And rosemary smells like a Sunday roast. None of it smells like anything I would want to put in a beer.

My big bucket of murky, lukewarm gravy sits in the corner of the kitchen, as sad and as still as a stagnant pond

Undeterred, I heat up a huge pan of water to boiling point, drop in my mesh bag, filled with grain and herbs, and leave it to steep, like a giant teabag, for a few hours. In conventional modern brewing, the grains would be heated up in a ‘mash’ to an optimal temperature to release the enzymes from the malt, which convert its starches into sugars, and the resulting ‘wort’ would then be boiled. This not only clears the beer but, most importantly, kills off bacteria.

However, Burton says that this practice appears to have been introduced with the arrival of hops, which need to be boiled to release the resins. Ale brewsters apparently didn’t waste their fuel with such fancy, fangled, foreign faff, and so instead I just leave the bag to soak, and watch with trepidation as the water turns first yellow, then khaki green, until finally, after three hours, it settles on muddy-puddle brown. It looks and smells not like beer, but like herby gravy.

After four hours, when the wort has begun to cool, it’s time to transfer it to a plastic bucket. Since yeast wasn’t discovered until the 17th century, the pitching of yeast is not allowed. Instead, I’m instructed to leave the pot uncovered to allow the wild yeast – and any other bacteria that happen to be floating in the air – to casually drop in.

I can’t help but be nervous and when I come back to the bucket after four more hours, my fears seem to be confirmed when absolutely nothing has happened. My big bucket of murky, lukewarm gravy sits in the corner of the kitchen, as sad and as still as a stagnant pond. It’s not until around six or seven hours later that what look like little flecks of spit start to accumulate on the surface. Twelve hours later, they are joined by two dead flies. When I lean in to fish them out, I notice that the gravy smell has completely disappeared and in its place is a little whiff of alcohol and some tangy, sour tones. Tiny, tiny bubbles, almost too small to see, are discreetly popping at the surface. Yet even this modest activity appears to die down over the course of the day, and the pot returns to its glum, silent state.

Disappointment begins to seep in – with a batch of modern homebrew, there would be a thick cushion of froth on the surface by this stage, and rich, yeasty smells filling the room. The experiment appears to have been a failure.

Two weeks later, however, when I glumly dip in a glass beneath the surface – which is by this point covered with many more dead flies, lots of dust and a few stray hairs – the ale has transformed from muddy-puddle brown to amber. Even more bizarrely, it smells a bit like ginger beer. Encouraged, I decide to bravely take a sip. And, admittedly on the basis of very low expectations, I am pleasantly surprised. Strangely, it doesn’t taste anything like it smells. The initial flavour is delicate, dry and lemony, with a slight tang. And then comes a powerful herby aftertaste, that spreads across my whole mouth and up my nose.

It is not an exaggeration to say it is unlike anything I’ve ever tasted before. Sampled alongside a modern IPA, the difference is dramatic. Without a doubt, the ‘medieval’ ale is more subtle and more aromatic, and the startling differences between the smell, first taste and aftertaste are confusing. The modern beer is more two-dimensional, but the flavours that it does have are clearer and more pronounced.

Do I still empathise with Columbanus’s last request? I am mostly just impressed that the ale doesn’t smell and taste as if it might make me ill. Nevertheless, it’s hard to shake the knowledge of the many flies that have festered in the brew and, even if it tastes okay, I can’t quite completely convince myself that it won’t make me sick. The flavours are also a bit too unfamiliar for my 21st-century palate. In short, no, it’s not something that I would want to drink a pint of.

Yet modern beer is an acquired taste for most people. Perhaps the ale would grow on me, just as beer eventually won over our ancestors. There is, however, another kind of pleasure to be had from drinking it – in the idea of experiencing something, the banal taste of everyday life, which has been lost for centuries. Brewing up this ale feels like creating a tiny wormhole into our distant past. And that, at least, is pretty cool.

There are no half measures when it comes to alcohol and the USA. Few countries have had a more complex relationship with the delightful/demon drink. They have loved it, they have hated it, they have tried to ban it, they have killed for it. But to this day, from sea to shining sea, pioneering American producers are making some of the most exciting liquor in the world.

Saddle up for issue 11 and enjoy:

The long road to Prohibition: Charting the USA’s love-hate relationship with alcohol

Lost Spirits: Meet Bryan Davis – distiller, heretic, resurrectionist, mischief-maker, tinkerer with time and scourge of the barrel

Drop a hop bomb on your home: Recreating American craft beer classics in your own home

No City for Saints: A 36-hour hit-and-run on the USA’s biggest cocktail festival in New Orleans

The last juke joint: Another wild night in Alabama’s last juke joint with its remarkable proprietor, Mr Gip

Nice ice, baby: Insulin, instant mash, Wonderbras, ice cider … let’s raise a glass to the latest great Canadian invention

Find your style: Sip it, shoot it, mix it – the best in Bourbon

And, as if that’s not enough, we launch three brand new series on mastering the morning after, drinkeries of distinction and beautiful booze design.

Yeeehaaaa!

What is the ultimate rebel drink? A Cuba Libre? A slug of Prohibition-era bathtub gin? A dram of illicit whisky distilled far from the prying eyes of the excise man? They’re all candidates, but there is another, arguably better contender. It keeps a low profile, but its history is sacred and tells the story of a nation.

Pulque, a milky drink crafted from the sap of the maguey plant, has almost 2,000 years of history behind it, and a significant stretch has been marked by resistance. As a symbol of the working classes, it has been stigmatised, censured and targeted by Mexico’s social elites since the 17th century, while in recent decades it has been hit hard by the ubiquitous reign of beer and the rise of its compatriots, tequila and mezcal. Add the fact that it becomes slimy and undrinkable within days of fermentation and you have a drink that, by rights, ought to be long extinct. Yet it has been defying the odds, and occasionally the authorities, for centuries. Because pulque is more than just a drink – it is a symbol of a people, part of the Mexican soul and psyche.

“The history of pulque is the history of Mexico,” says Dr Deborah Toner, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Leicester, who, together with Rocio Carvajal, has written a chapter on pulque in the book Authentic Recipes from Around the World. “And what makes it remarkable is that its status and place within Mexican society has changed so much. So it’s a really good way, actually, to see changes in Mexican history and the social structure and cultural values.”

Archaeologists believe that pulque’s origins go back to around AD 200 and that it was first brewed up by the Teotihuacan people – who predate the Aztecs and built Mexico’s largest pyramids – for use in religious rites. Mythical tales of its provenance abound in popular culture. These include the story of how the goddess Mayahuel, who took the form of a woman with 400 breasts, was transformed into a maguey plant, thus transferring the nourishing powers of her milk to pulque; and the belief that its invention led to the creation of the Centzon Totochtin, a band of 400 debauched, party-loving rabbit gods.

However, after the social, cultural and political earthquake of the Spanish conquest in the 1500s, pulque lost its spiritual status and became instead the popular drink of farmers and the working people. Pulquerías, the establishments where pulque was licensed to be served, sprang up in the countryside and in Mexico City, and became social hubs for the lower classes. In the 19th century, with the expansion of cities and the growth of a vibrant, urban working class, these ‘pulque pubs’ came into their own, spawning a distinct culture, which included the development of their own aesthetic, with brightly coloured decor and unique glassware.

At the same time that pulquerías were booming, however, they were despised by the upper and middle classes, who saw them as a corrupting influence on the poor and as an instigator of social disorder. “Even at the height of its popularity when hundreds of thousands of people were drinking [pulque] on a daily basis, it was still controversial,” Toner says. “For the more elite social sectors running the government and trying to impose social reforms, pulque was really a target. They hated it. They wanted to get rid of it.” Pulquerías were outlawed for a time in 1692, and in later centuries seats, benches, food, music and games were all periodically banned, in an attempt to bore away the customers and strangle the life from pulque-drinking culture.

The suspicion and scorn directed towards pulque mirrored the prejudice expressed towards the masses, and particularly towards the indigenous people of non-European origin: it was ‘unsophisticated’, it was ‘crude’, it was ‘backwards’. The fact that the alcohol content of pulque is similar to that of beer, which was positively viewed as a modern drink, and that it is actually very nutritious, lends weight to Toner’s claims that the anti-pulque crusades were more about a power struggle between the classes than genuine concerns about the well-being of the poor. “Rather than really understanding the inequalities within Mexican society [the upper classes] blamed pulque and a few other things for, in their eyes, the backwards condition of the Mexican lower classes. So it’s built into really quite hostile class politics that have shaped Mexican society.”

Pulque weathered the storm, but some of the negative connotations have stuck and, since the mid-20th century, modern consumer trends have also contributed to its demise. Although pulque still survives and retains an iconic status in Mexican culture, its consumption has been on the decline as beer, wines and spirits have moved in to partially take its place.

That trend is far from unique. There are many regional speciality drinks threatened by the tsunami of globalised commerce, which in the 21st century can sweep across even the most geographically isolated markets. Products which can be made quickly and cheaply, and transported easily, will always have a decisive economic advantage over local products made more slowly and on a smaller scale. But often the same pressures that threaten these drinks can also come to their rescue. As the global drinks market experiences a backlash against products perceived as generic, many producers have been able to market their own, region-specific drinks as an ‘authentic’ or more interesting alternative and, in doing so, expand their customer base.

Pulque cannot make such a pact with the devil, even if it wanted to. One of the drink’s peculiarities is that it can only keep for a matter of days, before it begins to become first thick and then slimy and, ultimately, undrinkable. Its traditional reach, the absolute furthest it can be transported, is around 100km into Mexico City. And while attempts have been made to produce tinned, pasteurised pulque for the ex-pat Mexican community, they have been met with disdain by many – Toner says she is yet to meet someone who believes it to be anything close to the fresh original.

And it’s here, perhaps, that pulque’s true rebel spirit comes out: it is a drink that refuses to march to the beat of globalised commerce. It can’t be marketed, packaged or exported – if you want it, you have to go and get it, at the point of production, where it is crafted by hand, in small batches. And it has to be enjoyed there, in the moment, with no stockpiling or taking bottles away as souvenirs. It is the antithesis of modern consumption, proudly and almost absurdly anachronistic. “In contrast to things like craft cider and craft ale, where you could make those products into well commercialised ones that can still be distributed over a large geographical area, with pulque you really can’t,” says Toner. “Pulque can’t adapt to those kinds of changes, so it almost has to resist.”

There are parallels in pulque’s plight to that of medieval ale. Locally made in small batches and highly perishable, that drink didn’t survive the arrival of hops and the birth of the commercial drinks industry. Yet pulque is older and has held out for longer. Can it defy the odds and stretch out into a third millennium?

Perhaps surprisingly, Deborah Toner says there is “cautious optimism”. One reason, she says, is the growing appreciation of Mexican cuisine, and, within that, a recognition, “for the first time”, of the indigenous contribution to food and drink. There is an increasing interest and pride in indigenous heritage, manifested in regional food festivals, in which pulque plays an important role.

The importance of the maguey plant to sustainable agriculture is another factor in pulque’s favour. Not only can the plant grow in poor-quality soil unsuitable for other commercial crops, but in doing so it helps to prevent soil erosion. This makes it worthwhile for farmers to continue to grow maguey – and make pulque – even if on a smaller scale than in the past, and even if only for consumption within local co-operatives. There are also signs that a new generation of Mexicans are beginning to take an interest in this quirky sweet-and-sour drink that has played such an important part in their national history, and which is becoming once again a source of regional pride. 

But above all, there is a sense that pulque is just too deeply a part of the soul of Mexico for it to die now. “It’s been a part of Mexican culture, albeit in different ways, for the best part of 2,000 years,” Toner says. “So regardless of the market forces that have led to the decline in pulque, it’s difficult for it to disappear entirely because it’s so embedded.”

Many moons ago, long before the reigns of the medieval dynasties that imposed their will upon Wales, the omnipotent Beli Mawr ruled the land.

A noble and powerful king, Beli the Great rose to become the Sovereign Lord of the Celtic Britons but little is actually known of the man who was widely believed by his subjects to be the God of the Sun, except for the fact he fathered four sons.

With ample heirs to take his place when he finally left this world for the next, he peacefully passed his crown and his castle to his eldest son, Llud. However, upon inheriting the Island of Britain, Llud soon discovered that his kingdom and people were stricken by three harrowing plagues. The stories of the first and third have no relevance to our tale, but the second, an unearthly scream, is significant.

The blood-curdling scream that haunted every May Eve not only penetrated the ears of the young and rendered them unconscious, it also crept into the wombs of those with child causing miscarriages, as well as leaving animals, trees and soil barren.

The source of the mysterious noise was eventually found to be two warring dragons, one red and one white, who fought relentlessly. As they did battle, flames licked and blistered their scaled skin and needle-like teeth burrowed into flesh, causing screams to fly from the mouths of both beasts.

A cunning king, Llud, accompanied by his younger sibling Llefelys, hatched a plan to catch the monsters and bring peace once again to the land. They dug a vast pit, filled it with a vat of mead and covered it with a sheet of fine satin.

The duelling dragons tumbled into the honey-sweet brew and were magically transformed into pigs. Upon swapping their leathered wings for trotters, the pigs succumbed to the lure of the mead, drinking the vat dry, and soon their eyelids became heavy and they finally yielded to their fatigue. Llud hastily wrapped the pigs in the satin, hauled them to Snowdonia and buried them, snout and all.

Upon swapping their leathered wings for trotters, the pigs succumbed to the lure of the mead, drinking the vat dry, and soon their eyelids became heavy and they finally yielded to their fatigue

The bizarre tales of Llud and Llefelys live on centuries after they were first told, recorded by medieval Welsh authors in one of the earliest examples of prose literature from Britain – The Mabinogion.

This story, and many other mead-soaked myths from The Mabinogion inspired a devoted team of brewers in the heart of Caerphilly to write a tale of transformation of their own as they set out to change the outdated perception of mead.

Like their forefathers, and those who brewed across Wales before them, the team at Mabinogion, whose logo displays the transformation of dragon to swine, are crafting small batches of mead, but bringing it into the modern era along with the stories that dance across the pages of their mythical manual.

“The mead industry is undergoing a huge transformation in the United States,” says Mabinogion’s creator and innovator, Tom Newman, a brewer who also heads up one of Wales’s largest craft breweries, The Celt Experience.

“Pioneers like Arizona’s Superstition and Michigan’s B. Nektar are now offering beautifully crafted mead alternatives to the traditional options.” Newman himself is a pioneer, having crafted the world’s first commercial mead collaboration with Superstition Meadery.

Long thought of as a drink gulped from golden goblets and horned cups by pillaging Vikings and barrel-chested Baratheons alike, mead is now enjoying a renaissance on our shores with the Welsh meadery among those leading the way.

Newman says: “The UK has adopted the US handmade, craft-led beverage industry with vigour. The opportunity to craft by flavours rather than by margins opens doors for innovative production.”

And so, by brewing a range of styles using an eclectic mix of ingredients, Newman and Mabinogion hope to help revitalise and rejuvenate what is thought to be the oldest fermented beverage in the world.

For mead is far from just honey, water and yeast. A range of spices, herbs, fruit and other ingredients can be added to the brew allowing a shift away from the sickly sweet perception that mead has suffered from. Methyglin is mead with added spices. Melomels have fruit added to the brew and capsicumels have added chilli peppers, while cysers use apples.

With a wide, and for many palates largely unexplored, spectrum of styles on which to experiment and innovate, Mabinogion hopes to do to mead in the UK what Superstition and B.Nektar have done in the States.

“With an abundance of fruit, spices and herbs growing in Wales, we intend to make a diverse range of big-flavoured, innovative styles like melomels, methyglins, cysers and even wild braggots (beer crafted with the addition of honey),” says Newman.

As such, the meadery’s range of ‘Bee Wines’ (similar in alcoholic content to more traditional meads, yet worlds apart in terms of taste) and ‘Bee Brews’ (lower ABV ‘session meads’, available in keg and bottle form) will consist of meads brewed with the likes of strawberries, bourbon-aged vanilla beans, oranges, hibiscus, apples, cinnamon and sour cherries.

“We just want to reconnect the world with magical flavours in one of the historic homes of this bee-made beverage. This is, and will be, our legacy”

Regardless of additional spices and fruits used, however, the key component is, and always will be, the honey and Mabinogion is going the extra mile. In addition to sourcing all of their honey from local beehives, the roof atop their mead hall is home to more than 20,000.

“We are looking to invest in a number of Welsh honey farms and establish a sustainable and growing bee population,” Newman explains.

“Welsh honey is both rare and beautiful. Rare, due to a decline in European honey bee populations and the relatively low levels of honey per hive, however beautiful due to the growth of flora.”

The inspirational tales from The Mabinogion will also be introduced to a new audience. Each mead will shed light upon a different part of the book and will be accompanied by a surreal gouache painting by American artist Poxodd Walker on each bottle. The debut offering, Hounds of Annwn, highlights a legend surrounding the dogs of the otherworld whose growl foretold death to all those who heard it. It is brewed with unpasteurised Welsh honey and a bouquet of spices, and aged with Madagascan vanilla.

Transformation to Eagle honours Lleu Llaw Gyffes, a hero who transforms into an eagle and flies away when struck with a spear. The sweet, aged cyser is made from fresh apple and rested in cinnamon and myrtle pepper that gives a delicate, yet spicy finish.

Each bottle bares its own unique ‘Honey Finder’ QR code that informs the drinker exactly which hive produced the honey and which blossoms, plants and flowers were harvested of their nectar to create it.

Newman says: “We just want to reconnect the world with magical flavours in one of the historic homes of this bee-made beverage. This is, and will be, our legacy.”

With one foot firmly in the past and the other striding forward, Mabinogion Mead is transforming the way drinkers view this age-old drink, one golden goblet at a time.

Further reading:

• The Mabinogion (Wikipedia)
• Mabinogion Mead
• The Celt Experience
• Superstition Meadery
• Gosnells Mead

The fact is, perry is far more often heard of than seen – and even then usually only alongside references to ‘real cider’. A younger, dainty sibling is perry to the oaken, bucolic, ‘real’ cider that is so much a part of tradition in England’s and France’s rural corners. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that this sibling, save for the odd dance in the 1960s and 70s, hasn’t seen much of the world beyond the farm gate. So we went to visit.

With the help of renowned perry producer and guru Tom Oliver, we’ve herded up eight perries, each of which represents this humble category in its own distinctive way. And to help you work out which perry is for you, we’ve put them past our own inexpert panel and attributed a character to each, from the ‘peart’ and sprightly partygoer to the seasoned perry adventurer. Wellies on? Come on in.

Babycham

Who: The ‘peart’ partygoer

How: From a champagne saucer upon entering a retro-themed ball

Tom says: Yes, a true perry, and one that was very well made during its heyday in the 1950s and 60s. Light, bubbly and easy. Ultimately aimed at the ladies, and an outright success within that demographic. Now made in Europe, and admittedly lacking some of its previous glamour.

We say: Not much in the way of flavour (and certainly not pear) but truckloads of sweetness in the form of completely refined sugar. Loses its initial fizz very quickly. Fit for purpose, though, and deserving of credit for that.

Henry Weston’s Perry

Who: The rural festivalgoer

How:  From a plastic cup, ideally at a folk festival or similar outing

Tom says: A commercial and consistent perry from the large independent producers who stock most of the major supermarkets with own-brand offerings. Relatively easy to get hold of and very accessible.

We say: Certainly asserts the fact that it is made from fruit, but exactly which fruit isn’t immediately obvious. Apple cider qualities appear to prevail: reminiscent of student flat, sleeping bag and wet tent. That said, with a good helping of ice there’s no denying the refreshing qualities of this particular offering.

Dunkertons Organic Perry

Who: The work-tired and thirsty

How: Straight from the fridge, relaxing in the garden

Tom says: A carbonated, more general, easy-going perry, which is ideal for drinking. This would be one for storing in the fridge, to be brought out when you want to put your feet up. A fully fermented perry that’s been back-sweetened and which has been created through an early and on-going commitment to organic produce.

We say: Again, difficult to decipher the pears. This one seems to react differently with each of the testers: Tixylix cough syrup to one, Barbour wax jackets to another. A pleasantly bready aftertaste was appreciated by all, however.

Eric Bordelet Poire Granit

Who: The sweet-toothed perry virgin

How: Works very well with a plat du jour (ideally on the French Riviera)

Tom says: If somebody’s never tasted perry before or isn’t the biggest drinker in the world, give them a bottle of this – it’ll make them think that perry is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s so juicy, so fruity, so easy, so light, so everything. People just fall in love with it.

We say: Incredible. A really distinctive perry, this one, with a gorgeous interplay between sweet and sour going on – think liquid rhubarb and custards. Lots of tangy sherbet on the tongue and a woody backbone. The flavour and texture more than make up for the 3.5% ABV (although perhaps not the hefty price tag).

Priggles Perry

Who: The gourmet

How: Especially good when paired with light chicken dishes and cheeses

Tom says: This is a wine-style perry, so it’s still. Made using locally sourced perry pears, it’s got a delicate nose of pear and citrus. It’s the perfect choice for drinkers keen to explore the possibilities of pairing fine food and perry.

We say: What a nose; someone’s passing around the rhubarb and custards again, or perhaps Granny’s stewing rhubarb in the kitchen. Plenty of sweetness on the palate and bags of juicy fruit. Imagine a tutti-frutti concentrate. Perhaps even some red chilli in there. Unfortunately for the squeamish, the clear glass bottle doesn’t hide the ectoplasmic sediment lurking at the bottom.

Farnum Hill Extra Dry Perry

Who: The convinced dry white wine connoisseur

How: Matched with food as only a connoisseur knows how

Tom says: Farnum Hill are the granddaddies of bittersweet cider apple cultivation in the US, and very particular about everything they make. Now that their pear trees are fruiting, they’re producing top-rate perry of the very driest kind, very much in the style of fine white wine.

We say: Unexpected notes of coconut and apple pie dominate. This really is like drinking a white wine, although we’re not so sure if that’d be a fine one, and it certainly wouldn’t be strong either. An unusually buttery note was also noted.

Gregg’s Pit Sparkling Perry

Who: The well-heeled, savvy perry drinker

How: Ideal as an aperitif, but also as a celebratory drink

Tom says: A rare perry and a very good-quality one at that, made using the keeving method which retains natural, unfermented pear sugars. Bottle conditioned and relatively expensive, it’s the sort you’d have to know of to get hold of. One for a special occasion.

We say: We’re entering craft perry now, no question. An overwhelmingly sulphuric nose settles down not a moment too soon, making way for some distinctively yeasty, beery notes. A polarising perry – some considered the taste surprisingly watery while others began to realise the complexity of this drink.

Oliver’s Fine Dry Perry

Who: The perry drinker with a thirst for adventure

How: Sipped and appreciated

Tom says: A real monster of a drink exhibiting all the facets of fine perry. It’s a big-tasting, bottle-conditioned number. Goes in with a degree of sweetness followed by a whole raft of classic characteristics including elderflower and rhubarb, before finishing on an astringently dry note. A heck of a journey, not for the uninitiated.

We say: Liquid sand – like sucking a teabag. A challenging perry, no doubt, but the panel is undeniably enamoured by it (once the tongues have recovered from the initial desiccation). There’s just so much going on here. We could get to know this.