Sing "Ho!" for Beltane mead - Pagan Song: Music for Your Magic

Today I am toasting the arrival of the Beltane season with some mead I made two years ago. Remember those strange times? It was April of 2020 and we were holed up in our homes. I was very, very single at that time, so it was rather an isolating experience. For me, that was a positive thing in many ways, though. It was like being on a months-long writer’s retreat. I wrote a song most weeks, and came out of 2020 with thirty-some brand new songs. A few were pagan songs for the Crow Women, but most of them were just flights of my imagination. They’re about everything from despondent waitresses to missing coffee cups to love in space. And, more to the point of this post, during the pandemic I made some awesome mead.

This post’s theme song is one of the first songs I wrote for the pagan community: Sing Ho! for the Mead. This was back in the 90s. It captures those heady years when I was first beginning to make mead, learning from pagan mentors like Green Oak and Dione Greywolf, while sitting in circles of camp chairs at pagan festivals. And then, of course, enjoying the mead itself all weekend. Here’s the song’s chorus:

Sing Ho! for the mead passed ‘round the fire
Ho! for the brewer with sticky hands
Sing Ho! For the drinker who won’t tire
Ho! for the gods of our green land!

You can read the credits on the song’s page on this website. Go ahead and listen while you read. The song made it onto the Crow Women’s second album Crow Magic, and we got pretty silly with it.

So, on that fateful Beltane of 2020, I did not spend the day in the woods dancing around a maypole with 400 of my favorite pagan friends. Everything had been cancelled. Instead I made mead and posted each step on Facebook. The paragraphs to follow that are in quotes are the comments the Alane of two years ago put on Facebook. The photos are from then, too. The rest of this post is the Alane of today, commenting on it from the perspective of April of 2022.

If you’re interested in learning to make mead, this post gives you step-by-step instructions. You should also check out the other mead recipe posts on Pagan Song, which are gathered on our mead-making page.

Here’s how I began, back in 2020.

“I am making mead today to celebrate May Eve! I don’t think I’ve ever started a mead all by myself before. It’s always been a pleasure shared with friends. So, virtual friends, please be with me in spirit. Step one: hydrating the yeast. It’s been in the fridge for months. That froth is from whisking in honey & sugar, not from yeast action. I hope it’s still ready to burst into life!”

“The yeast was in the water heater closet while I did my workout in the living room gym. I listened carefully–YES! The desired fizzing sound has begun. The yeastie beasties are alive. We are a go to start some mead today!”

Let’s pause the story for a moment for a verse from Sing Ho! for the Mead about honey, that defining ingredient of mead.

The goddess sends the bees to fly
They distill the flowers’ love
Into the honey we’ll put by
For baking and cooking and brewing mead!

Here’s the honey I used:

“But uh-oh, look at this label. This honey is dated 2016. That’s so weird. I thought I got this honey last year when I was in Durango to rehearse with the Crow Women. I wonder state of this honey is in?”

“Well, I have the wrong bucket of honey! My honey was from the same source–Honeyville in Colorado–but mine was a batch I got in May of 2019. This is a bucket from 2016 that must have been forgotten in a corner at Sylvia’s house. When I went by Syl’s house to pick up my honey, I got the wrong bucket. I bet things like this are happening to lots of people as they leave things outside for others to drive by and pick up, without any physical contact. But I shall press on! Syl said to go ahead and use it, since it’s at my house now. I have a long slog ahead of me, digging crystalized honey out of this bucket!”

These selfsame pictures you’re seeing in this blog post are the ones I posted on Facebook as I took them on that day in 2020. Many people chimed in with suggestions for dealing with the crystalized honey.

“put a heating pad around the bucket”
“I don’t know if you have a turkey fryer or some other giant pot, but I know someone who did and they propped their honey bucket on some broken tiles to protect the bottom of it more, and filled around it with water and set it to warming up.”
“fill the sink with hot water and set the bucket in there”
“Add super hot water to it and let sit for a bit…”
“The hot water will not have enough heat to melt all the honey. You would have to put in so much hot water that the balance would be disturbed, as in too much water, not enough honey. I recommend heating pads instead. I used to use two heating pads for 24 to 48 hours.”
“Bathtub of hot water?”
“Maybe suspend the bucket in someone’s hot tub? Just kidding, that would really be a disaster waiting to happen!”
“I get a bigger stock pot, put glass beads between the pot and bucket then heat the water in the stock pot slowly so that the glass beads don’t melt into the bottom of the bucket.”
“Set bucket in sun or other warm area”

I didn’t do any of those things. I wanted this brew to get started amid the energy of Beltane. I did it the hard way.

“So, I’m digging the honey out with a pair of ice cream scoops. This bucket is almost 4 years old, but it was *sealed*, so it *is* possible to dig out the honey. It is work. Work is hard. But hey, we’re talking about homebrewing here, so I’m just doing it. The goddess Hestia is here keeping me company. Gonna include her in the name of this batch the mead. Maybe Hestia’s Homebound Mead? Any other suggestions?”

A few people gave me suggestions. I liked “Hearth Mead” and “Hestia’s Best-ia Home Mead”. Dear reader here in 2022, if you can think of a creative name for this mead, put it in the comments.

After a break to take care of my parents who live a few blocks away, I came back and said;

“I was over doing today’s chores at my parents’ house. I’m home and I’ve liberated the yeast starter from the hot water heater closet. It is definitely working!”

Next came to the moment when I needed to commit to a recipe. I posted about my thinking process;

“It’s a 60 pound bucket of honey. The height of the honey was 13.5 inches. I want about 20 pounds for this batch, that’s 4.5 inches. There are about 9 inches left in the bucket now. So, I’m calculating that the amount removed is 20 pounds. Looks about right to me!”

A friend messaged me; “I just read this to my son as a “math matters in real life” teachable moment.”

I decided; “I want this Hestia-inspired mead to be soothing, so the flavoring will be chamomile and vanilla.”

“Ok, *finally* the honey is on the stove with 2 gallons of water. This stage is called “must”. Sometimes I don’t heat my must at all, but this honey is so thickened, I figure I better.”

By this time it was Beltane afternoon and I had accreted quite a few Facebook friends who were following along with me, ‘liking’ my these photos and comments. I said;

“I want to thank all the friends who are keeping me company as I make this mead. I always make mead with a brew buddy, so socially isolated brewing is pretty foreign for me. Thanks for being here! So, next step was to heat the must for about half an hour, skimming off the scum that rose to the top. When it got to 150 degrees I turned off the heat. Now I’m going to get the primary fermenter ready.”

A friend messaged me on Facebook; “Do you cook it on meadeium heat so it doesn’t come out meadeiocre?” Yuk, yuk, yuk.

“Because enquiring minds want to know, the hydrometer reading was at the 40 line, giving an approximate potential alchohol level of 19 percent.”

The honey provides sugar, which the yeast will convert to carbon dioxide and alcohol. The higher the percentage of sugar in the mixture, the more the potential alcohol. Hestia checked the numbers for me:

“I transferred the must from the brewpot into the primary fermenter (big white food-grade bucket) and added cold water to bring the volume from 3.25 gallons up to 5 gallons, and have waited for the temperature to drop to 90 degrees, cool enough to add the yeast without killing it.”

“And the last step. I pitched (poured in) the yeast, asking a blessing of happiness and contentment on the brew. Please add your blessings, too!”

Here are the blessings I got when I posted this picture on Facebook. I had been brewing and taking pictures and posting them all day long and by late afternoon, I had a bunch of other quarantined friends following along. It sure helped me feel less isolated. Here are some of the blessings I received:

“Sending light to it!”
“The blessings of Hestia be with your brew, your home, and yourself. So Mote It Be.”
“Bendiciones” (that from a friend I made when I was in the Peace Corps in Peru. I even brewed there!)
“A blessing of gratitude for all gifts of the earth”
“Slainte!”
“May it bring you health and the hopefulness of spring!”

The next morning, I checked the primary fermenter, and a vigorous mat of yeast coated the surface. My house was beginning to smell like a brewery, oh joy! Time for another verse of Sing Ho! for the Mead.

The transformation will arrive
When water, yeast and honey sweet
The touch of magic bring to life
Becoming our mystical, marvelous mead!

After about four days, I siphoned the mead out of the bucket and into a glass carboy. Fermentation in an open container is aerobic, using oxygen. But in a closed container, the fermentation becomes anaerobic.

The yeast gobbles up the sugar of the honey, and excretes carbon dioxide, which escapes throgh the water trap of the airlock. The yeast also excretes alcohol into the mead, the point of this whole escapade.

After a couple of weeks, I tasted the mead in its early stage. It seemed a bit insipid to me–not a lot of depth to it. So, as usual, I fiddled with it. I remembered to post an update for my friends to see;

“I gave it a handful of French Oak chips, and a pot of Egyptian Camomile tea that had steeped overnight. The vanilla I sent away for came in the mail. These weren’t very long beans, but they were fragrant. I cut 5 up into smaller pieces and added that as well. So, this will be a Vanilla-Chamomile mead. I’m guessing it will be done in early fall.”

Well, fall came. I tried the mead. It had a nice vanilla flavor, a hint of chamomile, and lots of honey character. But, it was too sweet for my taste. No way had it achieved its potential of 19 percent. I’d guess it was about 5 percent alcohol. So I took a glass of the Hestia Mead:

and a glass of the hearty Babalon’s Blood black cherry mead that I made with my friend Sylvia before the pandemic:

and blended them together

…and that made a very, very nice blended mead

Now, in 2022, I have just opened a bottle of this mead. The cork went “pop!” when I pulled it out. Yes, it had sparkled in the bottles. They aren’t champagne bottles, so I’m really lucky the pressure wasn’t enough to pop all the corks spontaneously. That would have made quite the mess in my garage!

It’s still sweet, but that feels appropriate for the sweetness of my favorite celebration of love: Beltane. (Pagan Song has many articles about Beltane.) I’ll take a few bottles to our local Beltane festival here in New Mexico, and share them with the paganfolk. It will be so wonderful to be able to celebrate the Sabbat in community again. Which brings me to the last two verses of Sing Ho! for the Mead. Merry May!

We pass a bottle in the night
Taste and test each other’s wares
Our faces lit by bonfire light
Our laughter powered by marvelous mead

Sing Ho! for the mead passed round the fire
Ho! for the brewer with sticky hands
Sing Ho! For the drinker who won’t tire
Ho! for the gods of our green land!

The evening slips along toward dawn
And lovers slip into the trees
To celebrate quite privately
The honey delights of marvelous mead

Sing Ho! for the mead passed round the fire
Ho! for the brewer with sticky hands
Sing Ho! For the drinker who won’t tire
Ho! for the gods of our green land!

For more information about the Crow Women pagan choir, and access to all the blog posts by Alane and the other 9 crowsingers who have written for Pagan Song, you can visit the Crow Women author page here on Pagan Song.

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