 In one of our previous videos we explored the origin of beer from its possibly accidental discovery and its pivotal role in potentially played in the development of human civilization, while also making a few of the earliest recipes from these ancient cultures. Today we explore some of the later developments with beer as we progress now into the early medieval era, a period of time that also coincides with the Viking era. Along the way we've also explored a few other drinks that compete with the potential title of the earliest alcoholic beverage such as wine and honey wine or mead. The biggest change from early historical beers to modern beers is the addition of hops, a bittering and antibacterial agent. But in between these non-hopped and hopped beers was an era when beer used an alternative for bittering and flavoring called Groot. Groot was a collection of herbs used in northern Europe for this purpose and could be a variety of a few assortments of herbs that were available. Eventually hops grew to replace Groot sometime around the 13th century. Chiefly as a way to avoid taxation the feudal lords were placing on Groot, but also because hops contained antibacterial properties. In today's video we're exploring two unique aspects of an early medieval beer, a group beer that is mixed with mead, making a drink called a breggart. The idea of mixing beer and mead dates back to at least 1800 BCE with a reference to it in the Sumerian hymn to Ninkasi. A mixed drink like this would be primed for another culture of the early medieval period, the Vikings. For Vikings ales and beers were very common place, but mead was held at a special place in that culture and religion. And a mixed drink like this forms a nice bridge between them. To help brew this I paired up with a knowledgeable brewmaster from the local Viking reenactment group. The main ingredient for this will be similar to past drinks, barley grown and harvested and left to begin germinating in a process called molding. And honey which we explored in our previous mead episode with our own custom medieval beekeeping masks. But then the new ingredients will be the herbs for the Groot, whorehound, mugwort, yarrow, and common ivy. The drink we're brewing today is an interesting combination of beer and mead. If you want to try other unique drink combinations you may be interested in today's sponsor, shaker and spoon. I've never personally gotten into mixing my own cocktail drinks. It's a lot of work to find recipes and then track down all the unique bitters and then have to have a bunch of them on hand whenever you want to make something. It's a little complicated, but shaker and spoon sent me a few boxes to try out. They make the experience really simple and easy for an inexperienced fixologist like myself. 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So I'm here with Joe who previously helped us with making things like a Viking anvil and a sword, but he also has another skill of brewing and today we're going to brew some Viking Arab beer. I'm Joe, I'm a blacksmith, brewer, and historical reenactor. Today we're going to be brewing a Viking Age bregat, which is a combination of malted barley, honey beverage that'd be fermented historically, and then spiced with commonly found herbs and things that would have been grown locally, native to kind of northern Europe. It's going to be made out of some malted barley, some caramelized rye, and some peated barley, and then we're going to start mashing it over an open fire. So now our kettle has reached strike temp, so that means the water has come up to about 150, probably a little bit more degrees. So what we're going to do now is add our malted barley into the pot and we will let this sit for about an hour, and this will cause an enzyme reaction within the grain to convert all that starch into sugar, and then we will have the start of our bregat wart. Perfect. Make sure there's no dough balls, and which is brew. Okay, there we go. So right now we're doing the mash, which is creating the nice kind of sweet grain water. What we're doing is waiting for a enzyme called amylase that is present in malted barley to take the starches that make up each little barley grain and turn into sugar to create essentially a sugary barley water that then you can add yeast to and ferment it into what we know is beer. Eventually we will separate all of the grain from the wart, which is the unfermented beer, and we will boil that down to our final volume for fermentation, and during that boil down we'll also add the different herbs to turn it into a gruit. Historically humans have probably been doing this for a very long time and probably discovered the process accidentally, but by the time of the Viking Age they would have basically known that taking germinated or sprouted barley, then roasting it, and then doing this process in a mash ton or louder ton would have created the beginning stages of a beer as we know it, and we've just made it more concise and scientific in the modern day, but historically throw it in a pot of hot water and it just sort of happens. Alright, so now we have a collection of herbs I grew to add flavor. We're going to do this without hops. It could be done either with or without. Start off with the Yero, a couple sprigs of that. When do we do the next one? That'll be probably in about 30 minutes or so. Yeah, there we go. Hmm, pretty sweet. I think those turn out pretty good. We've already reduced it down by about an inch. All right, now time for the mugwort. I'm going to cup all those leaves or sprigs. That's enough. Looks perfect. Into the pot we go. It's like making a sacrifice. Yeah. Sacrifice to Govnu. Govnu's one of my favorite historical gods. It's the god of blacksmithing and brewing. Oh nice. So you're good to your guy. Yep, indeed my guy. Now we're going to boil over territory. Oh, the beer. That is the downside of not being able to control the heat super well. Yeah. Okay, let's spill this all over myself. My spoon. So we've definitely made a beer-like thing. So now she feels pretty nice on my hands, considering they're a little cold. It's going to be a little grainy, but you know, it'll work. Yeah, it looks like that was a pretty successful mash, even using very rudimentary tools. It's sort of sticky and sweet, so it looks like we got some decent sugar extraction. So now we have the last two flavoring ingredients. We have poor hound and the ground ivy. The ground ivy, I didn't even actually grow. It just kind of grows everywhere here. So you nicely get rid of some of it. Nice. Now we're cooking. For the next ingredient, honey. So the honey will add a little bit of extra fermentable sugars to it. Also a nice kind of sweetness and body to the final bracket. That is thick. So we did the last step of transferring our wort into, this is not the last step. So we did the next step of transferring the wort into the fermenting vessel. Now all you have to do is add the yeast and let it ferment. So traditionally they probably would have just let natural yeast get in and ferment it. But we have a few more options available and you have a very specific yeast you brought with. So this is a yeast that's a Norwegian kveik yeast. Kveik yeast is really cool because they are wild yeasts that have been cultivated in Norway for all of these like farmhouse beers that individual families would have been making. And it has been recently sort of commercialized and become available here in the United States for the home group market. And so this yeast is fun because it's kind of an old wild strain that we can now use to create kind of an approximation of a viking age bracket. And it should be nice and quick and clean fermenting and hopefully will produce a really nice historical beer. Okay, so we've been waiting outside in the cold long enough for me to throw a coat on. But now I think the wort is finally cool enough to actually pitch the yeast in and let the fermentation start. I'm excited as y'all this turns out. Yeah. Pretty good. All right, so it's been a couple weeks. It's a little bit colder out and I'm back here with Joe. Any about a few other people from his group. We've got Ashley and Josh and we're going to try some of this beer. So we're the North Star Vikings and we're a viking age reenactment group based out of the Twin Cities here in Minnesota. We focus more on the daily life aspect of the viking age, making our own garb, making our own weapons, doing viking age cooking, viking age beer, that kind of thing. You know, make all of our own stuff and pretend to be vikings to the best extent that we can. Some of the garb that we're wearing, it's stuff that, you know, we've made ourselves and it's very different than what you might see seen, you know, portrayed in modern media portrayal of vikings. We are all portraying wealthy people with lots of silk and lots of silver. It's all mostly based in Birka, Sweden. Birka in Sweden, it was a very big trading port. So this is a hat that is an Eastern style hat. This is what they were wearing in Sweden during the viking age. It's very Eastern influence. You have your weapons, your pouches, and they were much smaller than something that you would see like in the movies or even at the Renaissance fair. The pouches that they had were very, very small to carry something larger. You would have a bag, tunics and things like that. They were imported from the east based out of Birka trading. This is also an Eastern style kaftan. All of the buttons are hand cast based off of an Eastern style button by Joe, but they're based on like more Slavic influences because they stretched all the way over into Russia. They did a lot of the plates that was a way to show your wealth. And then on mine, I have the tortoise brooches, which are the basic piece that would hold a lot of the Viking women's clothing together. And then you would also have your various daily implements that you would wear hanging from your brooches. You have your key to your house that shows that you are in charge of your house and that you carry that wealth. I got a little knife here and then silver and gold foil beads as a sign of wealth as well too. Rich traders. So this beer has been fermenting for about two weeks. Mash was extremely successful. We ended up creating what we think is a pretty high gravity beer. This could be anywhere from really low alcohol to up to probably like 14%. I'm guessing probably it'll be about 10% alcohol. Wow. We're not going to have any carbonation in it. So it's going to be relatively flat. When Vikings did it, would they have tried to chill it at all? Is it just always room temperature? Probably would have been room temperature. If it was colder out, they definitely probably stored it outside. Also, beers historically were generally drank pretty quickly. They weren't aged for a long time. They didn't have a lot of good sealing vessels that they could have held it in. Fermenting is a little bit different than how you normally do with modern equipment. Do you think that's going to cause any interesting flavor? There's a little bit more of an avenue for spoilage with this type of fermentation. So it could be a little sour, but which would have been perfectly normal for historical beers. As modern beer drinkers, we're not as used to that because we have modern sanitation and like glass and stainless vessels. But historically, almost everything they would have fermented would have had some bit of sourness to it just through the nature of them not understanding germ theory and lactobacillus loves to live in wood and other things that they would have been storing their alcohol in. But drink fresh, it would have been less sour and the sour character will definitely expand over time. So I'm guessing it's going to be reasonably alcoholic with still a little bit of residual sweetness and we'll get that nice kind of herbaceousness from all of the grew-it herbs. So I'm excited to try it. Should we try it? Let's do it. I'm so excited. Mm-hmm. It smells so good. There, right down. Right down the hatch. And it's like a cloudy kind of. I think that a lot of that color is the peated barley. Yeah, definitely not, um, clarified at all. Definitely smells like it fermented. Skull. It's like a brown beer. Very sweet and smooth. Very tasty. A British brown ale. Like, um, you know, like it has fryer tuck on the bottom. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. That fermented well. That's alcoholic. That's really good. That's very alcoholic. Um, I would guess just tasting it, that is probably in the like 11-12% easily. Yeah. I could get used to this. Nice job. Oh, that's real alcoholic. It's so good. Also, there's some of that smokiness I think that we pulled from, pulled from the fire. Like it's peaty, it's like peaty. Yeah, it's got a little bit of that peat character. Um, you can definitely tell that the honey fermented in there. So it's got almost kind of some mead notes to it. Mm-hmm. And you get those herbs. There's a nice bitter backbone to it that's definitely like the yarrow and I think the whorehound. And then you also get the kind of herbaceousness from that, uh, mugwort and the, uh, ivy. It's, it's quite good. Like, I think it balances out the sweetness. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. It's quite drinkable. Yeah. That's good. That's a good beer. Yeah. We did good. Excellent. We made beer. Alright, so we used some modern equipment with a hydrometer to measure and figured out we got about 10% alcohol, which is about what you estimated. Uh, so that's a pretty strong drink and I think it turned out really well, a lot better than I was expecting. Mm-hmm. And uh, yeah. So thank you and the North Star Viking group for joining us and uh, to all of our patrons. Thanks for watching. I'm pretty damn proud of that. It's a good result. Mm-hmm. Haha, we did it. We brewed beer over a fire. Cool. That's very alcoholic. Like, you get that, that ethanol bite. I was gonna say it's warming. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. 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