Yes, there will be math.–SLH
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A couple weeks ago I was in a Sam’s Club and decided to look at the pure honey and their raw honey as they generally have good prices on large quantities of honey which are useful in producing mead. Raw honey producing better mead but generally costing more than the processed pure honey.
Next to the honey was some quarts of pure maple syrup, a product of Canada. An errant thought occurred to me which ought to be quite obvious to you at this moment. Inspecting the quarts of maple syrup for the pertinent facts, it turns out that 1/4 cup of maple syrup has 210 calories, compared to 80 calories per ounce of honey. Just the information that I needed.
A number of years ago I was visiting my uncle’s house and knowing that I made my own beer and wine, he mentioned that a friend of his had made some homemade wine and he had a gallon of it in the refrigerator. He said that he didn’t like it, but he poured me a glass and said that I might and if I liked it I could have it.
I took one taste of the homemade wine, furled by brow, and said, “I know exactly what he did wrong.” The wine had a very distinctive flavor.
Some amateur beer makers who decide to try their hand at wine make the very same error. Wine grapes are generally more sour to the taste than most people would anticipate given the amount of sugar in the grapes, just as lemons have more sugar than oranges, contrary to most people’s expectations. They will simply, and foolishly, go to the store and buy grape juice and try to make wine.
Commercially available grape juices, like commercial jams and jellies, are made from the concord variety of grapes. Concord grapes are used for grape juice and jellies because they are a rather sweet grape rather than sour. However, the concord grape also contains a large quantity of fructose, a type of sugar which is not fermentable. Thus the yeast cannot convert the fructose to alcohol.
Wine made from such grape juice retains the fructose along with the alcohol produced from the other sugars producing a sickly-sweet wine with a distinctive concord grape flavor. Fructose is something to be avoided when making wine or beer.
Ergo, after coming home from the store, I went online to research the sugars which comprise maple syrup and their proportions. It turns out that only about 1% of maple syrup is fructose while about 65-66% of the maple syrup is glucose or sucrose, the fermentable sugars for which I was hoping.
Now, of course, knowing that a nice dry mead requires approximately 12 ½ pounds of honey for a five gallon batch, whereas a sweet mead requires no more than 15 pounds of honey, it was time to proceed to calculate the necessary quantity of maple syrup which would possess correct quantity of sugar.
Extrapolating from the 210 calories on the basic assessment that the calories were in fact primarily from the sugars, which seems quite likely given the relative concentration of the calories as compared to the concentration of sugars in honey as I already knew them to be, one arrives at the estimated quantity of maple syrup of 7 1/4 quarts of pure maple syrup.
Now, for those few souls out there who do not make their own mead, honey consists of about 95% glucose and sucrose, primarily glucose, with only 5% of other ingredients. For those foolish enough to attempt to make a honey or mead vinegar, please note that that 5% includes certain anti-bacterial agents secreted by the bees which produce the honey which will kill the $6.50 bacteria culture, termed mother-of-vinegar, you purchase to add to your mead.
Of course, when using malted barley to make your ale, or beer if you are adding your grout or gruit, it is helpful to understand that approximately 65% of the malt is fermentable sugars, after the starches being acted upon by the enzymes of the germinated barley. It is the remaining 35% of the malted barley which gives the ale or beer its body, color, and some of the flavors not attributable to the gruit.
It is the fact that so much of the honey is comprised of sugars that tends to make mead a very thin and palate cleansing beverage without the acidity of a white wine or the tannins of a red wine. This is the reason that most wine drinkers do not like mead and have trouble pairing a mead with the proper foods.
So naturally the 32-34% of the maple syrup which is not sugar creates some concern as well as some hope regarding the potential flavor components of the resulting alcohol beverage which is currently fermenting in my living room as I type. What type of body with be produced, what will be the ultimate color as the sugars are changed to alcohol.
Mead is quite likely the oldest and first alcoholic beverage man created. Every other alcohol traces back to mead one way or another, along with the very names associated with them. Mead also forms the root of many names one might not expect. Mead, a.k.a. medu, forms the root word “med” or “meth” or “mel” in many other words. A “melomel” is a mead with fruit juice added. A “metheglin” is a mead with herbs and spices added.
Metheglins were created by the ancient Celts to preserve the qualities of the herbs with an alcohol infusion. The Romans adopted not only this concept of infusing herbs in alcohol, but the root word “metheglin” comes into the Latin as “medicine”. Coincidentally, it is also where the concept of witches brewing potions originates, as the original brewers were primarily women, who were making the metheglin
When you add certain fruit juices in a melomel it takes on special names. Add grape juice to the mead and it becomes a “pyment”. Take the honey away from the pyment, and suddenly you get a wine. When apple juice is added to the mead, the called it a “cyser”, a word meaning “strong drink”. Removing the honey, the cyser became cider. Substituting malted barley for the honey at high concentrations became a barley wine, but wine denoted a grape alcohol, so that did not really work, beer became the name. But the word ale, used to mean an unguited beer, was originally from the Prussian word “alu” meaning a weak medu, or mead.
Thus you can see that should my concoction prove to be drinkable I am left with something of a dilemma. I know of no actual name for an alcoholic beverage made from trees, much less a specific tree of maple. It may not be a problem, the alcohol fermenting may turn out to be absolutely horrendous in taste. It may turn out to be incredible. Or is may be drinkable and passable, but nothing remarkable. We shall know in about six months, and I shall be certain to inform the reader thusly.
Why is any of this in the least bit important or worthy of discussion? It is not, but the process is.
All creation begins with but an errant thought. From thought calculations and planning ensues, practical implementation begins, and finally results evaluated. It occurred to me that therein lies the primary distinction between the “progressive” and real people.
The errant thought is creativity. Implementation is a craft. But both the calculation and evaluation are variants of mathematical analysis. Every person’s disposition is in accordance with this process, often moving between the various roles. My personal preference is in the calculation, in the mathematics of the possibility, to see if the errant thought is feasible, and to map out where it might lead, to evaluate and discover what has worked and what has failed.
The calculation of cause and effect, probability, reason, and logic is what is often missing from political or social discussions from the modern leftists. They have ceased from trying to foresee where their ideas lead. Never looking forward, they also choose not to look back; to evaluate the successes or failures of their ideas.
Symbolic of knowledge, the gift of fire was given by one of the creators of man, the Titan Prometheus, meaning “forethought”. It is with planning, reason, and calculation, (forethought), that gift of man which is used to shape the world. But it is by way of man’s co-creator, the Titan Epimetheus, meaning “afterthought”, through his wife Pandora, that man acquires the gift of hope, symbolic of man’s evaluative capacity.
Either way, forethought or afterthought, planning or evaluation, knowledge or hope, man is defined by his interaction with the world through his mind.
It is the mark of the mature mind: calculation.
