I well remember when I was about ten years old my grndmother was cleaning
out a walkin closet for the first time since before WWII, which would have
made it a 15 year accumulation at the least. In the ultimate depths she
found the last bottle of mead of her own making that she'd laid up during
Prohibition. She was a virtual teatotaler, but we nonetheless broke it open
and got thoroughly wasted together. I had no idea she'd spat in it.
As to hairy northerners, everything I know about the Dark Ages I learned
from Asterix.
At 06:55 PM 8/4/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>Mark Weiss tried to slip the following past me, but I was on it
>quicker than a tick on a dawg (as they say around here):
>
><The beverage quaffed in the Mead Hall may have been preferred to
>claret either because the hairy northerners liked getting sick more
>than Mediterranean types or because claret wasn't available.>
>
>Can't speak to the relative liking of sick-making drinks among
>the Hairivairi vs. the (less pejoratively termed) "Mediterranean
>types," but can assure you that Claret was not on tap in Heorot,
>which was a Meadhall, not a Monastery. For Claret, you need a
>Monk--and vice versa, no doubt!
>
>But mead was still the beverage of choice more for reasons to do
>with hip-hops vs. hives: you have to stay in one place for awhile
>to grow hops, barley, and ye olde barleycorn, of course, while
>making mead required only a certain honey-gathering bravura, a pot
>to put it in, and half a dozen thanes to stand around it and spit.
>
>Nevertheless (she concluded pedantically), it's always been all
>about the bier.
>
>Professorially yores,
>
>CanBoadicea
>
>
>
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