The best cup for drinking any kind of alcohol relies on a number of things, including the aroma, the brew’s style, and how the cup feels in your hand. You guys are aware that each mead has its own flavor, aroma, and texture. Meads come in a variety of flavors, ranging from earthy, floral, savory, and sweet to heavy, still, and effervescent. Mead is so wonderful that we could drink it straight from our shoes and still enjoy it, but a fine cup commemorates the history of the beverage and brings out its complex flavors, improving the overall mead drinking experience.
Traditional Large Vessels
Using the kind of cup the Norsemen and Celts would have been using long before glass blowing was even a twinkle in some ancient Venetian’s eye will make you feel even more connected to history if what you love most about mead is that it was probably the first alcoholic drink to ever touch human lips and that it has unquestionably been around longer than beer and wine.
Large traditional vessels like horns, tankards, and bowls are the best vessel for properly enjoying meads that are robust, woody, and earthy since they not only have the right look and feel but also the right size to really get into the roots of mead culture. The layers of a mead bouquet are composed of lighter, sweeter, fruitier flavors that remain at the top and generally concealed notes of grass and oak. You can fully taste all fragrances as they decant and change as they freely interact with the rush of oxygen when you drink from a large volume vessel with a large mouth.
Viking drinking horn with stand from Mead Horns Ale Horn Since alcohol existed before glass, people made drinking cups out of materials that were readily available. There is a fair probability that a tribe who grew cattle hollowed out the horns and drank from them. Ancient mythologies included horns, most notably in the Norse tale of how Loki tricked Thor into competing in a drinking game utilizing a horn that held all the world’s seas.
Drinking horns persisted as ceremonial drinking vessels after other drinking options became more accessible and affordable, always signifying a special event and acting as a status symbol for influential people.
Bovine drinking horns
The Viking style have recently become more popular as a result of rekindled interest in the production of old ales and mead.
Despite the fact that many soldiers and travelers considered drinking horns to be practical (especially when linked with a leather strap to attach to a belt or pack), one drawback of this style of horn is that it can be challenging to set it down while eating. You can either keep drinking until it runs out (recommended) or utilize a horn stand, which is occasionally included in sets when you buy a horn.
Ale Horn tanks The term “tankard” originally referred to any wooden container, but it eventually came to refer to an ale cup with the name we now associate with it. Originally constructed of wood or metal, tankards are now frequently made from various materials like horn because to the current popularity of fandoms for fantasy authors like Tolkien or George R.R. Martin.
Traditional Mazer Cup from Mazers. The mazer is a soup bowl-shaped drinking vessel made of wood or metal. They were the most widely used and well-liked drinking cups among ancient Germanic tribes for a while. All different kinds of homes would have contained mazers, which may be made of straightforward wood or beautifully etched metal.
Mead is still served in mazers in some regions of Scotland as part of a welcoming and friendship ceremony when the two parties coming together sip from the same cup symbolically.
Skål, friends.
