Kitchen craft: mead and mulled wine

On December 23 me and my husband finally got around to bottling this year's mead and glögg. Or as perhaps I should say, mulled wine. Finally! We carefully cleaned lots and lots of bottles, thinking that NO WAY we would need all of them. Hah!

The mulled wine (which I will continue to call glögg, as it is called in Swedish, since I really don't care for the english term. After all, there is no actual wine in our glögg!) was made after the same recipe as always, which you can find right here. The result: marvellous glögg, strong and flavourful. Not sweet as the store bought glögg people are used to, but something entirely different and much much better. Here served with almonds and raisins, as is traditional.

Moving on to the mead! This time we had three batches of mead to bottle, one large batch with the "regular" honey-and-water mead and two experimental batches. The regular mead, light yellow and gorgeous in every way, you can see in the pic below. The taste is by far superior to our earlier batches, and as always it is devastatingly high on alcohol.

The two experimental batches were the real surprise of the day. The one you can see below, red and gorgeous, is heavily flavoured with wild raspberries that I picked this summer. The second batch, which unfortunately I forgot to photograph, is flavoured with blueberries and a pinch of vanilla. 

The two experimental batches turned out very different. The blueberry mead is just awsome, with a mild blueberry taste and a pinkish colour. The raspberry mead is something else entirely. It's much more acidic, and when mixed with a bit of extra honey (which in this case is preferable) it tastes almost like a candy liqueur. 

I'd like to end this blog post with some other pics from our home this winter. The snow just keeps coming! Though it's not as cold as some other parts of Sweden (they had -40 degrees C up in the north just the other day...) it stays below zero and thus the snow remains. Yippie! Oh how I wish it will stay like this until spring.