Bottles, Birds & Dollars

England, my mother, Lift to my Western Sweetheart One full cup of English mead, breathing of the May.

So sang British Poet Alfred Noyes in America, My Sweetheart. Last week Britain was lifting a cup of mead to its American sweetheart, but the cup breathed less of May than of dollars. For the first time in 400 years, the English had turned to the manufacture of mead, a wine (fermented from honey) which was the drink of kings and commoners in England from Beowulf to Henry VIII.* At the village of

Gulval, near Penzance, the Worshipful Company of Mead Makers paraded to the Gulval parish church, where a cup of mead was solemnly blessed. The mead had previously received the blessing of the British Board of Trade, which in its own quaint way hopes that mead exports will help earn a few of the dollars Britain needs (see INTERNATIONAL).

Mead Makers Ltd., a Gulval firm, is now brewing mead in steam-heated vats at the rate of 300,000 bottles a year. The firm is already shipping some mead to Bermuda; Mexico has given the largest single order so far (5,000). U.S. citizens will have their chance at mead; plain, it tastes like a Rhine wine but has more sting. Special varieties are sack mead, which tastes like Tokay; cyser, in which cider instead of water is mixed with honey to make a wine that tastes like sherry; and pyment, or clarre, which is like claret.

British traders made another highly specialized export effort last week. In Manhattan's Washington Market, the season's first grouse went on sale. On hand were 103 brace (i.e., 206 birds), at $10.50 a brace, or about $3.50 a pound. That was the standard price for grouse; there was no extra charge for the fact that the birds had been bagged by George VI and his hunting party in Scotland (TIME, Aug. 22). The thing for U.S. gourmets to do, of course, would be to wash the illustrious birds down with a full cup of English mead; pyment, said gastronomes, would go best with grouse.

*Mead fell from fashion after the Reformation cut down the use of beeswax for church candles; apiarists, no longer able to sell their byproduct wax to the chandlers, found it unprofitable to make honey just for the mead makers.

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