Two Thirst-Waters for Pennsic
With the success of my first two thirst-waters, I wanted to follow up on the rest of them from The Compendium of Essential Arts for Family Living . I made the first one, which was really a short mead (and reused the spices and yeast to make a very nice plausibly-historical metheglin), but that leaves six thirst-waters to try: Malus asiatica , Chinese strawberry, Chinese quince, five-flavor [berry], grape, and fragrant sugar. Chinese quinces are pretty hard to get, and the fragrant sugar one has some pretty unclear bits. I can get grape juice, but getting Vitis vinifera , the European grape, is rough in the summer: American grapes make up most commercial grape juice, and they have a really distinctive flavor that wouldn't be appropriate for Chinese grapes, which would be vinifera . When I was looking through Manhattan Chinatown grocery stores, I came across a bag of five flavor berries: Meanwhile, I remembered that I had picked a quantity of young ornamental crabapp