Look, a while back some folks found a species of stingerless bees, one species of which is called Trigona necrophaga. Which uh... These cute little guys, eat meat if they can. As in, they're like other carrion bugs or animals and keep it seperate from their pollen foods. Hard to find all that much information as ai is all over the place and the parts that aren't are not all that full.
But, do you think if there was a breed of bees that made meat honey, that you could make mead out of it? I mean, mead is usually made out of honey, and meat honey is still technically honey, you know?
Since the bees don't make it into a honey, it'd technically make it harder to produce it into a mead as well, the meat collection is not even a honey in the proper defination. But if they did, which would be cool, I wonder if it would be edible?
Usually, food made from fermented goods have to be made very carefully. And animals, or in our case bugs, who consume carrion don't have to worry about rotten meet food poisoning as they have very strong gut biomes. In other words, what carrion eatting creatures can eat is usually not what humans can eat.
Now, humans can eat meat, after it's been processed. Namely cooked to a satisfactory level but nothing below rare, if that makes sense? But mead doesn't need to be boiled, as a result, you can't boil away any bad bacteria or other things meat has that humans can't eat. But honey can be boiled before the mead process begins. Hopefully, that would help work out the carrion problem with meat mead.
Also, the fermentation process is mostly made out of yeast and sugar hanging out. Fat doesn't really play into that bit and so the meat mead might not actually work out as nicely as say, real world mead. Which is sad, but most old school alcohol that normally was mass drunk, was low alcohol content anyways. Which would mildly work for this sort of drink.
Now, what about other factors, such as flavour? Well, meat honey as it has been dubbed, has an odd look to it. Namely it is a paste, not a thick liquid, and it is either a translucent white or pale. Furthermore, 'someone has claimed to have tasted it (I'd say I couldn't find who said that but alas), and it apparently tastes smoky, salty and apparently oddly sweet. Which, look, I've only drunk coolers and beer way before I was supposed to, but I think that might taste interesting in a drink. Would you like your mead if it had a salty flavour?
I mean the sweet and smoky flavour would taste nice but the saltiness might through it off too much. I think it'd be nice to have a taste of it, but well, I might not like it all that much for the long run.
Look, I love icy wastelands as settings. A bleak white-out desert of icy and death is kick ass. So, in a world like that, wouldn't it be fitting to have meat mead? Like, the bees turn to carrion to survive, and as a result the locals make meat meat instead of our worlds meat. Could also work if the locals aren't human creatures and are capible of eating raw meat.
I do suppose the drink would be a sort of thick broth consistancy, best drunk as a soup almost. It'd probably end up as a whitish brew with a thicker consistancy and rather low alcohol content drink. The sweet, smoky and saltly flavour would probably pair best with more sutble flavours to make the unique flavour of the meat mead stand out more.
So, here is the challenge. Blood doesn't like to stay liquad outside of it's host body. I don't know if that makes sense. But blood tends to starts to clump up a bit. But some people figured out that sealing up the blood or stiring it could reduce the clumping of the blood. In theory that means it could be combined with a pre-exsiting wine or brew, as again sugar and yeast is needed to femerment the wine and it would keep the alcoholic content up.
Thanks to blood drying and rotting eventually, as a result it would be a better idea to only collect fresh and responsibly stored blood. Namely in a colder storage situation and in a air-tight or close to air-tight container.
Flavour-wise it would like be a slightly more coppery or metalic sort of flavour added to the pre-exsiting wine it is mixed with. This would probably best served as a cocktail or a wine mixed with a cooler than just a wine. The wine would probably gain a brownish-red tinge.
In a fantasy setting of course this would work great for vampires. I mean, wine is already seen as a posh sort of alcohol and what is more vampiric than blood mixed with wine? I mean that would be a fantastic thing for vampric Count to drink.
Alternatively, it's a pretty interesting idea to make it a ritual drink for a fantasy setting. Somewhat like romans believing the blood of gladiators will carry their strength, you could have people drinking blood wine to gain the powers of others.
Honestly, there's a damn near infinate number of reasons to use blood wine in a fantasy world. It's just kinda cool.
This is more or less just a collection here instead of one particular drink. But you konw how Gin and Tonic was a mix of medicine at the time (tonic) and alcohol (gin), don't you think people would start mixing potions and alcohols?
Inhernetly, potions would have their own flavours, due to being made out of all manner of ingredients. Like (i'm using skyrim here) but like with Skyrim's Fortify Health potion, it is made out of Blue Mountian Flowers, Hanging Moss and a Yellow Mountain Flower, as the more normal ingredients. Would that give it a herbal taste? Would it taste somewhat like a tea? Than, I wonder what alcohol would pair with it? Maybe a white rum to line up with a Mojito?
My point is, an anime based around the idea of someone who is a bartender or mixologist getting stuck in a fantasy world where they start mixing potions with booze to make medicinal/magical cocktails sounds very interesting and I will watch it or read it if it is a manga.
I mean, certain potions would be harder to pair with an alcohol. I mean what does vampire dust taste like? What would orge teeth taste like? Would orge teeth be boild into the potion or ground up and introduced as a powder? How does potion making work. Are the ingredents boiled or reduced or any other form or processing?
Look long story short, potions would have to be taste tested first and since we can't, at least not in a manner that works as depicted, we can't perfectly predict what a potion would taste like before the end product could be paired with an alcohol.