Mead, an attempt to authentic viking, could use some help.

[Meader]

Hi, i'm Swedish living between stockholm and uppsala ( the last place for paganism to exist ) And i am making my first attempt to mead. It's almost winter so i thought to myself as lucky as i am to live where i live, what exists in nature to make mead with, and what existed for the vikings. After a long an hard thinking i came up with a perfect (in theory) recepy. We have these bearries which i think exists all over the world, atleast in colder countries called slånbär ( i have no idea what they are called in english please help me with that) They are bitter from the summer to october but because of acids reacting to minus temprature they loose their bitterness to some degree, even tho they are still bitter. i managed to pick somewhere between half kg - 1 kg of these and i beleive that the bitterness should mix quite nicely with the sweetness of honey. I am also breawing it with oak for the simple reason that the vikings used wooden barrels and i beleive that the wood left a bi-taste. I am also using swedish local wilflower-honey. i think that vikings use wildflower so the taste would be quite the same even to our flora has change some over the last 1000 years.. However i am thinking of mixing in winter apples to the mix, would that taste better then only slånbär and wood ? please help me alitte

Btw slånbär have 5 cm long effin thorns so my hands are ripped to pieces, if i accedently picked some poisoned berries and killed myself with this brew i beleive that oden let's me in to valhall because of pity " this idiot amuses me "

Best regards Mjölner.

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slån

 

[Waldmeister]

Hello Ragnar
The Berrys you have ,can be Moosberry a kind of cranberry.
The Honey is right.I hope you have cleaned the Barrel with sulphur .
But true Mead is only Honey and water.With Fruits in it ,it is a Melomal.
A Barrel looks fine but hardy to use and clean before the first racking.
Take it for ageing .

 

[Meader]

melomal , check ! no i managed to find the english name for it and it's called "sloe berries" and they are delicious and havent killed me yet.

And yes, thank you for the warning but this time i have my head on the right place and i sanitised everything twice before brewing