Came across this word in an wine making recipe book first published in the UK (no date) but looks around the 1920s or 30s. The term was used for a recipe for a mead that was made with hops (1 ounce boiled for 30 minutes). My question: is anyone on this forum familiar with the word "botchard"? Does it in fact mean a mead made with hops? I like the sound of the word and would like to use it for my "hopped meads". Thanks
entymological question. Anyone familiar with the term "botchard"
- Thread starter bernardsmith
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ye-es...so is "smith". but looks like botchard was a name for a style or type of mead too... (like braggot or hydromel)That's not a botchard. That was a pilchard. They often douse them in too much tomato sauce and so you might indeed need to drain them but you don't need a doctor for that. You were likely over-charged.
Could Botchard be a bastardization of "Bouchard?" Bouchard means "big mouth" which at least has some connotation with drinking and if you stretch it, boozing it up. Like "mazer" I can easily use this logic (although it may be flawed) to hypothesize that a botchard couuld possibly be a large mouthed vessel used for mead? Maybe that type of mead (let's call it Gaulish mead) came from Gaul in "bouchards" and then the English called it botchard mead? This is how my brain works. None of this is obviously fact, just wild imaginings from my drug and alcohol addled mind.
Assuming the root is latin and not greek... but it really sounds like a latin root rather than greek or germanic.
I think the whole Botchard thing is a mistake. Back in 2007 someone posted a "Honey Botchard" recipe on a homebrew site (Jim's Beer Kit) claiming that this recipe originated in Cyril Berry's "First Steps In Winemaking." I have a 3rd edition of this book and it never uses the word Botchard that I can find.
I am familiar with that post but I have a wine making book Peggy Hutchinson's Home Made Wine Secrets , Foulsham (PA) , no date, that was originally published in Britain (Stockton-on-Tees) and on page 116 she offers a recipe called Honey Botchard (1 oz hops, 3.5 lbs honey, 1 gallon water, 1 oz yeast, 1 slice toast) and she states that "Yorkshire folk swear by brewer's yeast for making the finest Honey Botchard". There is , as I say, no date of publication but on page 20 she offers what she calls "Approximate table of costs" and these include, Sugar for 7d, Bread for 2.5d and yeast for 1d an oz. ( a "d" was the symbol for a penny before metrication in Feb 1971, but from other sources I believe that a loaf of bread cost 2.4 d in 1914 and sugar was priced at 6.9d the same year (in UK statistical data) but no qty of sugar was indicated) - So I am thinking that Honey Botchard was a British hopped mead that was made about 100 years ago..
