The Drink of Heroes, the Drink of the Gods

[hammy]

Taste it.

The drink was a tawny golden color. Shadow took a sip, tasting an odd blend of sour and sweet on his tongue. He could taste the alcohol underneath, and a strange blend of flavors. It reminded him a little of prison hooch, brewed in a garbage bag from rotten fruit and bread and sugar and water, but it was sweeter, and far stranger.

Okay, said Shadow. I tasted it. What was it?

Mead, said Wednesday. Honey wine. The drink of heroes. The drink of the gods.

Shadow took another tentative sip. Yes, he could taste the honey, he decided. That was one of the tastes. Tastes kinda like pickle juice, he said. Sweet pickle-juice wine.

Tastes like a drunken diabetic's piss, agreed Wednesday. I hate the stuff.

Nine glory-twigs dipped in golden mead.

 

In the bottle - Juicy Fruit gum? But spicy. It's really pretty, kind of what I expected from Mama-Ji.

Wet - Whoa, that just morphed. It lost the spice and the fruitiness and now it's just bold. I don't know how else to phrase it. Almost leafy? (Which is odd, because if I remember correctly it's supposed to be a honey-mead scent.)

Drydown - Still bold, even as the sillage has decreased. The honey here is swarthy and sweet, and there's something tempering the sweetness that I can't quite put my finger on. I'm a big fan of this blend.

Verdict - I feel like this is a scent journey that follows Wednesday's mead. It's sickly sweet when you sniff it in the bottle, then a punch to the gut, and then it washes over you and you're happily floating along in the stupor of the scent. Perhaps that wasn't the best description, but I quite like this. My coworker commented that it smells like a Leo scent, and I completely agree.

Edited June 17, 2017 by hammy

[Casablanca]

First up on my skin, I get a sweet honeyed mead with a little carbonation. Alongside that, unexpectedly, is a lotta yellow-orange fruitiness: something like nectarine (or maybe peach) and mango. The mango-ish part reminds me of the yellow-orange fruity note from The Glimmer of Northern Lights – that recent Yule with the yellow arctic poppies.

 

The sparkling honeyed mead fades quickly, leaving mainly the fruit for most of the blend’s life on my skin. I never quite pick out any wood. I wish I did: it would help balance the sweetness.

 

I like this scent, but it’s fruitier than what I was looking for.

[Wench457]

Maybe if we combined Casablanca's skin chemistry with mine, we'd hit the sweet spot for this scent. So far I'm getting a lot of herbal woodsiness, with just the barest hint of sweet mead in the background. It's quite nice, just not the meady scent I was expecting. Going to let this one age a bit before retesting.

Edited July 1, 2017 by Wench457

[zankoku_zen]

Herbal woodsiness with a squeeze of orange and a fair bit of honey mead going around. I'm actually digging this one. ALOT. Good throw and wear length.

[Soupy Twist]

In the bottle: Hard to describe. Booze with woody overtones? Like tequila brewed in oak? Goes on as a lemony tonic water — what you'd mix with the booze, I guess. This quickly turns nasty as it dries, becoming lemon floor cleaner and then just wood. Bleah. Where did the honey go?

[LizziesLuck]

Wet: Blarg! It smells like bubblegum?! Why?? No, it's not bubblegum - it smells like sauce. Like that sweet red sauce you dip Chinese chicken balls in. That's what this smells like. Like Chinese food. SO. ODD.

 

 

Dry: Perfumey sweet and sour sauce. Seriously still getting Chinese sauce undertones here, and it's freaking me out. It's perfumey at the same time. I cannot pick out a single note. It's given me a headache. I will revisit this later, but currently it's freakin me out like nothing has since that time Round Dance smelled like hotdogs on me and I couldn't figure out why.

[roseus]

In the imp this was so sweet and fruity it made me recoil. As it dries the honey becomes more recognizable. It smells cherry-red to me. Like candy, or if someone turned the dial up on dragon's blood and mixed it with honey.

[Little Bird]

Goes on smelling rather like pineapple on my skin, with maybe a warm, fuzzy amber note. Something slightly green, herbal and spiky smelling as it dries down (a little reminiscent of sage). Mostly very sweet with a clean, fruity freshness... and... all I can think is pineapple. It's not boozy or honeyed at all to my nose.

[VetchVesper]

Hmmm... this one really matches the passage it was taken from to my nose, and I, like Wednesday and Shadow, don't like it very much. There's a bitter, medicinal herbalness that hits my nose and mixes with a thin honey smell. It does smell vaguely alcoholic, and reminds me, in this stage, of those honey powder drinks that you take when you have a sore throat. Then something deveolops briefly in the background that smells like cat pee or yes, possibly pickles. It fades within a few minutes, and then this starts to get fruity. But it's still got that thin, sweet honey thing going on, so the fruit smells overly ripe, like fruit mush. Also, this one reaally likes me and WILL NOT WASH OFF.

 

Anywho, as evocative as it is of the quote - no thanks. . I will add a disclaimer though - often the lighter smelling honeys don't work well on me, like the honey in Door and the Rappiccini Apiary scents. If you have good luck with those, this might be right up your ally.

[a_bear]

Yup, smells like mead alright, but not the light mead you get at Renn Fest; this is a darker, deeply funky mead, like you find in a dusty, thick ceramic bottle at the back of the liquor store, and best drunk in small quantities, unless you're an actual viking. I would absolutely take a sip of a mead that smelled like this, but as a perfume, it's too much for me.

[groovyrooby]

Holy bubblegum, Batman! Not at all what I expected!! I've actually been avoiding this one in the AG collection, because this passage from the book perfectly describes how honey notes tend to behave on me - so sweet they go sour, like pickle juice, like sweat dried on a cooled-off body. But this! This is the exact opposite! It is crazy sweet on me! Fresh, soft Bazooka Joe bubblegum. It's quite welcome, actually, because all the delicious-sounding candy gourmand scents I want so badly to work turn to burnt plastic on me, and the FOMO is killing me. But this scratches that itch beautifully. Hurray! Gets a little woody up close, almost car-freshener sweet with time. But still wafting longer, sweeter, and with a tinge of fruit (strawberry? definitely pink) than any of the candy scents I've tried. This is a win!