Drinking Horns

[Cormac]

Does anyone have methods for cleaning the inside of steer (cow) horns that will be used for drinking? Tandy Leather has 12" horns for a reasonable price. However, they often come with "schmutz" in them.

Secondly, is there a need to coat the insides after they're cleaned?

[Comyn]

Sabha did some research on this last year. She said she remembers boiling them, but not much else - she said to try one of the SCA sites for details. We coated ours - the horn can't then absorb stuff which might give subsequent drinks off-flavors, and you don't end up with random 'schmutz' floating in your drink. We used paraffin which withstands a higher temperature than beeswax (um, who's drinking coffee out of their horns!?). If you come up with some horn hardware, I'd love to see it.

[BroganTDB]

One way of getting the crap out is filling it part way with gravel and shaking it. That will act like a kinda sandpaper and scrape the junk off. Then coat it with bees wax. Mine came out great.
~Brogan

[Cormac]

Brogan - Oh, I like that idea. The last horn (which I made a "horn" out of) had junk in it that I was never able to fully get out. Now, I had soaked it in bleach/water so given that I wasn't drinking from it, it was "good enough". But, this is a little different.

Comyn - What sort of horn hardware did you have in mind? Banding on the horn, stands, or something else?

[Comyn]

I'm sure Aonghus would be able to point you to something from our time period (the Cavanaugh horn is much later I think), these are from Hochdorf (530BC), basically metal bands to attach straps to, and to protect the opening of the horn, perhaps a finial of some kind at the tip. There are lots of Viking examples which seem fairly similar.

note: link dead as of 170114