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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?

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.

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

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?

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