Contact the author: scott040877@gmail.com
Introduction
20 years.
That’s how long I’ve been making meads. I’ve been fermenting stuff for a bit longer, going back to 1996 when I started with kit wines with my Dad, but at some point I was told by Master Ragnar that if I wanted to do something all my own from scratch I should look into mead. My degree was in Microbiology with a minor in Biochemistry, and I can definitively say that my favourite of all microorganisms is yeast, one tiny lifeform that has become intricately linked and bound to human civilization. Mead making, fermenting really, appeals to me as someone scientifically minded.
My first mead was made in 2002, a metheglyn based on a recipe I found on the internet called “Halfdan’s Viking Mead”. As soon as it was done fermenting and clearing, I stuck it into bottles and opened one with my family to taste. We all agreed it was not good, so I gave a lot of it away. 10 years later I could have kicked myself because it had turned into absolute ambrosia! I’ve been refining my process, skills, and recipes ever since.
Like many mead makers in the SCA, the first and foremost period manual we are pointed at for learning about medieval recipes is The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby, Knight, Opened (Digby, 2005) thus the homage I’ve made in the title of this paper.
What is Mead?
Mead is the collection of fermented alcoholic beverages which use honey as the primary source of fermentable sugars. It can range in alcohol content from very weak, around 3%, up to very strong, around 18%. It is likely the first alcoholic beverage ever produced; however historical evidence is lacking to prove it definitively (Verberg, 2022).
There is some archaeological evidence for mead which shows the process has been known for a long time, including the discovery of pottery vessels from circa 7000 B.C. containing a mixture of mead, rice, and other fruits (Odinsson, 2010). It’s been a staple of the human experience for a very long time so it is fascinating to see mead getting a revitalization in the present day, both with home brewers like myself and with professional meaderies.
Using honey as a basic sugar to encourage fermentation, the varieties of mead are almost limitless. Most modern meads get named as a portmanteau of the non-honey ingredient plus “mel”[1], like the coffeemel made from coffee beans or capsicumel made with hot peppers. My focus is on medieval mead recipes, therefore I will not be covering these tasty creations
[1] ‘Mel’ is the Latin term for honey.
Types of Mead
Name | Ingredients | Description |
|---|---|---|
Traditional or Show Mead | Honey, water, yeast | This is your most basic mead and where we start. I’d recommend adjusting the acidity and providing the yeast some nutrients which I discuss in later sections. |
Short Mead or Hydromel | Honey, water, yeast | A short mead is brewed with less honey and more water and is generally ready as a drink very quickly. It is drunk young, often bubbly, almost like a refreshing soda pop. |
Great Mead or Sack | Honey, water, yeast | This mead is made with lots of honey, usually more than 3 pounds per gallon, resulting in a higher alcohol content, usually above 14%. You can have dry sack where the yeast had a high alcohol tolerance and fermented all available sugars, and sweet sack where the yeast died off due to exceeding their alcohol tolerance, leaving sugar behind. |
Metheglyn | Honey, water, yeast, spices | This can be where you can really express your creativity and do some experimentation – how many spices do you add? How much? Do you want a clove mead, or just a clove note? How much mint is too much? What would rosemary be like – would it make a savoury mead good for pork? |
Melomel | Honey, water, yeast, fruit | Basically, any mead which incorporates a fruit or fruit juice as its primary flavour. It’s another area where you can really experiment and play around – how much fruit do you use? Do you need or want to put anything else in? There are also some melomels that have specific and well-known names which I list below – but if you go looking you can find ways of making names for other fruit meads. Like raspberry “rubamel”. |
Cyser | Honey, apple cider, yeast | Instead of using water to dilute your honey and ferment, you use apple cider. It is important that you find your cider from a dealer who does not add preservatives – specifically polysorbate which will prevent your fermentation from getting started. The apple cider will bring sugars with it as well, so you need to be aware of how much honey you add to control the final alcohol content you are looking for. |
Pyment or Clarre | Honey, grape or grape juice, yeast | A pyment is a cross-over between mead and wine as you add grapes or grape juice to the must. The grapes will also bring sugars with them, but you need to take care as grapes and grape juice can bring a very sour note into the end product. |
Rhodomel | Honey, water, yeast, rose buds, petals, hips and/or rosewater | Using rose buds, petals, rosehips, or rosewater in the fermentation of the mead produces a rose scented and flavoured mead. You want to use roses that have a strong rose smell because the aroma indicates the flavour the rose will bring to the mead. You can try using fresh picked ingredients if you have access to a sufficient quantity of roses or look for dried online. |
Braggot | Honey, grain mash, yeast | This is a crossover between mead and beer where you use grain mash, like barley, in combination with the honey to ferment a beer-like mead. You can hop it if you like, you can pick stronger flavoured honeys like buckwheat, there’s lots you can try. |
Bochet | Carmelized honey, water, yeast | A mead where the honey is heated to caramelize it and create a completely different flavour profile in the end product. Use caution as, heating honey can be very dangerous.It’s similar to candy making except that honey has a very high boiling point, (160°F+) so a drop of honey on the skin is like lava, and it sticks. |
What else? If you search online, you can find a lot of other possibilities - some are period recreations that fit well with an SCA arts & sciences project, others may be an interesting, fun, enjoyable beverage or experiment - up to you. Capsicumel would be a piquant mead made using hot peppers; coffeemel is pretty much what you expect - neither would be something you'd expect to find served in the courts of King WIlliam the Conqueror, but they could definitely be fun to try.
Bees & Honey
The first ingredient in a mead is honey, the food produced by bees to feed themselves and sustain the hive over the winter. There are over 16,000 species of bees[1], yet only a few species of make honey (Crane, 1990). Over half of all species of bee don’t even form hives; they’re solitary[2], but all bees are important agriculturally for the fertilization of plants; in fact, wild, solitary bees can be even more useful in increasing yields of produce than the honeybees that farmers have imported from other regions (Winston, 2014).
Honey is concentrated flower nectar combined with biological compounds contributed by the bees, like enzymes. As the bees flit from flower to flower, they sip up the nectar through their straw-like mouths and hold it in a sac inside them called the crop. The process of converting the nectar to honey has begun. As the bee flies back to the hive, it regurgitates a little bit of the nectar and the droplet begins the dehydration process as the air flows over it. Back in the hive, the bees regurgitate their collected nectar into cells in the hive. Other worker bees fan their wings over the cells which gradually reduces the moisture content leaving behind the concentrated sugars making the sticky golden syrup we all know as honey. In his 2014 book, “Bee Time: Lessons from the hive”, Mark Winston writes:
“Honeybees are unusual among bees in processing large quantities of nectar into the storage form of honey. Floral nectar is carried back to the nest in the worker bees’ specialized second stomach, where enzymes are added that break down the complex forms of sugar in nectar into simpler, inverted forms of sugar that are easier for bees, and us, to digest. These simple forms of sugar are also better at resisting bacterial attack than more intricate sugars. Other enzymes catalyze the production of tiny amounts of at least two and probably more distinct compounds, hydrogen peroxide and methylglyoxal (MGO), which together prevent bacterial and fungal degradation” (Winston, 2014, p. 21)
Every different flower produces different nectar with different flavour notes. That’s why beekeepers try to field their bees in a location with a plentiful amount of a very specific type of flower so that they can produce honey from that specific flower. So if you’re starting a mead, picking a honey for its flavour profile can give you a different end product. [3]
You may also find distinctive differences between honeys from different seasons of the year – many medieval recipes call for honey collected from the hive in the spring or summer months, suggesting the flavour profile can be used for specific types of mead. Honey flavour profile changes with the flowers the bees are visiting, and different types of flowers bloom at different points throughout the summer. (Veberg, 2020). Medieval mead texts suggest that the bulk of the honey used was spring honey, which would have a comparable flavour to modern wild flower honey. Honeys in the middle ages would also have different grades, the best being “life honey” which would be like a free-run honey, very similar to the modern process using centrifugal force to extract honey from the comb.
Honey can be expensive if you’re getting it from a commercial producer. I encourage you to look for private beekeepers, because you need a significant quantity if you’re going to make a mead. I prefer unpasteurized honey because the delicate floral flavour notes are destroyed in the heating process.
Most period recipes that I have seen talk about mixing the honey with the water and boiling it. I believe that the main reason for this was to kill off any undesirable yeasts or bacteria on the honey; this isn’t as important a consideration if you’re using a commercially produced yeast packet which will out-compete wild yeasts[4] due to its concentrated nature. In the Middle Ages, yeast was either naturally occurring or carried over from other fermentations[5]. This can cause the resulting meads to vary unpredictably, as there are wild yeasts that ferment sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, but there are also wild yeasts and bacteria that produce undesirable chemical compounds. These unwanted yeasts give off-flavours to the mead, or outright spoil it; sometimes they can create acetic acid which will turn a mead into vinegar.
A mead maker would want to know that their source of yeast produces a good mead; is it the wild stuff on grape skins, or floating in the air where your fermentation happens, or from the lees from another successful fermentation to carry over the yeast that did well for you last time. It is possibly that desired yeasts were shared via the lees[6] between different brewers to support the community. Without modern scientific examination, it’s impossible to determine what’s in the honey, so the varieties collected are completely random. Due to the high percentage of hydrogen peroxide in honey, yeast generally can’t tolerate being included for long periods, but it can survive sitting on the surface. Therefore, one should boil the honey to kill off anything unwanted that is in the honey and use the boiling time to skim any scum from the surface[7].
It is important to boil the water for your fermentation to make sure any unwanted organisms or bacteria in the water are killed. In the middle ages they were unaware of spoilage organisms or water borne pathogens, but they did know bad water makes bad mead.To prevent this, they generally used sources of what they considered clean water. Refined commercial yeasts are generally much more robust and they out-compete any wild yeasts, so cross-contamination is not usually a concern for the modern brewer.By boiling the honey, you destroy the natural floral notes from the honey, so I truly feel this step is not necessary and you get a better, tastier mead if you don’t do it.
[1] Danforth et al., 2006 [2] Grimaldi & Engel, 2005 [3] Types of honey commercially available will vary by region, and can include wildflower, buckwheat, clover, blueberry flower, acacia or locust, eucalyptus, orange blossom, Manuka, et cetera. [4] Saccharomyces cerevisiae that naturally grows on plants and insects. [5] The barrels used for brewing were often not sterilized between batches (Contributors, 2022). [6] Lees are deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles that precipitate, or are carried by the action of "fining", to the bottom of a vat of wine after fermentation and aging (Contributors, 2022). [7] Usually comprised of bee parts, wax, and other random inclusions.
Yeast
I love Yeasts. They are an amazing species of eukaryote[1], belonging to the Fungi Kingdom. But they’re a unique member of that kingdom; they don’t form large bodies like mushrooms, or form long fluffy hyphae like moulds in your fridge. They live as individual cells, most reproducing by “budding” in which a new cell buds off the old one. Yeast can be a spoilage organism, they can be found in many places in the environment, and even as an infection in animals[2].
Yeast is a natural microorganism that exists in our environment. Because it feeds on sugars, it can be found where there are sources of sugar such as on the skins of fruit and on the surface of grain husks. Spores from the yeast can also travel on the wind, allowing it to land and grow where it finds a sugar source (Kiefer, 2001). Fermentations that occurred in the middle ages would have gotten their yeast from a few potential sources. For example, an open-air fermentation through air-borne yeast spores, fermentation started from the yeast on fruit or grain, or from a previous fermentation would all be common. In fact, Digby references the process of using a previous fermentation to get your new one started. In his recipe for “An Excellent White Meathe” it says “Then put into it a hot tost of White-bread, spread over on both sides, pretty thick with fresh barm” (Digby, 2005); barm being the frothy yeast foam from the top of a fermenting liquid. The toasted bread plus the barm would have brought nutrients into the mead that the yeast needs to thrive.
The yeasts cooks and brewer are interested in are the ones that eat sugar and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide as waste products. The carbon dioxide produced by yeast is why they are valuable in bread making, creating the bubbles and pockets in breads. In fact, the “bready” flavour in breads actually comes from the yeast and if you leave a wine sitting on the lees[3] or use it for a champagne style in-bottle fermentation, it can impart that bread-flavour to the end product.
The same carbon dioxide production in champagne can be a desirable contribution to meads if you want it to have bubbles. Carbon dioxide is soluble in water, where it exists as carbonic acid; also raising the acidity of the liquid it’s dissolved in. With a bit of agitation, that carbonic acid converts back to gaseous carbon dioxide forming small bubbles in the mead and provides a sparkling feeling on the palate. You can retain effervescence in your mead by bottling it without agitating it to remove the carbon dioxide, or by bottling the mead with enough residual sugar that the yeast will ferment a little in the bottle; that’s how champagne is made. Be very careful with this process, because in-bottle fermentation puts extra pressure inside the bottle and can result in exploded bottles.
Generally, the yeasts used for mead making come from the species under the genus Saccharomyces. Those are the yeasts that are best at eating sucrose, glucose, and fructose, and releasing alcohol and carbon dioxide. There is historical evidence that Saccharomyces cerevisiae as well as a selection of other wild yeasts which were primarily responsible for fermentation in the Middle Ages (Dugan, 2009; Ng, 2004).
Not only are there specific species, but there are specific cultivars or sub-species that are desirable for different end products. The different cultivars and/or variants have differences in what they do in fermentations, having different levels of alcohol tolerance, producing different side compounds, fermenting at different speeds, tolerating different pHs, and handling the lack of nutrients differently.
I use the D47 cultivar of S. cerevisiae which has been called a “Mead Yeast”. According to the manufacturer, Lalvin, it is a yeast that produces polysaccharides in the fermentation contributing to a “round, soft palate” and which help to stabilize aromatic compounds; ideal for a melomel, metheglyn or even a rhodomel. Further, it tolerates up to 15% alcohol, so it will ferment well to a moderate alcohol level suitable for most meads. For example, if you’re making Sack, you will likely want something that ferments to a higher level like a champagne yeast[4], but generally D47 is a happy yeast that tolerates mead conditions pretty well.
I would encourage any mead maker to do a bit of yeast research to decide on which one suits what they want to do. If you want a sweet mead with a low to moderate alcohol level you could look into a beer yeast that stops around 6 % alcohol. Any honey you put in beyond that potential alcohol level will remain unfermented. If you’re making a short mead[5], you might want something that ferments gradually so that it’s still fermenting and bubbly when you serve it. If you know your yeast dies out at a specific percentage of alcohol, once it hits that percentage, you can choose to safely ‘back sweeten’ it; that is, add more honey after the fermentation is finished. So, when fermentation is done, and you taste your mead and think you want a stronger honey note, you can safely add more honey without risking bottle explosions[6].
Generally, the yeast you get from a commercial producer is lyophilized – freeze dried, in a pouch. You have two choices on how to add it into the liquids. You can usually just sprinkle it gently over the top of your must and it will gradually re-hydrate and begin fermenting, or you can “pitch” your yeast, where you mix some warm water (not hot or you’ll kill the yeast) with some honey (or other fermentable sugar) and add your yeast, then mix it up and wait five minutes to begin the fermentation. This is a good way to see that your yeast is healthy – you get it going and can see it foaming up before adding it. I’ve done it both ways and have had it work both ways, so it’s up to you to decide, sometimes through trial and error, what you feel will work the best. I’ve had an older yeast packet that didn’t really catch and have had to add a second, fresher packet by sprinkling it in on top a day later, and the mead still turned out fine.
Yeast also have a preferred temperature for fermentation. If it’s too cold, the fermentation may not start at all, the yeast will be sluggish and potentially dormant. If it’s way too hot, you’ll kill your yeast. If it’s a bit too warm, the Yeast may throw off flavour compounds into the must. My recommendation is to keep the mead at a comfortable room temperature and allow it to ferment slowly. A slower, cooler fermentation will produce fewer off flavours in the mead and will be beneficial to the end product. You’ll be able to tell how well or quickly your fermentation is happening based on the amount of gas being produced. Using an airlock helps you observe this without having to open up the fermenter to check.
[1] Having a nucleus, so not a bacterium. [2] Candidiasis, Thrush, etc. [3] Wine must be removed from the bottle in a timely fashion and strained to remove the detritus of fermentation that settles at the bottom of the container. [4] S. banyans, a yeast sometimes used in beer making as well. [5] A mead produced with a low alcohol by volume ratio, often not more than 5 percent and a short fermentation time. [6] Once sealed, even the strongest bottle may burst under the immense pressure of fermentation, so caution should always be used when handling them.
The Must
Must is what you call the liquid you’re adding the yeast to. Generally, that means honey dissolved in water or fruit juice or a combination of the two, plus any other additives you are using. Most meads are created using water to dissolve the honey, i.e. Sacks, Metheglyns, Hydromels, Rhodomels. My recommendation is to buy a few big jugs of distilled or spring water so you’re avoiding adding any chorine from tap water into your must. It’s not necessarily a show-stopper, but chlorine does not make yeast happy. If you’re trying to avoid off flavours, or are worried about a delicate yeast you’re using, that’s one pressure you can take off by just buying some jugs for your fermentation. You could also boil your tap water to drive off the chlorine but I find the jugs easier. I do put some water into a kettle and boil it, using the boiled water to help melt the honey (if it’s raw, it can be a semi-solid cream). It’s also good for rinsing the residual honey out of the pail to get it into your must; you want every drop. You want to be careful that your must isn’t too hot when you add your yeast, but you also don’t want it to be too cold or else fermentation won’t get going. Generally, room temperature in you house will do just fine, even with the air conditioning running.
Yeast needs nitrogen to build proteins, so providing them with a source of nitrogen compounds like amino acids, that they can readily use can help your mead. Yeasts are, in fact, capable of fixing nitrogen; the process of taking up atmospheric nitrogen dissolved in the must, and “fixing” it into new amino acids. When you starve the yeast of nitrogen sources and make this their only source, the biological pathways they use to survive and fix the nitrogen produce undesirable waste products; a by-product of this pathway is urea which reacts with ethanol to make ethyl carbamate. This is a source of both off flavours and of some residual headaches experienced by those who imbibe the end product. Ideally, you want your yeast to focus their efforts on making alcohol, not on having to activate their nitrogen fixing pathway (Fugelsang), (Lipman, 1911).
In the Middle Ages, fermentation would have typically been done with live yeast from the air, from fruit, or from the lees of a recent fermentation, which is generally a lot of dead yeast and enough living yeast to get the fermentation going again once you give it more sugar. That dead yeast is important; it brings with it lots of nitrogen in a form that is easily taken up by new living yeast. If you’re fermenting at home and you don’t have lees to use, you have some options for getting the nitrogen into your mead. You can buy yeast nutrients from a wine shop but I prefer to buy bulk brewer’s yeast and then take a quarter to half a cup of it and boil it on the stove with water. I bring it to a rolling boil and leave it there for 5 minutes to kill the yeast. I do not want this stuff to compete with the yeast I’m using to ferment as it’s there to replicate the “lees” and provide that nitrogen to the yeast. As I write this, I’m making a rhodomel and I used this exact process – I added the boiled yeast slurry to the primary fermenter. Fermentation is finished and I’m transferring it off the lees[1] . I’ve tasted it; I do not pick up any of the awful, musty-like off flavour that many young meads have. It tastes clean, with exactly the flavours I was going for, so to me, that’s a great success.
Acidity is desirable to keep your yeast happy, and this can require a bit of thought. How much acidity is already coming from your planned ingredients? If you’re using apple cider to make a cyser, you’re probably fine. Same with a black raspberry mead. But a rhodomel, made with rose petals? Or a show mead, sack, or hydromel? You may want to consider adding the juice of a lemon, or two, to your must. You can check the pH with commercially available pH test strips if you want to be sure, but I generally do it based on how much mead I’m making and whether it would be a desirable note in the end product. It’s all about trying to give the yeast as much of the stuff it needs to focus it on just making alcohol. The happier you keep your yeast, the less off flavours it will introduce into your mead – I say this through a lot of trial and experience.
[1] A process known as ‘Racking’ that removes the mead from the leftover materials created during fermentation.
Some other things I've tried
To give you an idea, while I’ve generally kept notes on what I’ve done, I’ve also lost a couple of notes in the last 20 years. So as a completist, I feel like I’m missing a few things that will help explain some of the lessons I’ve learned which I’ve mentioned or discussed above. I once made a metheglyn, likely similar to the ones I’ve got here, but I decided to put in way too many cloves. I’ve noted it under “cloves” in the ingredients section. I wish I still had the recipe, or a bottle of it. It was a real learning experience on knowing your ingredient and thinking hard about how much you want to put into your must. And the trial and error you get to do if you are going to keep coming back and trying again!
I’ve also made more than one Cyser, and I can say I generally enjoy them – they turn out pretty well and age nicely but be careful how much fermentable sugar you give your cysers because you can push yeast too far and generate off flavours called fusel oils.
I’ve made a mead which I put a few oranges into instead of lemons. I got the orange notes, but I don’t recall it being one of the more enjoyable meads I’ve ever made, and I didn’t go back.
I have also tried making relatively plain, wildflower meads and blueberry flower meads. These were traditional or show meads. They were good, but plain. They had good honey notes, but I always found them a little boring compared to some of the more interesting metheglyns and melomels. I also found that terrible off-note that young meads can get due to lack of nutrients was very forward when they were young which always disappointed me.
On the Ingredients
Raspberries: found in Digby circa 1669 as Rasbery, and Rasberries, and as Rasps in Wolley circa 1672. The traditionally widely cultivated European red raspberry is the species Rubus idaeus. There are two species of black raspberry: Rubus occidentalis is native to North America, and Rubus coreanus is native to Korea, Japan, and China (Miquel, 1867). The black raspberries I have used in mead making are R. occidentalis as they were picked from the side of the road in Dundas, Ontario.
Strawberries: Digby lists a recipe for Strawberry wine, and many metheglyns using strawberry leaves.
Lemons: found throughout Digby as Juyce of Limon or Limon-peel, and Wolley as Limon. Lemons were a hybrid from Persia of bitter orange and the citron, which was spread to southern Europe and was farmed in Italy in 1450 (Veberg, 2020).
Oranges: found throughout Digby circa 1669, and Wolley circa 1672.
Apples: early reference to the use of apples in mead in Veberg, 2020, pointing to the primary source, Owen, 1805, which was translated in 1805 from the original Greek text by various authors in 10th CE. Apples are also mentioned throughout Digby and Wolley.
Grapes: mentioned frequently in Digby and referenced throughout Wolley.
Roses: There are many mentions of roses, rose petals, and rose leaves used in a variety of extracts in Digby and Wolley. Rhodomelites are documented in Owen’s Geoponika based on recipes that come from 10th CE (Owen, 1805).
Mixed Spices: Digby, 1669, has a recipe for “An Excellent White Meathe” on page 12 which references cinnamon, ginger, mace, and cloves. The spices are boiled in the water and honey, which would act to extract some flavour from the spices, so if you are not boiling your honey, extracting the spices in boiling water would be period.
Cinnamon: I like to get my hands on true, Ceylon cinnamon, which has a milder, sweeter flavour and crumbles between your fingers, rather than the harsher modern cassia bark that Is called cinnamon in the grocery stores – but you can use either to get the flavour.
Cloves: be careful with these. Cloves have a very strong flavour and can be bitter when the mead is young – I once took a ¼ cup of cloves and extracted them in boiling water before putting them into the must – this made an overwhelmingly clove metheglyn which didn’t mellow for at least 5 to 10 years. The end result was a drink that went very well with meat dishes like pork, and that some people liked and others hated because some people love clove flavour and others do not.
Vanilla: there has been some research which points to vanilla being used even earlier in wines enriched with vanilla in Jerusalem in 586 BCE (Amir, 2022).
Nutmeg: mentioned throughout Digby and Wolley, included in several types of metheglyn.
All Spice: also known as the Jamaica pepper, myrtle pepper, pimento or pimentao was given the name “allspice” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as early as the 1600’s by the English, based on the flavours being similar to cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. It is native to Jamaica and would have been introduced to Europe when sailors began contacting the Caribbean.
Tannins: You can find many recipes that try to bring tannin notes into meads. Tannins or tannoids are a class of astringent, polyphenolic compounds that are typically found in wines. They are heavily present in red grapes, grape stems, and can come from oak aging in barrels. Tannins can also be found in many other plant parts, and you can find a lot of recipes in Digby that call for various plant parts like strawberry leaves which would impart tannins into the must. (McGee, 2004)
Raisins: Bringing all the concentrated flavours one would expect from dried grapes, they also bring concentrated tannins into the must (Digby, 2005).
Oak Aging – If you have access to real oak barrels for bulk aging your mead, you’re a far step further ahead from me! If you want to try and bring an oak flavour into your mead, you can buy oak chips from a wine shop: they sell both French and American oak. You can even toast them in a frying pan to get those toasty oak notes into your mead. I know it’s cheating, but for some making mead it’s the closest they can easily get to really aging in an oak barrel and if that’s the flavour profile you are hoping to bring out because the recipe you’re following would have been aged in an oak barrel, I say go for it. There are many references to making mead in a barrel or storing it in a barrel for a period of time in Digby. These barrels would have been made by a cooper out of wood, most likely oak, which would have provided the same oak-aged flavours that are found in modern day wines (Kilby, 1971).
Notes on Equipment
Sterilization
The most important thing you can do to support a successful fermentation is sterilizing your equipment. You need to kill off any spoilage organism that could get into your must and result in terrible, undrinkable mead. You’re investing your time and money and labour into this; you want it to work. You want to clean your equipment with soap before putting it away. Before using it for a fermentation, you can sterilize with boiling water, or you can buy sodium metabisulfite from a local wine making store and rinse down all your equipment before fermenting or using it for racking or stirring. A spray bottle is handy for this. You’ll want to rinse the sodium metabisulfite off with hot tap water before you introduce your ingredients because you don’t want it in your must; it will add an unwanted chemical taste.
A note book
Hugely important to any mead maker; you want to record what you did, what recipe you used, the date you did each step, and any observations you have along the way. Then you can refer back to your notes and decide what worked and what didn’t, so you can change it the next time.
Airlock
A rubber stopper or bung with an air trap in it that allows carbon dioxide from the fermentation to get out but has sanitary liquid in it to keep air from going back into the fermenter to keep spoilage organisms out.
Primary fermentation vessel
The first stage of fermentation is usually pretty vigorous, meaning lots of bubbling and frothing. So fermenting in a big pail with a tightly fitting lid and an airlock will allow the frothing and bubbling to occur. If you were to do this in a carboy, it could force liquid up through the bung and airlock and make a huge mess.
Carboy
These large glass containers are where you finish your fermentation. After fermentation starts to slow down in the primary fermenter after a week or two, you can “rack it”; syphon it off the lees in the primary into the carboy to complete the fermentation. The carboy has sloped shoulders and a very small opening. It helps to reduce the amount of head-space, so that the mead isn’t exposed to significant oxygen which can attack the flavours in the mead and change it in undesirable ways.
Siphon
Lots of different options, but generally a long straight piece of plastic food grade hose that you can use to gently move the mead from one container to another. You need to have your receiving vessel lower than the fermenter where the mead is so that you create a gravity pull on the liquid, which will move from the higher position to the lower position. When you syphon, you want to be careful not to disturb the sediment because that’s what you want to leave behind as it settles out of your mead.
Long spoon
Good for scooping the honey into the primary fermenter and mixing up the must and ingredients. Plus, you can use it to “beat” the mead at the end of the fermentation to drive off the residual dissolved carbon dioxide so that your mead doesn’t have bubbles from carbonation.
Cheese Cloth
If you are adding a lot of bits and pieces and you want an easy way to pull it out of the fermenter so it doesn’t clog up the syphon, you can put all the ingredients you’re using into a cheese cloth bag. You can also strain chunky fruit out of your fermenter into cheesecloth and then use it to squeeze the fruit to get any more flavour out of it into your fermenting must. Be careful, this can make your end product cloudier, taking longer to clear, and some fruits will add bitter notes if you squeeze them out.
Hydrometer
This is a calibrated glass bulb with a long rod with markings inside that floats higher when there is more sugar dissolved in your must and drops lower and lower until all the sugars are eaten and turned into alcohol. Mead should start at a specific gravity up near 1.084 g/cm3 and it will always finish at 1.000g/cm3 or a little lower. There are other dissolved compounds which can affect specific gravity, but generally it is the sugar content that is making the biggest impact. There are other ways of determining if your must has sufficient sugars present for your end goal and a lot of period recipes will talk about putting a whole egg into the must to see how high it floats. You can use these methods if you like, or you can just know that the recipe calls for 10 lbs of honey and let the fermentation go without recording anything about specific gravity – it’s up to you. But once you know that 10 lbs of honey in 20 L of water gives you 11% alcohol, you may not need a hydrometer.
Floating thermometer
Again, not essential, but if you are concerned about the temperature of your mead, if you’re concerned about getting the fermentation going or keeping it in the right range for the yeast, dropping a floating thermometer into the must to check the temperature is always a good option to have, especially if you’re new to it or are trouble shooting.
Bottle filler
There are a number of options but generally you need some way to get the mead out of your carboy and into bottles. There is a really handy doohickey that you can attach to the end of some food grade plastic hose that has a stop-valve in the end. Once you get the syphon hose filled with mead, you can put this wand into a bottle and it will start filling so long as you use the gravity method mentioned above. Once you pull the stop-valve up off the bottom, the liquid stops flowing, but the syphon hose remains primed for the next bottle.
Corker
You have to have a way to seal your bottle, and I have found corking my bottles to be perfectly acceptable. I have only ever had one bottle go “off” so I’ve found corked bottles to be pretty stable. There are other options, including crimp caps (like beer bottles) and self-sealing bottles like Grolsch bottles where there’s a stopper on the bottle, so see what works for you.
My Recipes
These are some of the things I've tried - I encourage you to play around and see what works for you, what you like and what you don't like - hopefully I've given you a few ideas about what you might do differently than I did!
I have pails and carboys designed for 5 gallon (or 23 L) batches and I've always made big batches which produce around 30 bottles - but you can scale down if you want to experiment - so don't think you have to go as big as I did! Many mead makers I know have great results working in 1 gallon batches, so if that's your speed, fill your boots!
Halfdan’s Viking Metheglyn
15 lbs honey 5 cloves 2 sticks of cinnamon 2 whole nutmegs ½ teaspoon powdered mace 2 lemons – juice and peels 2 vanilla beans 2 in piece of sliced ginger ½ cup brewer’s yeast Bring to 23 L with water
Boil the brewer’s yeast with water for 5 minutes. Add the honey to the primary fermenter with some boiled water to melt it. Add all ingredients to the honey and then bring up the volume to 23 L (5 gallons). Sprinkle your fermentation yeast (d47 works well) on top. You can check the specific gravity at this moment, which will allow you to know pretty clearly what the final alcohol percentage will be. Fit with lid and airlock. Once the fermentation slows down (after about a week or so) you can rack it into a carboy to continue the fermentation.
A note – This mead is full of different flavours. It may not be great when the fermentation is finished. But have some patience, it will change over time. After a couple of years it will be good. After 10 it may be spectacular. The spices in a metheglyn bring all kinds of compounds which work together and change with age, some notes coming forward, others mellowing.
Cyser
10 lbs honey 1 to 3 sticks of cinnamon 6 cloves Bring to 23 L with unpasteurized apple cider – no polysorbate
Add all ingredients to the primary fermenter and add yeast, ferment to dryness. I like the cinnamon and clove notes in my cyser – but you can leave them out, or play around with how much, even add other spices.
A note on polysorbate - it is added to apple cider specifically to prevent fermentation - it won't let yeast grow - that keeps the bottles in the supermarket from blowing up until it dissipates or some other spoilage organism takes over. So it is not your friend if you're trying to ferment!
Black Raspberry Melomel
10 to 15 lbs honey 4 lbs black raspberries
Bring to 23L with water
You can put the black raspberries directly into the primary fermenter, add the honey and bring up to 23 L with water. You can mash them with the spoon to break up the raspberries and release their juices, but you can also put them into the freezer to break up the cells in the raspberries, although they wouldn’t have had freezers in period, so likely the more traditional way would have been to mash the fruit. The more fruit you put in, the stronger the flavour and the colour, so it would be interesting to experiment. Black raspberries have a unique flavour, different from their red cousins, and they impart a tremendous colour to the mead. While the native North American variety may not have made its way to medieval Europe, it is conceivable that the far eastern variety, R. coreanus, may have been available during the middle ages. Whatever the case, it was a freely available ingredient and it tastes great, so I took it and made mead with it. And it was especially meaningful that I handpicked the fruit to make a mead, which felt even more like what a person in the middle ages would have done – a tasty fruit on hand, hand-picked, abundant, needing to be preserved to be enjoyed long term, make it into a mead.
I just started a new black raspberry last week (July 2023) and used about 2.5 kg of black raspberries and 12 lbs of honey. The specific gravity was 1.080 which will result in about 10% alcohol - maybe a little higher, because some sugars were tied up in the berries which will break down during fermentation.
Strawberry Melomel
10 to 15 lbs honey 10 cups strawberries
Bring to 23L with water
I recommend using more than 10 cups – strawberry flavour is not very concentrated in each berry, so the more fruit you add, the stronger the strawberry flavour in the resulting mead.
Mild Metheglyn
10 to 15 lbs honey 3 lbs sultana raisins 6 lemons juiced 10 cinnamon sticks 1 tsp clove 25 allspice berries
Bring to 23L with water
You can add the raisins and spices to boiling water to “extract” flavour before you add it to the must. This can result in a stronger flavour, but sometimes pulls out more bitter flavours which will take aging of the mead to go away. Keep good notes and if you don’t like the results, do it different next time.
Rhodomel
10 lbs honey 4oz dried “golden-rim” rosebuds – food grade, purchased from Amazon 2 lemons juice and peel 1 stick Ceylon cinnamon ½ cup nutritional yeast boiled for 5 minutes
Bring to 23L with water
Soak the rosebuds in boiled water for 5 minutes while getting the other ingredients into your primary fermenter. Transfer all other ingredients into the fermenter, bring to 18 L with water – I used less water for this mead because I only had 10 lbs of honey for it and wanted to keep the alcohol level at 11%. Note, the roses are imparting flavour and scent to the mead, but the rosebuds I used did not transfer any “rose” colour to the must. I will need to do experimentation in the future to discover whether different colour roses might impart colour. I went with the lemon for acidity hoping it only mildly flavours the end mead, same with the cinnamon – just a hint, because I didn’t want metheglyn, I wanted a rhodomel.
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