Willowdale Forge

Hey all, Zoe here - the other half of this blog, and I decided to try my hand at posting - particularly my little mead-making project. Even though Mac is the medieval drinks expert, I just like mead as a drink and I feel like a potion-brewing witch when I make it. Beer was the more popular drink during the middle ages, as it was cheaper and more widely available, but I think it's nasty and who doesn't want to feel like Early English royalty?

As I dug into mead-making, I fell into a SUPER deep medieval-mead-making rabbit hole. I'm not a mead expert, and I'd highly recommend Susan Varberg's blog, Medieval Mead & Beer, for a very, very in-depth look at how to make medieval mead. HOWEVER, all that said, I did collect some research and played with it myself. Plus, I made some of my own recipes.

So. Mead. What is it? Fermented honey water, in its most basic form. Honey-wine, it can be called to those who aren't familiar. There's a lot of other names mead has when it's mixed with other things:

Mead – water, honey and yeast

Sack Mead – mead made with extra honey

Short Mead – low honey and low alcohol yeast to be drunk quickly

Hydromel – watered down mead (in period, another word for mead)

Braggot – (period) ale refermented with honey; (modern) malted mead

Melomel – mead made with fruit

Mulsum – mead made with fruit

Cyser – mead made with apples

Metheglin – mead with spices

Pyment, Clar – mead made with grape juice

Hippocras – spiced wine, sweetened (but not fermented) with honey

Botchet — caramelized honey mead

Really, though, when you see it on the shelf, a pumpkin melomel will be marketed as "Pumpkin Mead," so really only the brewmasters get into the weeds on the names. I was really curious as to how the ingredients were sourced in the middle ages - nowadays, brewers get really into where they source their ingredients (there's a bazillion different yeasts you can use!), but after doing some research, turns out the medievals were too!

Honey.

The medievals categorized honey in different ways. The best quality honey was called "life honey" and was the honey that dripped freely from the wax when pierced. Grades of honey diminished as the honey became harder to get out of the hive. The dregs of honey (collected by heating the frame in water to blend the honey but not melt the wax) was given to servants and was not preferred. Honey was also categorized by location - Egyptian honeys were very popular and expensive. Honey from different regions in Spain were considered of different quality - one merchant got particularly fussy when one of his batches was "spoiled" by mixing honey from a better region with that from a worse region. Finally, honey was categorized by flower type. One monetary requested honey made only from lavender. Since hives were highly mobile frames or skeps, it would have been possible for apiarists to move their hives to lavender fields.

Water.

Water is, well, water. Right? Not quite. Medieval recipes do specify using fine, spring water. The water and honey were often boiled together - likely to kill bacteria. However, the wording on "boille" is not super clear. Mead-masters knew that honey shouldn't be boiled (it kills natural yeast), so whether or not the must (the water/honey mix) was boiled in the modern sense or just warmed is unclear. Perhaps the need for "fine, spring, fresh water."

Yeast.

While modern brewers and vintners have a wide variety of yeasts to choose from, medieval brewmasters didn't have as many options. There were a few different options, however. Baking yeast (like a sourdough starter) was one option, while other recipes call for the leftover lees of wine/mead batches. Hops were also used. Of course, yeast is also naturally occurring, so brewers could fairly reliably rely on the natural yeast to kick-start itself.

I'll dump my own mead pics here and then get into the details of a Middle English mead recipe in part two, I guess. I'll talk a bit about the mead-making process, too. Mead is made by mixing honey and water into a must. Then, yeast is added. Modern mead-makers also add yeast nutrients and other additions to ensure their batch doesn't get infected.

A newly made bottle of mead. Notice the cloudy colour characteristic of new mead. As the yeast eats the sugars, they'll create a bottom layer of debris and the mead will clear, as seen below.

After the primary fermentation has occurred (you can tell when the bubbles of gas, telling you the yeast is eating, have stopped), mead-makers will re-reack their mead. This involves moving it from one jug to the next.

At this point, the mead can be put into a closet and age for a while. The best meads have high clarity - that is, they're clear! The example below is only about 2 months old. It has a way to go, but has good clarity already. Notably, the sagas state that the best, oldest, clearest meads were served to Odin and the gods.

Anyway - that's the basics of mead-making. I'll make a part two about older recipes! Sources:

Beekeeping in late medieval Europe: A survey of its ecological settings and social impacts. Llu.s SALES I FAVÀ, Alexandra SAPOZNIK y Mark WHELAN

Trade, taste and ecology: honey in late medieval Europe. Alexandra Sapoznik, Lluís Sales i Favà & Mark Whelan