How to Make Mead From a Seventeenth Century Recipe

One of the great things about Mead making is the whole tradition of it. Mead has been made for centuries and quite possibly millennium. You can easily find and follow these recipes with just a little variation for modern times and tools.

I have chosen a recipe that comes from a book called “From the Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened”. It is a collection of recipes for making a variety of meads and metheglins. This recipe is one of the easiest to make. If you want to check out the book and see more of the recipes the complete book is freely available on the Gutenberg project website.Here is the recipe as Sir Digby explains it:

TO MAKE EXCELLENT MEAD

"To every quart of Honey, take four quarts of water. Put your water in a clean Kettle over the fire, and with a stick take the just measure, how high the water cometh, making a notch, where the superficies toucheth the stick. As soon as the water is warm, put in your Honey, and let it boil, skimming it always, till it be very clean; Then put to every Gallon of water, one pound of the best Blew-raisins of the Sun, first clean picked from the stalks, and clean washed. Let them remain in the boiling Liquor, till they be throughly swollen and soft; Then take them out, and put them into a Hair-bag, and strain all the juice and pulp and substance from them in an Apothecaries Press; which put back into your liquor, and let it boil, till it be consumed just to the notch you took at first, for the measure of your water alone. Then let your Liquor run through a Hair-strainer into an empty Wooden-fat, which must stand endwise, with the head of the upper-end out; and there let it remain till the next day, that the liquor be quite cold. Then Tun it up into a good Barrel, not filled quite full, but within three or four fingers breadth; (where Sack hath been, is the best) and let the bung remain open for six weeks with a double bolter-cloth lying upon it, to keep out any foulness from falling in. Then stop it up close, and drink not of it till after nine months.”

Now here is my translation and explanation of how to make this mead recipe. I will stick close to his quantities, which will give us about 1 gallon of Mead. You can easily translate this if you want to make a 5-gallon batch.

Put four quarts of water in a pot and heat it. Mark the side of the pot at the water level. Add 1 quart of honey to the water and bring it very gently to a boil. Skim off anything that rises to the surface. Put 1 pound of white raisins in a nylon straining bag (or a doubled cheesecloth bag) and drop into the water. When they are swollen and soft remove them from the boiling water and press all the juices out of them. Add all these juices into the boiling mead. Continue to boil the batch down to the mark you made on the pan. This is the four-quart level. Once this is done cool the liquid and strain it into a fermentation bucket for six weeks. After this the fermentation should be almost complete and you can transfer it to a carboy or bottle it where you keep it for nine months before drinking.

Now here are some suggestions I have for varying from the exact recipe, which is an update to modern times without losing any of the ancient taste.

First off, Digby doesn't say anything about yeast! If you are a mead maker you must be wondering how are we going to ferment without yeast. Well, in those days they just took advantage of naturally occuring yeast bacteria that were in the air and the utensils but I don't recommend you do this. We live in a much cleaner world and we want to exercise more control over our Mead so I suggest you pitch a yeast into your batch once it has cooled. Almost any yeast will work including Lalvin D-47 or even Fleischmanns bread yeast. (Just follow the pitching instructions that come with the yeast.)

Secondly, he uses blue raisins, which are a bit difficult to come by so I recommend you switch to some more run of the mill, and readily available raisins. The raisins do have an effect on the taste but more importantly they act as a nutrient; so other types of raisins can be used quite successfully.

Finally, about the whole boiling thing. You can successfully do this whole recipe without any of the boiling or heating of anything. Personally I think your mead will be just as good. The reason why Digby boils is because he has to. He got his water from a well and his honey was no doubt heavily contaminated with all kinds of stuff. His boiling of materials would sanitize and clean everything that would compete with the yeast that is desirable to grow. Your sanitizing needs are greatly reduced if you are pitching a real yeast in the brew and you are going to be using extraordinarily clean honey and water by his standards.

If you read the Digby book you will see that he claims this mead to be a good cure for consumption and other ailments. While I won’t make the same claim, and I don’t even know what consumption is I will claim that you will end up with quite a delicious mead you can be proud of. And it is Mead you can brag to your friends about because it came from a seventeenth century recipe.