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Drink

Mead, Melheglin, or Honey Wine

A fermented beverage made from honey, water, optional hops, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Honey and hops work together. They rank in the top 41% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Mead, Melheglin, or Honey Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the must

  1. Boil honey in water for 1 hour.

  2. Skim carefully and drain the skimmings through a fine sieve.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then stir in the yeast.

Ferment

  1. Transfer to a fermentation vessel and let it work, filling it up until fermentation subsides.

  2. Cover with brown paper and monitor the fermentation.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Honey + hopstop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1 recipe

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Honey
Provides the sugars that the yeast ferments into alcohol, and most of the body of the mead.
Yeast
Converts the sugars in the honey into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed or stressed by very hot liquid. Cooling the boiled honey and water to a warm, safe temperature before stirring in the yeast keeps the culture alive so fermentation can start.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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