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Drink

Mbthbqlin, or Mead, or Honey Wine

A fermented beverage made by boiling honey with water, optionally adding hops, yeast, lemon rind, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Honey and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,707 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Mbthbqlin, or Mead, or Honey Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the must

  1. Boil honey in water for 1 hour.

  2. Skim carefully, draining the skim through a fine sieve, and return what runs through.

  3. When cool, stir in the yeast.

  4. For 9 gallons, use 1 teacup of solid yeast.

  5. Optionally, add thinly shaved lemon rind while boiling or flavor with spices or sweet herbs.

Ferment

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

  2. Cover with brown paper and monitor.

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 + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,707 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Hops + lemontop 40% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. 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 fermentable sugar that the yeast turns into alcohol, and the body of the mead.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the honey into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma and helps preserve the mead.

The step that matters

Skim carefully. Boiling honey and water brings impurities and wax to the surface as foam. Removing them cleanly, and straining through a fine sieve, keeps the mead clear and reduces off-flavours in the finished drink.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (honey, hops):

  1. Grapefits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against honey, hops. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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