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Drink

Mead Wine

A fermented honey beverage made with water, 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 Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the must

  1. Dissolve the honey in the water.

  2. Add the hops and simmer gently for 1 hour.

  3. Transfer to an earthenware bowl and let it cool to milk-warm.

  4. Stir in the yeast.

Ferment

  1. Cover and let it sit for 3 days.

  2. Strain the liquid into a cask and bung loosely until fermentation subsides.

Age and bottle

  1. Tighten the bung and let the wine age in the cask for 12 months.

  2. Rack off carefully into bottles.

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 sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol, and most of the sweetness and body.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving fermentation.
Dried hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the mead.

The step that matters

Let it cool to milk-warm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid. Cooling the must to milk-warm keeps the yeast alive so it can start fermenting promptly.

“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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