Skip to main content
Drink

Metheglin, or Mead, or Honey Wine

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Metheglin, or Mead, or Honey Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the must

  1. Boil honey in water for 1 hour.

  2. Optionally, add lemon rind, spices, or sweet herbs during boiling.

  3. If using, add hops to refine and preserve.

  4. Skim the mixture carefully and strain through a fine sieve.

Ferment

  1. Once cooled, stir in the yeast.

  2. Use 1 teacup of solid yeast for 9 gallons.

  3. Transfer to a fermentation vessel and let it work, topping up as needed until fermentation subsides.

  4. 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 + 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 sweetness in the finished mead.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving the fermentation.
Hops
Add bitterness and a preservative effect that helps keep the mead stable.

The step that matters

Topping up during fermentation. While the mead works, it foams and loses liquid. Keeping the vessel topped up limits the surface exposed to air, which reduces the chance of spoilage microbes taking hold before fermentation subsides.

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.

More mead recipes

Sarsaparilla 10Cowslip 8Sassafras 7Sack 6 See all 45 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes