(translated by u/ralfv)
These are mead recipes from German and French manuscripts and printed books, written between about 1350 and 1581, translated into English as closely as the originals allow. Read this page before you brew one of them. It explains what you are looking at and what the yeast of the time could actually do.
Every other recipe in this wiki gives you a batch size, a target gravity, a nutrient schedule and a yeast. These don't, and that's deliberate. What you get is what the cook or cellar master wrote down 500 to 700 years ago: the ratios, the steps, the odd details, and the gaps. Nothing has been converted, filled in or "improved". Where we had to add a word for the sentence to make sense, it's in [square brackets]. Where a reading is uncertain, there's a (?), and the Notes under each recipe say why.
Why not modernize them? Because once you swap in what you think the author meant, you lose what he actually wrote. There's a nice cautionary tale about exactly this: a published modern version of the Würzburg mead (the first recipe below) quietly added apple and grape juice and dropped the hops and sage that are plainly in the text. An article in EXARC Journal (Stull 2017) called that reinterpretation rather than editing. We'd rather hand you the text and let you make your own calls.
So these pages are for experienced mead makers and for anyone who enjoys a bit of an experiment. If you're making your first batch, start with the beginner recipes and come back later.
The modern way. Take the ratios, scale them to your batch size, and brew with everything you'd normally use: a yeast you trust, a nutrient schedule, proper sanitation, a hydrometer. Everything in the rest of this wiki applies. You'll get a mead that tastes like the recipe intended, made with tools the author never had. Perfectly legitimate, and the easiest way to find out what a 14th-century hopped sage mead actually tastes like.
The historical way. The academic name for this is experimental archaeology: you work with period ingredients, period methods and period kit as far as you can, and you see what happens. Raw or lightly strained honey, water, the herbs named, no nutrients, a wooden vessel, yeast the way they got it (more on that below), and a hand instead of a thermometer. It's slower and less predictable, and it teaches you a lot. If you go this way, write things down: what you did, what you measured, what went wrong. That's the part that makes it useful to the next person.
Most people end up somewhere in between, and that's fine too. Just say which way you went when you share your results.
These were written for people who already made mead or wine every year. They skip anything a professional would find obvious. A few things that come up again and again:
This is the part most people get wrong. The common assumption goes: back then nobody knew about yeast, so everything was a wild ferment that you left to its own devices, and it stalled at 5% and went sour half the time.
The recipes say otherwise. Several of them pitch on purpose:
They didn't know yeast was a living thing; that came with Pasteur in the 1850s and 60s. But they knew perfectly well that the foam off an active ale ferment makes your mead go, and that a vessel that has fermented before will ferment again. Barm from the brewhouse next door was a top-fermenting ale yeast, kept alive by constant reuse. That's not a wild culture, it's the medieval equivalent of a house strain.
And the recipes that don't mention yeast at all? Those were written for households with a working cellar, and their casks fermented wine or mead every year. The wood of a cask holds on to its yeast; no medieval cleaning gets it out. A cellar population like that has been through years of fermentations and has been selected, without anyone intending it, for strains that can handle alcohol. That's a domesticated culture, just an invisible one. (This is our reading, not something the texts state. But it's what working cellars do to this day.)
The real "wait and see" ferment is wild flora off fruit or from the air. That's mostly non-Saccharomyces yeasts that give up somewhere around 4 to 6% and leave sugar behind. Starting a boiled honey must with nothing but air is slow too. I once had 20 litres of raw cherry mash, full of wild yeast straight off the fruit, sit there for 36 hours without a single bubble; a strong wine yeast starter got it going within about six hours. A boiled must has even less going for it.
What that means for you:
My favourite thing about these texts: with nothing but a kitchen and a cellar, people were doing things that science only explained centuries later. They didn't have the theory. They had generations of watching what works.
| What the recipe says | What we'd call it today |
|---|---|
| Add water until a fresh egg floats and just shows (Bavaria) | Measuring gravity. The egg is the hydrometer. |
| Boil a little yeast in a bag in the must, "not too much of it" (Bavaria) | Boiled yeast as nutrient: dead yeast feeding the live yeast. (If the word really means yeast; see the recipe's Notes.) |
| Pitch when you can just bear your hand in it (Würzburg, Bavaria) | Pitching temperature: warm enough for a fast start, not hot enough to kill the yeast. |
| Take the foam off a working ale, or a starter that has "got its cap" (Paris, Bavaria, Nuremberg) | Propagating a yeast culture, long before Pasteur showed yeast was alive. |
| Ferment in a cask that has fermented before | A resident cellar yeast, selected over years for alcohol tolerance. |
| Top it up every evening, then rack it off the yeast (Würzburg) | Keeping air and vinegar bacteria out, and getting the mead off the lees. |
None of this was written down as theory. It's just there in the steps, and it works.
Not from the texts. We worked these out from the honey-to-liquid ratios in the recipes, using the same figure as the Meadcalc example elsewhere in this wiki: 18 lb of honey in 5 gallons gives 1.129, so about 36 points per pound per gallon. A litre of honey weighs about 1.42 kg (3.1 lb). They ignore any boiling down unless the recipe says how much, so treat them as ballpark figures.
| Recipe | Ratio in the text | Rough OG |
|---|---|---|
| Hopped Sage Mead | 1 honey : 2 water, then boiled | 1.140 or higher |
| Noble Mead, Boiled Down by a Third | 1 honey : 2 water, boiled down by a third | around 1.210 |
| Hopped Red Mead | 1 honey : 3 water | around 1.105 |
| Spiced Bochet, first recipe | 6 pints honey to 6 sextiers (48 pints) finished | around 1.050, less after caramelizing |
| Spiced Bochet, second recipe | 1 honey : 3 water, boiled down by a tenth | around 1.120 |
| Egg-Test Mead with Beer Barm | water added until an egg shows | roughly 1.070 to 1.100 |
| Nutmeg and Cinnamon Mead | about 1 honey : 12 water | around 1.040 |
| Rose and Laurel Berry Mead | 1 honey : 6 water, plus extra honey for colour | 1.060 or a little higher |
The juniper drink from Meister Hans uses a single measure of honey (or half a pound of sugar) for a cask of several hundred litres. That's a lightly sweetened "water drink", as the text calls it, not a mead in the modern sense.
| Date | Recipe | Origin | Style |
|---|---|---|---|
| c. 1350 | Hopped Sage Mead | Würzburg | Metheglin (hops, sage) |
| c. 1389 | Hopped Red Mead | Nuremberg | Hopped, caramelized honey for colour |
| c. 1393 | Spiced Bochet | Paris | Bochet, spiced |
| c. 1450 | Noble Mead, Boiled Down by a Third | Lake Constance | Traditional |
| c. 1450 | Buolach's Spiced Cherry Mead | Lake Constance | Melomel (cherry), spiced |
| mid-15th c. | Egg-Test Mead with Beer Barm | Bavaria | Traditional |
| mid-15th c. | Green Mead from Young Bees' Honey | Bavaria | Traditional |
| 1460 | Juniper and Zedoary Small Mead | Württemberg | Metheglin (juniper, zedoary) |
| c. 1487 | Blackberry Honey Wine, Boiled Twice | Southern Germany | Melomel (blackberry) on wine |
| 1543 | Nutmeg and Cinnamon Mead | Germany | Metheglin (nutmeg, cinnamon) |
| 1581 | Rose and Laurel Berry Mead | Frankfurt | Metheglin (rose, laurel berries), caramelized honey |
How to read the translations:
The translations come from fyndling.de, a project translating historical cookbooks, and are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 like the rest of this wiki. Each page credits the transcription the translation was made from. The original-language texts, German translations, facsimiles and a fuller commentary are on fyndling.de (in German; Google Translate does a decent job).