How to Brew Your Mead Like a Viking: 3 Bold Recipe Variants

From advancedmixology.com

The oldest alcoholic concoction in the world, mead’s history can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Evident in the Scandinavian culture, literature, and mythology, mead played a vital role in the lives of Vikings. How to make Viking mead during the medieval period is an exciting process that many of us would like to know.

It is well-known that Vikings brewed their own drinks, including mead. By combining honey, yeast, and natural flavourings and allowing the mixture to ferment, they make Viking mead the traditional way. What set the Viking mead apart from the conventional mead we all know and love are the ingredients and how brewers during that time procured them.

Honey and Beekeeping

Vikings were knowledgeable when it comes to beekeeping. They used skeps or coiled domes of straw for the honeycombs. They would then collect the honeycombs from the beehive and place them in a cloth bag, allowing them to drain as much honey as possible. To get every drop of honey, they would crush the drained honeycombs (and sometimes, even the beehive) and put them into a pot of water.

The pure raw honey would produce the highest quality of mead, while the crushed combs and beehive would make mead with lesser character. But both meads would be consumed accordingly.

Traditional Flavourings and Additives

In addition to the ones that they could grow in their homelands, Vikings had access to various ingredients, thanks to their extensive trading routes. Common fruits they used for the mead include raspberries, elderberries, cherries, hawthorn berries, crabapple, rowan berries, and rose hips.

For added flavouring and preserving effects, Vikings tried adding herbs to their mead. They also traded for exotic spices such as cumin, pepper, and cardamom, which they could have used for their mead-brewing.

Wild Yeast

Today, brewers can easily buy packaged yeast and yeast nutrients from grocery stores. Vikings, on the other hand, did not have this luxury. In fact, during their time, they didn’t even know what yeast was and that they needed it to make their mead. They could have drawn wild yeast from the raw honey, fruits, and herbs to their mead must, initiating fermentation without realising it.

Here is a mead starter recipe by Jereme Zimmerman—a writer and traditional brewing revivalist who advocates natural and holistic home brewing. This mead starter, as the name suggests, can help in instigating fermentation in your wild mead. You can use it as a replacement for store-bought yeast and brew your mead just like a Viking.

How to Make Viking Mead

Ingredients

• ½ cup Raw, unfiltered honey
• 2 cups Spring water
• Natural yeast - any organic fresh or dried berries, grapes, or plums
• An additional source of wild yeast and nutrients (Optional) – a small bunch of any wild, unsprayed botanical such as wildflower petals (violets and dandelions are good)

Equipment

• 1-quart (at least) Open-mouthed vessel (glass jars or ceramic crocks are best)
• Wooden stir stick
• Clean cheesecloth, towel, or t-shirt for covering the vessel

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Put the honey and room temperature water into the open-mouthed vessel and mix them.
2. Use the stir stick to dissolve the honey fully.
3. Add the berries, dried or fresh, and the optional botanicals.
4. Place the vessel in a warm, dark place with no direct sunlight. An ideal temperature is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit or 21 degrees Celsius.
5. Cover it with a cloth.
6. Keep the stir stick accessible as you will need to stir the must at least three times a day. This way, you can incorporate any yeast that has dropped in into the mead must. It will also provide aeration to ensure a healthy fermentation.
7. After about five days (or longer during the winter), once the mixture is fizzy and foamy, your mead starter is ready.

Viking Mead Recipe Variations

Now that you already have the wild yeast to help with the fermentation, here are three simple recipes on how to make Viking mead using botanicals that you can easily find in nature.

1. Juniper Hibiscus / Hawthorn Berry and Flower Semi-Sweet Mead

This recipe uses hawthorn berries, an ingredient that the Vikings used to add to their mead during the medieval period. It will yield one gallon of semi-sweet mead. 

Ingredients

• 1 quart (about 2.3 pounds) Wildflower honey
• 1 gal Spring water
• 1 oz. Dried juniper berries
• 1 oz. Dried hibiscus flowers or 2 oz. fresh
• 0.5 oz. Meadowsweet
• 0.5 oz. Yarrow
• 4-5 Raisins
• ¼ - ½ cup Wild mead starter or 1 packet (5 g) of Lalvin D-47 or Lalvin 71-B

How to Make

1. Mix honey with water into a stockpot over medium-low heat.
2. Stir thoroughly until the honey dissolves fully.
3. Using a funnel, pour the mead must into a one-gallon carboy.
4. Add the juniper berries, hibiscus flowers, meadowsweet, yarrow, and raisins.
5. Add the wild mead starter, or if you prefer, one pack of yeast.
6. Cover the vessel with an airlock half full of water inserted into a cork.
7. Place the vessel in a warm, dark area to allow fermentation for at least one month.
8. After a month, your mead will clarify but will still be too sweet and less alcoholic. To help continue its aging and achieve a more clarified mead with high alcohol content, rack the mixture into another container.
9. Rack again at least two times, every two to three months, until you have a clear mead with minimal sediment on the bottom of the carboy.
10. The next step is to bottle the mead. Typically, a one-gallon batch should be ready for bottling in about four to six months. For you to know if it’s time to bottle, drop a bit of sugar into the mead or stir it carefully. If it produces bubbles, then it means that the mead is still fermenting. You may also try to place a lid on the container and wait for a few days before gently opening it. If you hear any fizzing sound, the mead is still fermenting.
11. Bottle the mead using wine bottles, beer bottles, or flip-top bottles with new caps. Let it age for at least six months to one year. 

2. Spring Wildflower Mead

This all-natural recipe will require some foraging during spring when most wildflowers are in bloom. You can use wild violets, honeysuckles, dandelions, clovers, and Rose of Sharon. Be sure to use only the petals, as any greens may cause bitterness. Also, avoid foraging from areas that are not pesticide-free.

You can use other flowers as well, including roses, marigold, lavender, hawthorn (mayflower), and elderflower.

Ingredients

• 1 quart (about 2.3 pounds) Wildflower honey
• 1 gal Spring water
• 1-3 pints of tightly packed flowers
• 8-10 Organic raisins
• Lemon or orange
• A small oak leaf
• ¼ - ½ cup Wild mead starter or 1 packet (5 g) of Lalvin D-47 or Lalvin 71-B

How to Make

1. Put the honey and water into a stockpot over medium-low heat.
2. Stir the mixture thoroughly until the honey dissolves fully.
3. Pour the must into a one-gallon carboy using a funnel,
4. Add the flowers, setting aside a few for later use.
5. Squeeze in some lemon or orange juice. A couple of squeezes should do the trick.
6. Add the organic raisins and small oak leaf for added tannins and nutrients.
7. Add the wild mead starter or one pack of yeast.
8. Install the airlock.
9. Allow the mixture to ferment for at least one month.
10. After a month, rack the mixture into another container, adding the remaining wildflowers for a more potent floral aroma.
11. Rack again at least two times every two to three months.
12. Bottle the mead if you think it’s ready.

3. Garlic Mushroom Cooking / Dessert Mead

Besides being a refreshing drink, mead can also be an excellent replacement for wine when cooking. This recipe will produce a delicious dessert mead or cooking mead, depending on the honey-to-water ratio that you will use. With garlic as an ingredient, this mead offers many health benefits, including immune system boosting.

Ingredients 

• 2 ½ lbs. Honey or 4 lbs. honey for dessert mead
• 3 gal Spring water
• 4-12 heads Garlic
• 2 cups Chopped fresh shiitake mushrooms or 1 cup mushroom tea
• 8-10 Raisins
• Wild yeast
• ¼ - ½ cup Wild mead starter

How to Make

1. Prepare the must by heating water and honey. Use 2 ½-pound honey for cooking mead or four pounds of honey if you like sweeter, dessert mead.
2. Peel each garlic clove and chop or smash it. Add the garlic to the must, saving some for later use.
3. Add the mushrooms. You can do it in two ways.
4. You may put the mushrooms directly into the must. Or
5. Prepare a mushroom tea, then add the tea to the must. This way, racking will be less messy.
6. Add the wild yeast and let the mead ferment.
7. After a month, add the remaining garlic for a strong garlic aroma.
8. Bottle the mead.

Back to the Basics

The Vikings made their mead the traditional way, taking advantage of the available resources during their time. The result is a sweet-tasting alcoholic drink that has miraculously made its way to our modern times. How to make Viking mead requires going back to the basics of brewing, using all-natural ingredients, and the simplest of equipment.

https://advancedmixology.com/blogs/art-of-mixology/how-to-make-viking-mead?srsltid=AfmBOor4KEL__YZm403ZP5gkyVZDoUfGEdWGgOnkjdBilEL-Q4j6hwSQ

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Century Recipe

From openculture.com

Read a story set in the Middle Ages, Beowulf or anything more recently written, and you’re likely to run across a reference to mead, which seems often to have been imbibed heartily in halls dedicated to that very activity. The same goes for medieval-themed plays, movies, and even video games. Take Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, described by Max Miller, host of Youtube channel Tasting History, as “a history-based game of, like, my favourite time period — Saxons and Vikings, you know, fightin’ it out — so I’m assuming that there’s going to be mead in there somewhere.” He uploaded the video, below, in the fall of 2020, just before that game’s release, but according to the Assassin’s Creed Wiki, he was right: there is, indeed, mead in there.

Perhaps throwing back a digital horn of mead in a video game has its satisfactions, but surely it would only make us curious to taste the real thing. Hence Miller’s episode project of “making medieval mead like a Viking,” which requires only three basic ingredients: water, honey, and ale dregs or dry ale yeast. (The set of required tools is a bit more complex, involving several different vessels and, ideally, a “bubbler” to let out the carbonation.)

In it he consults a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century manuscript (above) called the Tractatus de Magnetate et Operationibus eius, which includes not just a letter on the workings of magnets — and “a university handbook on the theory of numbers, proportions, and harmony” and “the seven signs of bad breeding; the seven signs of elegance” — but also “one of the oldest known surviving English mead recipes.”

Making Medieval Mead like a Viking

“When you think of Saxons and Vikings, yes, you think of mead,” Miller says, “but mead actually got its start way before that,” evidenced in the alcohol-and-honey residue found on Chinese pottery dating to 7000 BC and a written mention in the Indian Rigveda. “I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the extreme, that all the gods and all mortals seek it together,” says that sacred text. Even if Miller’s mead doesn’t make you feel like a god, it does have the virtue of requiring only a few days’ fermentation, as opposed to the traditional period of months. Toward the video’s end, he mentions having set one bottle aside to ripen further, and possibly to feature in a later episode. That was nearly three years ago; today, Tasting History fans can only speculate as to what alcoholic Valhalla that brew has so far ascended.

You can find the text of the medieval recipe below:

//ffor to make mede. Tak .i. galoun of fyne hony and to
þat .4. galouns of water and hete þat water til it be as
lengh þanne dissolue þe hony in þe water. thanne set hem
ouer þe fier & let hem boyle and ever scomme it as longe as
any filthe rysith þer on. and þanne tak it doun of þe fier
and let it kole in oþer vesselle til it be as kold as melk
whan it komith from þe koow. than tak drestis
of þe fynest ale or elles berme and kast in to þe water
& þe hony. and stere al wel to gedre but ferst loke er
þu put þy berme in. that þe water with þe hony be put
in a fayr stonde & þanne put in þy berme or elles þi
drestis for þat is best & stere wel to gedre/ and ley straw
or elles clothis a bowte þe vessel & a boue gif þe wedir
be kolde and so let it stande .3. dayes & .3. nygthis gif
þe wedir be kold And gif it be hoot wedir .i. day and
.1. nyght is a nogh at þe fulle But ever after .i. hour or
.2. at þe moste a say þer of and gif þu wilt have it swete
tak it þe sonere from þe drestis & gif þu wilt have it scharpe
let it stand þe lenger þer with. Thanne draw it from
þe drestis as cler as þu may in to an oþer vessel clene & let
it stonde .1. nyght or .2. & þanne draw it in to an
oþer clene vessel & serve it forth // And gif þu wilt 

make mede eglyn. tak sauge .ysope. rosmaryne. Egre-

moyne./ saxefrage. betayne./ centorye. lunarie/ hert-
is tonge./ Tyme./ marubium album. herbe jon./ of eche of
an handful gif þu make .12. galouns and gif þu mak lesse
tak þe less of herbis. and to .4. galouns of þi mater .i. galoun of
drestis.

https://www.openculture.com/2023/09/how-to-make-medieval-mead-a-13th-century-recipe.html

Bill Savage’s Lavender-Blackberry Mead Recipe

From meadist.com

Bill Savage used to work for Wild Blossom Meadery in Chicago, IL.  He now brews at Goose Island Beer Co – we wont hold that against him. He still enjoys making and drinking mead. You can take a meadist out of the meadery, but you can’t take the mead out of a meadist!

Bill was nice enough to send me his recipe for a Lavender-Blackberry Mead so I could share with Meadist readers. So here it is – a milestone for the meadist – the first guest recipe.

I enjoyed a Lavender-Blackberry mead that I made about 3 years ago. There’s a nice little all organic & local-grower grocery shop in Edgewater (far North side of Chicago), where I obtained some Lavender flower tips just before they blossomed. I used about a half ounce at the time, making a sort of “tea” concentrate with the Lavender tips. The aroma is amazing!

Ingredients

• 12 lbs. of raspberry honey
• 2 tbs Yeast Energizer
• 1/2 oz Lavender Flower Tips
• Lalvin 71B-1122 Yeast
• 9-10 lbs of blackberries

Directions

1. In a 5 gal. pot, bring 4 gal. of water to a boil for 5 min. let it cool using a Copper Coil Immersion Chiller, & cool the water down to about 160F.
2. Stir in/dissolve 12lbs. of raspberry honey & 2tbs. yeast energizer/yeast hulls.
3. Continue to cool with copper coil chiller to @70F.
4. Make a concentrated “Tea” with the Lavender Flower Tips.
5. Transfer into a 5 gal. carboy & aerate.
6. Finally add your Lavender “tea” to the carboy, stir, & then add your rehydrated yeast/starter.
7. Allow to ferment for 3-4 weeks @ 70F. Then, rack again into another carboy, that has previously been packed with 9-10lbs of blackberries (if desired, 48hours prior to this step, add about 1/4-1/2 tsp. potassium metabisulfite to the blackberries/juice mixture at the bottom of your sanitized 2nd carboy, to ensure bacteria/wild yeast aren’t introduced to your mead). During the rack, also add a second Lavender ‘tea’ concentrate infusion.
8. Let this sit for another 3-4 weeks. Rack a second time, and let age for another 5 months.
9. Bottle afterwards & serve at @ room temp.
10. O.G. – 23.5 Brix. @11.5 – 12% abv.

https://meadist.com/making-mead/mead-recipes/home-made-lavender-blackberry-mead-recipe-by-bill-savage/

Susan Jane White’s gifting jar of Wild Red Mead prunes is a recipe to keep the pipes in check over the Christmas period

From independent.ie

Susan Jane White’s gifting jar of Wild Red Mead prunes is a recipe to keep the pipes in check over the Christmas period

• It’s gift season and I’m nosediving into my Santa hat and glittered apron with violent giddiness. Homemade presents are my modus operandi, my maternal algorithm and form of expression. It’s how I show love and appreciation (none of which a scented candle from Goop can embody).
• 
  
• 
  

Wild Red Mead is a fruity alcoholic bevvie made in Kinsale from fermenting honey with dark cherries and Wexford blackcurrants. As expected, it tastes like some cosmic spillage from the stars. It’s smooth and rich with a deep burgundy hue. Fruit meads were basically Ireland’s medieval red wines, alchemised from native wild berries, raw honey and keen tenacity.

Grab yourself a bottle this Christmas (kinsalemeadco.ie), and serve at room temperature in dinky little port glasses. Any leftovers can be rustled into these celestial red mead prunes, served warm with vanilla ice-cream. Prunes are obviously absurdly talented, with their Oscar-worthy role in powerhosing our pipes. But marry them with Irish mead, and an aria breaks out. The combination is devastatingly good, and will become a firm favourite every Christmas. Trouble is, I keep eating the gifts.

Wild Red Mead prunes

                                            Gift jars of prunes boiled in Kinsale Wild Red Mead. Photo: Susan Jane White

For 2 gift jars

You will need:

300ml Kinsale Wild Red Mead

5 tablespoons muscovado sugar

4 cloves

200g pitted prunes

​1 Tumble the Wild Red Mead, muscovado sugar and cloves into a small saucepan. Bring to a rolling boil for 3 minutes to burn the alcohol off. I realise that this may sound counter intuitive to an Irish reader at Christmas time, but the end result will still rock your tonsils and your toes.

​2 Reduce the heat to a polite simmer and add your prunes. You’ll find fabulous soft, pitted prunes in Lidl for €1.50. Harder prunes will need longer cooking time to absorb the mead.

​3 Simmer for about 10 minutes (longer if your prunes are hard, but you don’t want soft prunes disintegrating into the liquid). Take your pan of prunes off the heat and discard the cloves.

4 Allow the prunes to cool down and absorb all the juiciness before packing into 2 scrupulously clean jars, and tying a dinky Christmas ribbon around each neck. Store in the fridge for up to 10 days or gift them straightaway. Serve with vanilla ice-cream or thick Greek yoghurt and a side of Bing Crosby.

https://www.independent.ie/life/food-drink/recipes/susan-jane-whites-gifting-jar-of-wild-red-mead-prunes-is-a-recipe-to-keep-the-pipes-in-check-over-the-christmas-period/a533607798.html