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MEAD, TO PREPARE (another way)
The following is one of the most approved methods of brewing mead. Let the whites of six eggs be well incorporated with twelve gallons of water, to which add twenty pounds of honey. Boil these ingredients for an hour, then put into the liquor a little ginger, clove, cinnamon, and mace, together with a small sprig of rosemary. As soon as the liquor is cool, add a spoonful of yeast, and pour the mead into a vessel, which should be filled up while it works. When the fermentation ceases, close the cask, and deposit it for six or eight months in a vault or cellar of an equal temperature, and in which the liquor will not be liable to be affected by the changes of the weather. At the end of that time it may be bottled, and will then be fit for use. A more simple, and to some palates more agreeable, method, is to mix the honey in the proportion of one pound to a quart of water, which is to be boiled, scummed, and fermented in the usual manner, without the addition of any aromatic substances. It ought to be preserved in a similar manner, and bottled at the expiration of the same time.
A straightforward honey wine, written when brewing at home meant a cask in a cellar and whatever yeast came to hand. The method still works; the equipment and the controls have moved on.
- Scale and unitsCassell's is a British book, so these are imperial gallons: twelve of them is about 54.5 litres, or roughly 14.5 US gallons. Twenty pounds of honey to that volume is a modest must, around 1.7 lb per gallon; the plain version at the end, one pound of honey to a quart, works out at four pounds per gallon — about two and a half times as strong — and will finish sweet and high in alcohol.
- The egg whitesThese are a fining agent, not an ingredient. Beaten into the cold water and boiled with the honey, the albumen coagulates and carries wax, pollen and scum to the surface to be skimmed off. Modern brewers get the same clarity by skimming carefully and letting the mead settle, or with a proprietary fining.
- Boiling for an hourAn hour at a rolling boil drives off much of the honey's aroma and can set a permanent haze. Current practice is either no heat at all, or holding the must at around 150F for a short time. The long boil here reflects an era with no other way to be sure of what was in the honey.
- "A spoonful of yeast"This means barm skimmed off a working beer, a living ale yeast. Substitute a measured sachet of wine or mead yeast, pitched at the manufacturer's rate once the must is below 80F. Bread yeast will ferment it but leaves a coarse flavour and stalls early.
- "Filled up while it works"The old cask was topped up daily so the foam and its debris pushed out through the bunghole, keeping air off the surface. A carboy with an airlock does the same job without the daily attention, and headspace should be minimised again once fermentation slows.
- SpicingGinger, clove, cinnamon, mace and rosemary in a 54-litre batch is a light hand. Note that the recipe puts them in after the hour's boil, not during it; tie whole spices in muslin and taste after a week or two, since long contact pushes clove and rosemary toward medicinal.
- Six to eight months, and bottlingThe long cellar rest at steady temperature is the important instruction and should not be shortened; it is where the raw, yeasty edge goes. Confirm with a hydrometer that the gravity has been stable for two or three weeks before bottling, since honey ferments slowly and a mead bottled while still working will build pressure in the glass.
- YieldThe large batch gives about seventy 750 ml bottles. Scaling to a single 5-litre demijohn means roughly 2 lb of honey for the spiced version, or about 4½ lb for the strong plain one.
Mead is an old sweetened ferment in northern Europe, made wherever there were bees and no cheap sugar, and by the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s it was already a rustic survival rather than a fashionable drink — the dictionary preserves it much as it preserves metheglin and sack posset. The distinction drawn here between the spiced version and the plain one echoes an older vocabulary in which spiced mead was often called metheglin, a word generally traced to Welsh meddyglyn, medicinal liquor. Clarifying with egg white is the same technique English cooks used for jellies and consommes, applied to a fermented drink; the instruction to keep the cask somewhere of even temperature is a reminder that a stone cellar was the only temperature control a Victorian household had.