Spiced Meads: Tips from the Pros
Spiced meads, often called methyglyns or metheglins, date back as far as mead itself. The options are limitless when it comes to choosing what spices and herbs, as well as how they are used. Two professional meadmakers share their advice for approaching this style of mead that is perfect for the winter holidays.
Ash Fischbein, Co-Owner of Sap House Meadery in Ossipee, New Hampshire
When I make mead I try to take away the variables. To do that, I like to add spices and herbs after fermentation. If I add spices to a mead that has completed that process, I know exactly what I am adding them to. Adding them prior is like building on a moving foundation.
Contact time with the spices varies depending on the spice. We have recipes that call for spices and herbs with contact times of only hours! We don’t always add these types of items once, either. We have been known to add various ingredients for different lengths of time, many times. It can add dimension and it can enhance the flavor and make it taste more like the ingredient.
Likening meadmaking to cooking, dried herbs and spices give a more concentrated, direct flavor, so be careful. A general rule of thumb in cooking is use half the amount of dried spice than you would for fresh. Remember, it is to always easier to start with less than you think and add more later to develop the recipe.
I don’t usually do anything unique to spices/herbs prior to their addition. I do use strainer bags just to keep things contained. I can remove it when I need to and it keeps my equipment cleaner (e.g. pumps). We do have a mortar and pestle, but it is rarely used.
Even with multiple additions, I don’t like to overpower honey varietals with anything. I do like to find their affinities though. A lot of varietals out there have wonderful spice characteristics — clover being a great example. Clover honey has a wonderfully warm, cinnamon characteristic. Some may think it would be great to add more, but I would much rather add something that complements it. A great example would be nutmeg or vanilla, ginger or coriander seed, pineapple or coconut. We become our only limits, but I would choose to take the road that respects the subtlety of the honey.
California orange blossom honey, which is wildly different in flavor than its counterpart from Florida, has an amazing jasmine flower flavor with aromatics so reminiscent of jasmine rice. This honey is amazing with lemongrass, ginger, vanilla, and orange zest. Sometime the spice or herb that you are looking for is right there in the honey you have.
Spices and herbs can also complement fruit meads well. A couple of my favorite spice/fruit combinations are strawberry and basil (a classic), as well as grapefruit and rosemary.
Here are my other top pieces of advice for homebrewers:
1. Take great notes! You will never remember what you think you will.
2. You might as well make your batch 5 gallons (19 L). The downfall of a 1-gallon (4-L) batch is it is such a small sample size to really get good data and it is too small of a sample size when you realize how good it is!
3. Sometimes the stems and woody pieces of herbs have great flavors to build on as well. Don’t waste what might be a great addition.
4. #endthewaronweeds — Some of the best flavors we have used are considered weeds (crimson sumac, wild carrot, pineapple weed, and sweet fern, to name a few). Just make sure that what you are using is safe to consume.
Raphael Lyon Meadmaker/Owner Enlightenment Wines and Meadery, Brooklyn, New York
One of the first things that any meadmaker needs to understand about using herbs is that they are not just simply used for flavoring. While they contain flavors, and those flavors should be considered, more often than not — like the use of hops in beer — they serve multiple roles as fermentation aids, preservation aids, and as any quick glance into the historical and archeological record will tell you, tend to be herbs with healing and psychoactive benefits.
It is for this reason that the history of meadmaking, like most alcohol making, is tightly wrapped up with the practice of medicine and magic. Remember, distillation of spirits for making tinctures is a relatively new development. Until that time all medicine extracted in alcohol would have been done with wine, mead, or more likely some combination of both. Many meads were created as much for the benefit and extraction of the herbs as it was the production of alcohol. When you think about making herbal meads — think about vermouth, cordials, and amaros — we recognize them as cocktail ingredients today, but they were medicinal wines when first created.
It is probably for this reason that Americans have fallen into the habit of talking about mead with herbs as “methyglyn,” a Welsh word with the same root as medicine. We don’t use that word at our tasting room or on our bottles, however. Instead we advocate for the term “botanical mead.” That distinction is important to us. It’s easier to say and understand for one. But critically and more importantly, using a Welsh word to describe a kind of beverage that’s made around the world, and has been for thousands of years before Welsh was even a language, seems uninformed. It places Northern Europe at the center of a tradition when it doesn’t really belong. Most botanical meads made today are made in Africa after all — it’s called tej. If anything we should be calling our herbal meads tej. Failing that, “botanical mead” seems like a good compromise.
That being said, the second thing to understand is that use of herbs and botanicals are not a sideshow to meadmaking, or a style of making mead. Again like the use of hops in beer, they are a core element of meadmaking. The historical record is very clear on this subject. Virtually all mead residues found in archeological sites, and recipes when they can be found of more modern types, have some type of local herbs in them. Yes, you can make mead without herbs, but it’s much harder to do, more likely to sour, and more difficult to preserve. It also doesn’t taste as good.
Flavor aside, plant matter tends to provide the critical element of tannin, which not only helps structure the final product, but before the use of commercially-available yeast and storage in wood barrels, it would have also helped clear the wine. Raw honey has virtually no tannins or bittering agents but it does have an enormous amount of protein. If you want those proteins to settle out and clear you need to either boil the honey, which destroys its nose, or add a tannin source to help the proteins coagulate and sink with the yeast into the lees. Sometimes this can be accomplished with fruit, but not always. Luckily there is a whole army of herbs with tannins that don’t really have much of a taste so you can add them to your mead without overpowering the honey flavor if that’s what you’re after. Bay is a commonly used one, and I believe it’s why you see it in many old English recipes.
Now then, you’re probably wondering, what herbs are good choices to add to your botanical meads, when should they be added, and so on. All I can say on the subject is that every plant is different and every plant has hundreds of flavors and chemicals. Some herbs require hot water extraction, some cold, some only express themselves in alcohol, some in a few days, some in a few months. There is no hard rule.
A good herbalist book can give you a sense of where to start (I recommend Maud Grieve’s A Modern Herbal, it’s available to read online for free). Other than that, it’s all about trial and error, testing, and learning.
One last piece of advice as you start experimenting with different herbs in your homemade meads is to take good notes along the way!
