How to Make Mead: A Simple Viking Honey Wine Recipe

Whenever the sagas describe a feast, mead is flowing. The golden honey wine was far more than a drink to the people of the Viking Age: it was festival luxury, sacred offering, and the stuff of myth. Best of all, you can still make it today exactly the way it was made a thousand years ago - with nothing but honey, water, yeast, and patience.

In this article you get both: the story behind the legendary drink of the gods, and a simple base recipe that will make your first batch of homemade mead a success. You need no brewing experience, just clean equipment and a few weeks of waiting.

The Drink of Gods and Poets

No other drink is as deeply woven into Norse mythology as mead. The most famous story is told in the Prose Edda of the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson: from the blood of the wise Kvasir, two dwarves brewed the Mead of Poetry - whoever drinks it becomes a poet. The drink later fell into the hands of the giant Suttung, who hid it deep inside a mountain, guarded by his daughter Gunnlod. Odin himself bored through the rock, spent three nights with Gunnlod, and stole the entire supply in three enormous gulps before fleeing back to Asgard in the shape of an eagle. Ever since, mead has been considered the source of all poetry. You can read the full story of the cunning Allfather in our portrait of Odin, the Allfather.

Beyond the myths, mead was genuinely special. Honey was scarce and expensive in the North - bees only reluctantly tolerate the Scandinavian climate, and much of the honey had to be imported or painstakingly gathered from wild hives. The everyday drink was therefore the far cheaper barley ale. Mead was reserved for the great occasions: weddings, blot sacrifices, feasts in the hall of the jarl. Serving mead to your guests was a display of wealth.

Archaeology backs this up. Residue analyses of drinking vessels from Scandinavian and northern German graves repeatedly show traces of fermented honey drinks, often blended with berries or grain. And the famous Oseberg ship burial contained, alongside two buried women, buckets and ladles - equipment for a feast in the afterlife, which certainly included something worth drinking.

What to Know Before You Start

Mead is created by fermentation: yeast eats the sugar in the honey and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. That means two things. First: the result contains alcohol - depending on the amount of honey and the yeast, roughly 10 to 14 percent. This is not a drink for children, pregnant women, or chugging. Second: cleanliness is everything. Everything that touches your mead must be thoroughly cleaned, ideally rinsed with very hot water or a food-safe sanitizer. Stray microbes are the only reason a batch of mead truly fails.

The good news: the ingredient list is wonderfully short.

Ingredients

For about 5 liters (1.3 gallons) of mead you need:

• 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs) blossom honey (liquid, ideally from a local beekeeper - the honey defines the flavor)
• 4 liters (1 gallon) still water
• 1 packet of wine yeast (port wine yeast or a dedicated mead yeast)
• 1 tsp yeast nutrient (from any homebrew shop, helps the yeast do its work)
• Optional: juice of 1 organic lemon for a touch of acidity

Equipment: a fermentation vessel of at least 6 liters (glass carboy or food-grade bucket), an airlock with stopper, a length of food-safe tubing for racking, and clean bottles.

Instructions

1. Clean everything. Rinse the fermenter, spoon, funnel, and airlock thoroughly, then scald them with boiling water. This step decides between mead and vinegar.
2. Dissolve the honey. Warm about 2 liters of water to no more than 40 degrees Celsius (104 F) and dissolve the honey in it completely. Do not boil - too much heat destroys the honey’s delicate aromas.
3. Top up and cool. Pour the honey mixture into the fermenter and top up with the remaining cold water. The mixture should be lukewarm or cooler (below 30 degrees Celsius / 86 F), or the yeast will die.
4. Add the yeast. Stir in the wine yeast and the yeast nutrient, plus the lemon juice if using. Give it one vigorous stir to work some oxygen in - the yeast needs it to get started.
5. Fit the airlock. Seal the vessel with the stopper and the airlock (filled with a little water). It lets carbon dioxide escape without letting microbes in.
6. Wait. Place the fermenter somewhere calm at 18 to 22 degrees Celsius (64 to 72 F). Within one to three days the airlock will start bubbling. Primary fermentation takes about 4 to 6 weeks - it is done when the bubbling stops and the mead begins to clear.
7. Rack it. Using the tubing, carefully siphon the young mead into a clean vessel, leaving the layer of spent yeast at the bottom behind. If you have the patience, let it mature there for another 2 to 4 weeks.
8. Bottle and age. Fill the mead into clean bottles. It is drinkable now - but after 3 to 6 months of cool storage it tastes noticeably smoother. Patience is the secret ingredient.

Tips & Variations

• Sweet or dry? If the yeast ferments all the sugar, the mead turns out dry. For a sweeter mead, stir in another 100 to 200 g of honey after the first racking.
• Berry mead: Add a handful of dark berries (elderberry, blackberry, sloe) during the last third of fermentation - residue finds show the Vikings did exactly that.
• Spiced mead: A cinnamon stick, two cloves, or a piece of ginger turns the base recipe into a winter feast drink.
• Serve it warm: In Scandinavia, mead is often gently heated (never boiled!) in winter - the mulled wine of the North.
• Drink it in style: Room temperature or lightly chilled, from a clay cup or a proper mead horn. And as at any feast in the hall: the first sip belongs to the host, the rest to the company.

By the way: this base recipe is just a taste. Our cookbook “Viking Feast” holds 141 recipes from the world of the Norse - from feast-day roasts and hearty stews to more mead variations with berries and herbs. See the cookbook

	Mead	Ale	Wine
Sugar source	honey	malted barley	grapes
Availability in the North	expensive, feast days	everyday drink	imported luxury
Alcohol content (typical)	10-14 %	2-5 %	10-13 %
Fermentation time	4-6 weeks	1-2 weeks	2-4 weeks

Fun fact: According to a popular (though historically unproven) story, the word “honeymoon” goes back to the custom of newlyweds drinking honey wine for a full month to encourage fertility. Myth or not: mead and weddings demonstrably belonged together in the North.

A Drink That Makes Stories

When your first homemade mead sparkles in the glass a few months from now, you are drinking a piece of cultural history: the same drink that flowed from horns in Valhalla, that Odin stole for the sake of poetry, and that was raised in the halls of the jarls in honor of the Norse gods. Skal - and remember: the best stories are written after the first horn, not after the fifth.

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons