Metheglin Recipe

Metheglin (pronounced meth-egg-lin) is simply a flavoured mead. It predates even wine made from grapes, so it is a pity it has gone out of fashion. Traditionally it was made stronger than mead. A seventeenth-century writer says that it is ‘Strong in the superlative… doth stupifie more than any other liquor, and keeps a humming in the brain’. I can find no one who makes metheglin commercially, so if you want to hear that humming you will have to make it yourself. The name metheglin comes from the Welsh meddyglyn, equivalent to meddyg, which means healing. There was considerable congruence between food, drink and medicine in times past and the herbal nature of many metheglins reflects this.

There are endless old recipes; the seventeenth-century The Closet of Sir Kenelme Digby lists several dozen with names such as ‘Sir Baynham Throckmorton’s Mead’ and ‘Mead from the Muscovian Ambassador’s Steward’. An array of flavouring ingredients were used – virtually anything with a strong taste that was not poisonous (at least not very poisonous) and preferably good for you: watercress, fennel, ferns, liverwort, marshmallow roots, scurvy grass, cloves, borage, marjoram, flowers and so on. There is, incidentally, a third species of honey wine called ‘braggot’. This is a halfway house between wine and beer as it uses hops and sometimes malt.

Broadly, metheglins fall into four categories – herby, spicy, floral and weird. You can use whatever takes your fancy – the ingredients listed below just happen to be ones I found either in my garden or foraging basket. The garden herbs and mugwort are perfectly safe but leave out the wormwood if you are of a nervous disposition.