Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jun 25, 2024

Black mead, or bochet, made with spices and wood chips

City/Region: Paris
Time Period: 1393

Mead was very popular from Russia to England, but started to lose favor in part due to the rise of cheaper brews like vodka and hopped ales. Mead was often still drunk for its medicinal properties, especially when it was infused with herbs and spices.

This mead has some of those wonderfully warming spices, and I added wood chips from the local brewing store to mimic the wood barrels that it would have been fermented in. The burnt caramel scent softens and mellows out during fermentation, and the resulting mead is not sweet at all and is more complex than many meads I’ve had.

To make six sextier of bochet, take six pints of very sweet honey, and put it in a cauldron on the fire and boil it, and stir for so long that it starts to grow, and you see that it also boils with bubbles like small blisters which will burst, releasing a little bit of dark smoke. Then add seven sextier of water and boil so much that it reduces to six sextiers, and keep stirring. And then put it in a vat to cool until it is lukewarm; then strain it through a cloth, and put it in a barrel and add a pint of yeast from ale, because that is what makes it piquant, (though if you use bread yeast, it makes as good a flavor, but the color will be duller), and cover well and warmly so it ferments.

If you want to make it very good, add an ounce of ginger, long pepper, grains of paradise and cloves in equal amounts, except for the cloves of which there should be the least, and put them in a cloth bag and toss it in. And when it has been two or three days and the bochet smells of spices and is strong enough, take out the bag and wring it out and put it in the next barrel that you make. And so this powder will serve you well up to three or four times.
— Le Ménagier de Paris, 1393.

Ingredients:

1 pint (675 g) honey
1 gallon plus 2 cups (4.25 L) distilled water
5 g dried ale yeast
About 3 g yeast nutrient, optional
5 g dried ginger pieces*, optional
5 g long pepper*, optional
5 g grains of paradise*, optional
2 g whole cloves, optional
A couple of handfuls of wood chips*, optional
* See notes below.

Instructions:

1. For this first step, I recommend taking a few precautions. Wear gloves and long sleeves, as the honey will sputter a lot and you want to avoid getting it on your bare skin. Also use the very largest pot you have, ideally a stock pot of some kind. The honey expands and bubbles quite a bit, so it is much better to be safe with this.
2. First, pour 1 gallon (3.75 L) of water into the pot and make a note of how much the pot is filled (this will be important for later). I stood a wooden spoon upright in the pot and remembered how far the water came up the spoon. Pour the water out.
3. Add the honey to the pot and set it over medium heat. If your pot seems ridiculously large for the amount of honey, you probably have it right. Heat it, stirring occasionally. After about 5 minutes, it will start to bubble around the edges.
4. Once it starts to bubble, stir slowly and constantly, making sure to scrape down the sides as you go. After another minute or so, a layer of foam will form at the top. At this point, it’s very important to keep an eye on the pot, lowering the temperature if the foam starts to rise too much, but you also want to keep the honey bubbling. Things can get out of hand very quickly, so be vigilant.
5. After about 6 minutes of bubbling, the honey will eventually begin to darken and large bubbles will rise to the surface. Keep stirring the honey. We want it to go far enough that the foam becomes thick and large bubbles let off dark steam and just a bit of smoke. It took me about 10 to 12 minutes.
6. Be very careful with this next part and do not look directly over the pot because there will be sputtering honey and lots of steam. Slowly add the water. The water hitting the very hot honey will cause the honey to boil vigorously and shoot up and will create a lot of steam. Use caution and expect a bit of a mess to clean up later. As you add the water, the honey will eventually calm down and will harden.
7. Bring the mixture back up to a gentle boil, stirring occasionally, and the honey will melt again. Let the bochet boil gently, reducing it down until it reaches that 1 gallon (3.75 L) mark that you noted in Step 2. This took me about 40 to 45 minutes. When it has reduced to 1 gallon, take it off the heat and set it aside to cool, preferably until it’s slightly warm, but no more than 120°F (49°C) at the hottest because we don’t want to kill the yeast.
8. Strain the bochet and pour it into the sterile container you’re going to ferment it in. I have a handy strainer-funnel combo that worked great.
9. Mix the yeast with a few tablespoons of water to wake it up, double check that your bochet is under 120°F (49°C), then add the yeast mixture.
10. If you’re using the optional spices, crush them in a mortar and pestle just enough to break them open. You don’t want to use ground spices for this or grind them up too finely. Mix them together and place them in a small piece of finely woven cloth like muslin. Use some kitchen twine to tie the muslin up into a sachet, leaving one end of the string long enough so that the sachet will be submerged in the mead and the string will reach out over the top of the fermenting vessel.
11. If using, add a couple of handfuls of the wood chips and the spice sachet to the bochet, leaving the long string of the sachet hanging over the side of your brewing vessel (this will make it easier to fish out later). Put on the lid with a bubble air lock.
12. Set the bochet aside in a dark place for 2 to 3 days, then remove the spice sachet.
13. Let the bochet continue to ferment for another month or so. You’ll know it’s fermenting when you can see and hear the bubbles rising to the surface, and you’ll know it’s done fermenting when you can’t hear the bubbles anymore. Mine took about a month.
14. When the mead has finished fermenting, pour it into a new sterile container, keeping out the dead yeast. You can either age the mead, or serve it forth right away.

Notes

• Long pepper is hotter than black pepper and has a more aromatic, almost flowery quality to it that’s wonderful.
• Grains of paradise have a complex flavor that is peppery with hints of citrus, ginger, and cardamom.
• I found food-safe wood chips at a local brewing store.
• Link to dried ginger pieces: https://www.amazon.com/Chopped-Ginger-Root-4oz-Cut-Supplement-Herbal/dp/B00BVUBW8W/ref=sr_1_60
• Link to long pepper: https://amzn.to/3ui5j5L
• Link to grains of paradise: https://amzn.to/40Rd66L