Braggot (variously called bracket, bragot, brakkatt or brackett) is often associated historically with medieval Britain. Consumed widely in the Middle Ages, it was either ale wort fermented with honey, ale blended with fully fermented mead, or an ale laced with honey and spices. Often it was blended by the publican on the spot in one way or another. As hops gained acceptance in the British Isles, they too found a home in braggot.

The availability of both varietal honey and brewing ingredients these days fairly begs the hobbyist to concoct one of these medieval brews. The compatibility of malt and honey is a natural one, and the diversity of each means that there are happy partners for all.

Though most homebrewers dabble in mead at some point, it is usually a sometime endeavor, making some of the considerations for brewing braggot not so obvious. On the other hand, every club or group of homebrewers seems to have at least one person schooled in the art of mead who is more than willing to offer some advice.

Hello, Honey

The contribution of varietal honey is the first factor that a home meadmaker must consider when putting together a recipe. Honey varieties are as distinctive as any malt or hop, and should be chosen carefully to meld with other additions, be they spice, fruit, grape or in our case, malt-based recipes. Search for a varietal guide, and peruse your local markets and think of what they might contribute to a braggot from a perspective of beer styles.

Floral and herbal varietals would work well in an earthy, basic pale ale recipe. Those with fruity notes could be more at home in a wheat beer. Delicate honey and a single malt grist of pilsner malt would be quite a challenge, but the perfect summer choice for braggot. Richer, more aggressively flavored honey, like buckwheat or avocado, would add immeasurably to a darker beer. Also consider how they would blend with a particular cultivar of hop. Perhaps a local wildflower honey and your own homegrown hops could become your signature: seasonal wet hop braggot.

In competition, a judge will look for a contribution from both the beer and mead components, not necessarily equal, but distinct from each in artful manner. This isn’t a competition though, and the degree to which honey is used to influence the character is totally personal. For our purposes, though, the challenge is to marry the two so they harmonize and flatter one another. An equal representation from malt and honey might work fine for the more delicate varietals, but a 20 percent addition may be more than enough for the more boisterous ones.

All-grain recipes may be easier to tweak or manipulate, but extract and honey are so similar that the extract brewer may have a leg up when it comes to putting a plan into action. For either strategy, it would be best to make the beer first, stirring in the honey at the end after the heat is shut off. This should drop the wort temperature enough to still pasteurize the honey (if you even feel that is necessary), while at the same time retaining the desirable volatile components―pasteurization at 150º F or higher for a few minutes should do the trick.

As for boiling the malt wort, decide on how much bittering you want out of your hops. Thirty minutes at a minimum would serve to sterilize the wort, allow time for kettle coagulant to work during the bittering process, and leave enough time for aromatic hop and spice additions at knockout. Again, hops are a personal choice, but think hard about their contribution as some are quite overwhelming at high doses in any addition. Try to calculate an IBU level of about 20 to 25. Honey has a specific gravity of about 1.400 to 1.500, so a quart of honey will be around three pounds, give or take.

Honey contributes about the same gravity points as liquid malt extract, as they are quite similar in moisture content. Start with one pound of honey (11 fluid ounces) per gallon of finished braggot, and work from there. Added at that rate to wort with an original gravity of 1.045 should give roughly an equal contribution of honey and malt extract. Specialty malt will offset the high fermentability of honey, unless you desire a very dry braggot.

Homebrewers are always keen to the importance yeast has on any finished product, and braggot is yet another palette to experiment with. Neutral American or estery London ale yeast would incorporate nicely into a braggot, as would a more characterful Belgian yeast. Think about a buckwheat honey Belgian dubbel fermented with an abbey yeast. If it’s more of a mead character you desire, select from the many dry, medium or sweet mead yeasts that are available. Yeast specs are offered by both White Labs and Wyeast Laboratories online. Braggot can be made either still or with some carbonation, so decide which route you’d prefer, but I would wager that your braggot would be better with a bit of a sparkle and a few months of age on it.

The recipes below are designed to give three gallons of braggot, with an original gravity of around 1.080, and 50 percent or less contribution from honey. Any of them could be tweaked for a braggot with an original gravity of 1.100 or higher. Take advantage of your local varietals and get medieval with your next batch.

Think about it. Honey bees, Apis mellifera, and related species are abundant worldwide. The honey they manufacture from the nectar of flowers consists mostly of simple sugars. Left in the rain, a forgotten pot of honey would accumulate wild yeasts and ferment rapidly. As the only known sweetener in pre-industrial times, honey was avidly sought, and accidental fermentation probably occurred many times.

Brewing is said to have hastened the development of civilization because people needed permanent settlements and agriculture to have enough grain for both beer and bread. Civilization, on the other hand, put a crimp in mead making. Farmers cut down acres and acres of woodland, driving the bees from their natural habitat. Wine and beer became the beverages of everyday life, while mead became a royal prerogative, a beverage for weddings and other major ceremonies.

In fact, the term “honeymoon” is said to derive from the old custom of giving the newlywed husband and wife mead to drink during their first month of marriage, in the belief that this heady libation would produce a male child.

Mead never disappeared, though it became a kind of a liquid anachronism, consumed mainly at medieval-themed feasts, Renaissance fairs and other historical reenactments. A handful of brands could be found on the market, including Bunratty from Ireland and Chaucer’s from the Bargetto Winery in Soquel, CA (the latter with a pouch of spices attached to the bottle for making a mulled wine).

Now, the movement toward traditional, all-natural foods and beverages—the same movement that gave us the microbrewing revolution—has discovered honey wine. Diverse publications such as Spin magazine, U.S. News and World Report and the Seattle Times all ran articles on mead, or were planning to, while this piece was being written. On November 8-9, the first-ever commercial mead festival in the United States—dubbed “Planet Buzz”—was set to take place in Chicago. Organizer Ray Daniels anticipated 30 to 50 meads, both domestic and imported, along with a smattering of ciders and perries. Check out www.meadfest.com for details.

The Year of Mead

The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) lumps mead in with grape wine for statistical purposes, so no one knows just how much mead is being made, or how many meaderies are out there. The sense is that production is growing.

“I call this the year of mead,” says Julie Herz, vice president of sales and marketing for the Redstone Meadery in Boulder, CO. She estimates there are 40 to 50 producers in the country, many of whom she lists on her website, www.honeywine.com, a superb compendium of mead information, legend and lore. “I hear about a new one every two months on average,” she adds.

Most businesses specializing in mead are of recent vintage, having popped up within the last five to seven years. Redstone Meadery is typical. Founded in 2001, it’s a truly artisanal operation, with an annual capacity of 9,000 liters. Sales are in-state only. “We’d like to be a player, but we don’t want to jump out of the gate too quickly,” says Herz. “We want to grow as the category picks up speed.”

Michael Faul, owner of Rabbits Foot Meadery in Sunnyvale, CA, received his license in 1994, and he might be considered one of the deans of the mead business. “Fourteen years ago I took my wife to a medieval festival at Bunratty Castle near Shannon Airport in Ireland,” he recalls. “She liked the local mead so much that we grabbed a bottle at the duty free. It’s totally different now, but at the time it was a heavy, syrupy dessert wine. Back home, we checked a couple of local liquor stores, but we couldn’t find it. I was a homebrewer, so I decided I could make it for her.”

That first batch turned into a new profession for the computer systems engineer. His main product is Pear Mead (12 percent alcohol by volume, or ABV), made from clover honey along with cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and well-ripened fruit.

Like Faul, most of the new generation of mead makers have a brewing, rather than a winemaking, background. Herz and David Myers, president of Redstone, learned mead making as members of Hop Barley and the Alers, a homebrew club in Boulder. Most of their equipment came from a defunct brewpub in Wyoming. Jon Hallberg, who runs the Smokehouse Winery in Sperryville, VA (a meadery with adjacent bed and breakfast inn), used to be head brewer at the Richbrau Brewpub in Richmond, VA.

Herz’s database includes a number of traditional wineries that make a mead on the side. Among these is the Bonair Winery in the Yakima Valley of Washington. “In 1996, we had a big freeze, and there weren’t many grapes to process,” explains owner Gail Puryear. Bonair markets several honey wines, including a cinnamon-clove mead called Winter Solstice, under the tongue-in-cheek slogan: “If it was good enough for ancient Druids, running naked through the woods, drinking strange fermented fluids, it’s good enough for me.”

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