Ancient Web: A 2001 Meadery Catalogued Medieval Drinks by Recipe and Source

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

If a medieval feast needs a drink, a surviving old webpage has thoughts about the difference between mead, metheglyn, and hippocras. It also has footnotes—lots of footnotes.

Visit Alcoholic Drinks of the Middle Ages.

The site's index, last updated March 2, 2001, divides its subject into wine and mead, beer, distilled spirits, liqueurs and cordials, vinegar, tasting, fruits and spices, a bibliography, and an index. Each heading opens a smaller group of linked historical essays and recipes.

A section on wine and mead explains terms such as melomel, a honey-based drink made with fruit, and cyser, made using apples. It moves between quotations from ancient authors, the chemistry of fermentation, historical vessels, and practical differences between present-day and historical production.

The site does not flatten the material into a single claim about how everybody drank in the Middle Ages. It distinguishes ancient Greece and Rome from later Europe, compares the amphora with the wooden cask, and traces how storage could affect the drink available at the table.

Research notes beside period recipes

The liqueurs and cordials section includes discussions of distillation and flavored spirits, while the main index points to period recipes for cherry wine, metheglin, spiced drinks, and vinegar. Some are transcriptions or adaptations of old texts rather than modern recipes with tested safety instructions.

Its bibliography reveals how the collection was assembled. Sources include The Closet of Sir Kenelme Digbie Opened, The Country Housewife, classical writers, winemaking manuals, and articles from historical-recreation publications such as Tournaments Illuminated and The Complete Anachronist.

That combination gives the site a recognizable early hobby-scholar character: scholarly aspirations, a large personal reading list, experiments in practical reconstruction, and plenty of opinions. Its older historical claims should be checked against current scholarship, and its instructions should not be mistaken for contemporary food-safety guidance.

The pages remain ordinary linked HTML rather than a searchable recipe service. Their structure makes it possible to follow a term from an introductory paragraph to a source citation and then back into another drink category.

It is the kind of reference shelf an enthusiast built because a subject was too fascinating to leave scattered across books.

Explore the medieval drinks index and bibliography.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.