Honey to the Flower ~ Mead Making as Medicine

Mead Making, 'Writing with Bees' with Charlotte du Cann, May 2018

Mead is an ancient bee medicine made by our ancestors since the earliest times. It was created throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, with Chinese pottery vessels dating from 7,000 BCE showing traces of honey fermentation such as takes place in mead making. In Europe similar traces have been found in ceramics belonging to the Bell Beaker Culture (2,800-1,800 BCE). Fermentation has a long history and can be seen as a way to reclaim food from fast food and supermarket culture. I find it deeply heartening ans hopeful to have fermenting food in the hedgehermitage kitchen; a substance in a constant state of transformation, just as I like to think I am. With the simple recipe that follows we might also use mead making to connect to the land and the plants around us in our everyday lives; this too is a radical act in a culture so threaded through with disconnection from nature.

The Hispanic-Roman naturalist, Columella, gave a recipe for mead in his ‘De re rustica’, in about 60 CE;

“Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius of this water with a (Roman) pound of honey. For a weaker mead, mix a sextarius of water with nine ounces of honey. The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire. If you have no rain water, then boil spring water.”

Many recipes will also include yeast but an older way is to make it without as adding raw honey to spring water will cause it to ferment. I was given the following mead-making recipe by Charlotte du Cann at a ‘Writing with Bees’ workshop held by the Natural Beekeeping Trust in May 2018 and I am only just now trying it out. The thought of it obviously needed to ferment first!

Blackthorn blossom, nettle, and strawberry mead, April 2019

All that’s needed for the recipe is a jar; a Kilner jar is perfect as it needs to be shaken vigorously at the beginning, spring water (not tap), raw honey (runny is best as less shaking is needed!), together with soft fruit, flowers, berries, and leaves. By changing the recipe it’s possible to follow the seasons in the most simple and beautiful of ways. I can think of few things nicer than going out with my foraging basket in search of ingredients for mead making. We might try elderflower, rose petal and strawberry, or wild cherry and meadowsweet in the summer, blackcurrant and fennel, blackberry and mint, as the seasons change. Other possible ingredients are things like herb robert leaves, lemon balm, lavender (both leaves and flowers), violets, forget-me-nots, rowan or hawthorn berries, sloes, rose hips, mallow flowers, borage, and heather, among countless others. It is important to be sure of our identification of course, and to be mindful of where we are collecting our ingredients from, but there is so much for us to experiment with. And we are taking part of the land into ourselves; offering the honey made by the bees back to the flowers.

Foraged primroses, nettles, and blackthorn flowers

To make the mead, take around 1 litre of spring water (the less water, the stronger the mead) and half a 227g jar of honey (although I had a much larger jar and probably put more in!), put them in a jar and shake energetically. This will activate the honey and it will begin to froth. You can then add your sliced fruit, together with any leaves or berries you like. Swirl it around again and leave, making sure to stir once a day. After a few days it should begin to froth; continue to stir once a day, and when the frothing begins to calm down, you can strain it and drink it. The process should take around ten days. It can become too fermented. If this happens, just strain out the flowers, fruit, and leaves, and put it into the fridge.

I put my flowers in first, but I'm sure that it will be ok!

Adding the honey

Filling them up with spring water

After energetic shaking ~ the blackthorn mead was especially excited!

I am currently trying two different recipes. My first thought was to make nettle mead from the nettles in the hedgehermitage garden. I am doing that, with the addition of some primrose flowers from the churchyard of the church I go to and which has stood on that spot for over 1,200 years; ancient ground. My other jar contains blackthorn blossom and some nettle tops from the companion plants growing under the blackthorn just down the road from here. I have added strawberries to both, although I think that I would rather have just used the nettles and flowers. I am not yet confident enough to do that though, as I wonder whether the soft fruit aids the fermentation process. I was mindful of keeping the nettles from the two different locations separate. I would like to use one to weave connection between my home with my church and the other to connect more deeply with the blackthorn being and her edge-place plant allies. I will perhaps sip a little each day and see what comes. I think of this more as a sacred ‘medicine’ than an alcoholic drink and will treat it in that way. I will perhaps write about that another day.

In the meantime, do let me know if you make this simple mead and what recipes you decided on. I wish you many blessing of honey and land if you do choose to make this mead prayer.

The Blackthorn Being

Welcome to Radical Honey...

Welcome to Radical Honey, where in future months you might find all manner of things grounded in a call for sacred activism through connection, community, creativity, cultivating wonder, reclaiming, snuffling out the truth beneath the obvious, small beauties, dancing bravely in the edge places, foraging, mindfulness, seeing what is real, acknowledging what is broken and calls for mending, open hearts and soft bellies, kindness, the power of vulnerability, everyday acts of small subversion, wild acts of fierce courage, and the quiet magic of a whistling kettle and a nice cup of tea. It had not been my intention to begin sharing these writings on the autumn equinox and yet, as is so often the case when we just let things happen, it does feel perfect to let them go as we begin our turning towards the dreaming dark. Who knows what spells we will spin, and what wonders we might catch sight of in the autumnal mist?

'Radical' is such a maligned word and many of us have been taught to be afraid of it, carrying as it does within its few letters a whiff of what we have come to think of as harsh, strident, confrontational, and aggressive. And yet, when we look beyond these learned fears, we find that radical is a deep and beautiful word, meaning 'of, or related to, the root', or going to the origin and fundamental nature of something. It is all about digging deep and seeing beneath what we might see at first or have been told. It means asking 'why?' When I feel out what the word 'radical' means, I imagine curling into myself like a fox, snuffling through layers until I find what smells like good earth, and I sense the power of connection and community underneath all those things which seek to divide us. When we are radicalised, brought back to our roots, there is no hope of dividing us and this seems to me to be a powerful standpoint from which to challenge all that we wish to change. 

 

And what of honey? For me honey symbolises creativity, the gathering of beauty to nourish our spirits, to sustain us through times where we feel a lack of what is good and sweet, and to help us trust in healing and abundance. And the sister bees are dripping with the magic of community, connection with the song of the land, the value of the individual woven into the collective, and the rightness of placing what, and who, is the most vulnerable in the centre of all that we do in an ever-changing, ever-flowing movement of love and care. In bees I find She~Who~Is and the Source. It is significant that they are struggling in the world, just as many of us are. Our relationship is old and there are many threads of kinship woven between us.

                                             
                                                                                                                               
 And so Radical Honey is to call for sacred activism and change, through connecting to our roots and drawing on deep wells of creative and joyful honey. In a world like this one, any act of connection or happiness is a radical act, and a rebellious one. I encourage each one of us to acknowledge our rebellion, from standing in front of line of riot police on a fracking protest, to speaking out for those who have no voices, from joining a march, to seeing the beauty in a magpie's wing. And, after it all, knowing that often we all just need some kindness and a hot cup of tea in order to stir up something that might change the world. This is Radical Honey; nothing, and no one, is insignificant. Everything matters.

In the next few weeks, I hope to write about my own small acts of rebellion and the ways in which I support myself in community with all beings. In my own small community in London this might mean introducing fly agaric mushrooms and harebells, blue alkhanet and the local squirrels, ashy mining and hairy flower-footed bees, the man from the kebab shop, foxes and cats, my human neighbours, soil microbes, moss, the crows on the Heath, the pigeons on the Green, hidden rivers and wildly growing weeds, and, moving further afield, the Kent sea, and Sandstone Hill Woman and Silver Spring Valley Woman; spirits of the land where I spend my free days wrapped up in love. All are part of the community that sustains me. This is where I find my radical honey and from that ground there shall be adventures. Who knows what the autumn will bring...