Welcome to the first edition of The Bee's Lees. Most of the recipes in this collection are taken from issues of the Mead Lover's Digest, an electronic mail forum for discussion of mead brewing. Like the other brewing-related electronic forums (Homebrew Digest, Cider Digest, etc.), archives of the back issues exist on various ftp servers around the country. As the number of back issues of these digests grows, it becomes quite time-consuming for the average reader to go through all of them, looking for recipes. This is probably what prompted the development of The Cat's Meow (TCM), the brewing recipe-book culled from the archives of the Homebrew Digest (among other sources). TCM is huge, and contains several hundred recipes covering just about every style of beer-type fermentable. It even has some recipes for making mead.

So if TCM is so comprehensive and also contains mead recipes, why is there a need for a separate mead recipe book? The recipes in TCM come mostly from The Homebrew Digest, a long-established electronic digest for ........ beer brewers! Most of the readers of the digest brew beer, and some make a mead occasionally. Very few mead recipes get posted there, and for a mead brewer, the "signal-to-noise" ratio, as it's called, is extremely low. Also, a lot of serious mead-makers are not interested in beer at all, and never read Homebrew Digest. And last (but not least!), many people, though electronically connected, simply can't afford the time it takes to sift through everything coming down the information highway.

Disclaimer (Please read this!):

Though many recipes have been posted on the Mead Lover's Digest, not all of them made it into this book. I only chose ones where the contributor stated QUITE CLEARLY that the resultant concoction was at least "pretty good". I did not select lists of ingredients that someone had just put into their carboy the night before, for instance.

Of course, even using the best recipes and ingredients is no guarantee of success. This recipe book assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the extract brewing process. To find out about the general procedures involved in making mead, please read The Mead-Lovers README File, the Mead FAQ, which is available at the same place as the Mead Digest archives. To receive the FAQ, send (by e-mail) the following message: GET PUB/MEAD MEAD.FAQ to: LISTSERV@SIERRA.STANFORD.EDU

Many thanks to the people who have shared their recipes. More recipes are always welcome, as well as questions, comments, and (constructive) criticisms. My e-mail address is: jmiller@genome.wi.mit.edu.

Copyright 1994. This document was created specifically to encourage the brewing of mead. It may be distributed freely (electronically), but may not be sold for profit.