Oldest Known Mead Recipe

Columella was a Roman living around 60BCE (Before Common Era), during his life he wrote a book entitled De Re Rustica, well to be exact he wrote twelve volumes of this title, the books were advice to another Roman named Publius Silvinus. The advice ranged all over the map of Columella's vast stores of knowledge and experience. One of these volumes contained information on viniculture (the production of wine).

In Columella's advice on viniculture there is a brief paragraph which can be said is the oldest known extant mead recipe.

Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius of this water with a 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.

I've been asked, why didn't the romans die drinking this if its so darned dangerous. Well this is a complex question really, but let me expand upon the threatening warning that I wrote above.

Reason #1 Some did die from drinking these wild fermented beverages

Reason #2 The areas predominate wild yeast is exactly the kind of yeast that is needed to produce good alcoholic beverages, or at least relatively palatable ones. It may not be able to compete with the laboratory grown yeasts we now use, but they worked. In many parts of the world however most of the wild airborne yeasts are not the proper yeasts you want and may produce the wrong kind of alcohol. There are many types of alcohol and humans can only barely handle one, all others are extremely dangerous.

Believe it or not the stagnate rainwater is the safest component of this recipe (other than the honey), while the rainwater would have gathered some rather nasty bugs sitting still for a long time those bugs will not survive the alcohol produced by the fermentation process and in fact in the end, despite there being some risk that some of the wild yeast that grows in the mead might be the kind that produces alcohol that might kill a man, the fact remained it was still safer to drink this mead on average than it was to drink most of the water available, you were statistically less likely to get seriously ill.