Joe's Ancient Orange Mead
The legendary no-fuss recipe that breaks all the rules, and works.
ABV
~11% ABV
Time to bottle
~2 months
Original gravity
~1.120
Final gravity
~1.030
Joe Mattioli's famous one-gallon recipe: whole orange, raisins, one clove, a cinnamon stick, and plain bread yeast. No hydrometer, no racking schedule, no nutrient math. You pitch it, ignore it for two months, and bottle a sweet, spiced dessert mead when the fruit drops and it clears.
What you'll need
- 3.5 lb (1.6 kg) clover honey
- 1 large orange, washed and cut into eighths (peel on)
- 25 raisins
- 1 stick of cinnamon
- 1 whole clove (no more, it dominates fast)
- Optional: a pinch of allspice or nutmeg
- 1 tsp Fleischmann's bread yeast
- Water to 1 gallon
- Batch size
- 1 gallon (3.8 L)
- Yeast
- Fleischmann's bread yeast (yes, really)
Taste profile
What a finished batch should taste like.
Aroma
Flavor
How to make it
- 1
Dissolve the honey in warm water in the fermenter, then add the orange pieces, raisins, and spices.
- 2
Top up to about 3 inches below the top of a 1-gallon jug and shake hard to aerate.
- 3
Pitch the bread yeast dry on top. Fit an airlock and put it somewhere dark at room temperature.
- 4
Do nothing. Do not rack, do not stir, do not open it; the recipe depends on being left alone.
- 5
Around week 8–9 the fruit drops to the bottom and the mead clears from the top down.
- 6
When it is clear and the fruit has sunk, siphon carefully into bottles, leaving the sediment behind.
Brewer's notes
- This recipe finishes sweet because bread yeast gives up around 11%: that is by design, not a stuck ferment.
- Resist the urge to "improve" it with wine yeast; you will get rocket fuel that needs a year of aging instead.
- One clove means one clove. It is the most common way this recipe gets ruined.
After bottling: 2+ months. Drinkable young by mead standards, better after the clove settles in.
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