Is it like wine? Or is it like beer?Mead is alcohol made from honey. It is not wine and it is not beer. It’s mead.There are 3 basic forms of fermented alcohol in human history: There is beer, wine, and mead. We enjoy them all! However, all of them start from some kind sugar and it is the source and amount of sugar that primarily defines the fermentation style:If the primary sugar source is grain, it is beer.If the primary sugar source is fruit, it is wine.If 50% or more of the sugar source is honey, it is mead.Mead is not a kind of wine or a kind of beer. It is historically our 1st major form of fermented alcohol because we had access to honey everywhere we hunted or gathered food. It’s an amazing gift from nature… and it’s the mother of wine and beer. Humankind had mead long before we had wine or beer. Imagine that! Beer and wine are descended from mead….Mead is pre-agrarian. It’s at least 9,000 years old, likely older…some say at least 20,000-40,000 years or more… The authors of Mead Wikipedia note that “Mead is independently multicultural. It is known from many sources of ancient history throughout Europe, Africa and Asia, although archaeological evidence of it is ambiguous.[4] Its origins are lost in prehistory; “it can be regarded as the ancestor of all fermented drinks,” Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat has observed, “antedating the cultivation of the soil.”[5]So, before we farmed land, we gathered honey and used it for a variety of purposes, ranging from culinary to religious to medicinal. When honey gets wet, it will ferment and turn into alcohol. This might happen naturally such as when washing clean a honeycomb, as when making candles or soap, or as a way to get the last of the honey out of the comb.Traditional mead is honey, water, and yeast. Since yeast is naturally occurring in the air we breath, honey-water became honey-wine early in our human history. Modern mead is made with specifically chosen yeast, varietal honey, and filtered water for a quality product. What mead is throughout time and independently in every culture is honey magically transformed into delicious alcohol.So, will you like the taste of mead? Probably. Here are 2 typical indicators: if you like honey and you like alcohol, chances are you’ll like mead. :)Keep in mind however, that Mead is giant category of alcohol that is described by Wikipedia in the following way:Mead (pronounced /ˈmiːd/ meed) or honey wine is an alcoholic beverage, made from honey and water via fermentation with yeast. Its alcoholic content may range from that of a mild ale to that of a strong wine. It may be still, carbonated, or sparkling; it may be dry, semi-sweet, or sweet.[1]Depending on local traditions and specific recipes, it may be brewed with spices, fruits, or grain mash. It may be produced by fermentation of honey with grain mash;[2]mead may also be flavored with hops[3] to produce a bitter, beer-like flavor.So, mead ranges in flavor along an incredible continuum of flavors and variables, depending on honey source, type of yeast used, investment in aging, combination with fruit or spice, and many other factors.Consider that there are as many possible types of honey as there are flowering plants fertilized by bees in the world.Think about the number of kinds of plants there are in the world. Just for a minute. That’s a huge number of plants….each of which will have different flavors.Honeys are not all the same! Honey, of course, is made when bees eat and digest pollen and store it in honeycombs. Each plant around the world in different seasons has different scents and properties…. So, for example, there is Almond Honey, Tupelo Honey, Black Locust Honey, Pumpkin Honey, Mint Honey, Tulip Honey, Buckwheat Honey, Apple Blossom Honey, Clover Honey, and on and on… hundreds and hundreds of varieties.Even categories of honey like Wildflower Honey can be subdivided by region and types of wildflowers very much like the terroir in wine….like Autumn Wildflower, Desert Wildflower, Mountain Wildflower, Prairie Wildflower, and more….Each and every one of these honeys have a different taste. And, like grapes each year for wine, each year and season the honey will also yield different flavors depending on rain, available nutrients in the soil, health of the plants, health of the bees, etc.So, mead typically tastes of honey, but the range of honey flavor is immense. Honey, which has every flavor of plant possible bound up in sweet deliciousness, has much more variation than grapes or grains could ever hope achieve. However, just because mead tastes of honey does not mean it is always actually sweet. Most people assume mead will always be sweet either because they have only had sweet meads or because they assume anything made of honey must be sweet. However, both beer and wine are also made from sugar, whether that is fructose or starch; and so, enter the next key elements of flavor control, yeast and technique. Depending on yeast and technique, mead can be dry, semi-dry, semi-sweet, or sweet.Often people will expect mead to be very sweet and very thick…. Mead can be like that, but it can be light, crisp, and dry as a bone.How dry or sweet mead is has to do with the kind of yeast you use and how much sugar you started with in the beginning. Some yeast are more alcohol tolerant than others and will continue to live well into the fermentation process. So, one way to control the amount of residual sugar is through the yeast. Other recipes will add sugar back into the alcohol after the primary fermentation process is complete to adjust sweetness, just like in current wine and beer fermentation practices. Sweeter meads are thicker. Drier meads are lighter.Then, of course you can take a traditional mead (honey, water, and yeast) and add fruit or spice to it. When you add a fruit, it’s called a Melomel. When you add a spice, it’s called a Metheglin. Of course, you can get creative and have a Spiced Melomel or a Fruit Metheglin like our Apple Pie…So, there is conceivably a wider and broader range of possibilities in mead than in beer and wine combined. Imagine THAT! It’s a big claim, but think about it…Beer has a very broad range of options. Truly. It’s everything from yellow water to “I-drank-a-loaf-of-bread” …. and everything in between including world-wide variations in ales, lagers,porters, stouts, Belgians, ambers, IPAs, wheats, ryes, etc… Different kinds of grains, hops, additions like fruit or spice, and huge variations in brew techniques.Wine has a deep continuum of grape varieties that transform into Bordeaux, Champagnes, Ports, Madeiras, Burgundies, Pinots, etc, . There are huge variations in types of grapes from different regions, grown in different soils, varying hydration, and vinting practices… and of course grapes are not the only fruit. One could ferment any fruit into a wine and we are only starting to see some true creativity in that area from commercial wineries.So, considering that honey has as many, if not more, variations across all flowering plants fertilized by bees around the world in all the seasons, soils, climates, and agricultural practices, there is a fundamental enormity of breadth in what can be mead based on just types of honey. Then, it can be infused with cinnamon or it might carry strong lavender tones or it may be flavored with fruits like raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, paw-paws, apricots, peaches, or even grapes. There is an immense variety of kinds of mead. Limited only by our imagination!Then, combine that with all the fruits and/or spices imaginable: including recalling that honey is the original sweetening agent in all of wine and beer for thousands of years …So, any consideration of what mead tastes like has to acknowledge such a mind-blowingly infinite creative set of possibilities, so quintessential to our humanity that Claude Lévi-Strauss makes a case for the invention of mead as a marker of the passage “from nature to culture.”[6]“.We hope that our mead may have the potential to also bring us from culture back to nature as we choose to drink local!
