Mead, the alcohol better known as honey wine, is 'liquid history in a glass'

From foxnews.com

4 fun facts about the drink brewed for thousands of years

One of the easiest beverages for beginning home brewers is a basic mead. 

But what is mead? And where did it come from? 

1. Mead has many names and varieties 

"Mead, also known as honey wine, is one of the most incredible fermented beverages known to humans," Julia Herz, executive director of the Colorado-based American Homebrewers Association, told Fox News Digital in an email. 

Wine is fermented grapes, whereas mead is fermented honey – hence the name "honey wine." The ancient Greeks called mead "ambrosia" or "nectar," noted the American Homebrewers Association's website.

Mead can also be mixed with other beverages. A mead that is "mixed with beer or brewed with hops and malt" is known as a "braggot," whereas mead with fruit is known as a "melomel," the American Homebrewers Association said. 

"Hydromel is a watered-down version consumed in Spain and France," the website said. 

Mead can be mixed with different fruits and herbs to create different flavours. (Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The type of honey used to make mead also plays an important role, Herz said. "Mead can also have fruit, herbs and spices added to fermented honey for added sensory reward. With hundreds of honey types, there is no end to experimentation and the possibilities."

2. Mead played a role in ancient religious traditions

Mead "was believed to be the drink of the gods and was thought to descend from the heavens as dew before being gathered in by bees," the American Homebrewers Association said. 

"Many European cultures also thought bees were messengers of the gods and preferred mead over wine in rites and grand ceremonies." 

A variety of ancient cultures, including the Egyptians, Celts, Greeks, Chinese and Vikings, all drank forms of mead, noted the website for the Irish meadery Kinsale Mead Co. Mead was especially important to the Vikings and in Norse mythology, noted the American Homebrewers Association.

Norse mythology states that warriors who reach Valhalla will be given mead. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Warriors who reached Valhalla – the warrior's heaven in Norse mythology – were promised "a draught of mead, delivered by divine maidens," as a reward, it said. 

Even today, a form of mead known as "Tej" or "T'ej" is the national drink of Ethiopia, according to the mead resource website "Got Mead?" Tej has been brewed in Ethiopia since the fourth century, it said.

3. Mead is one of the oldest forms of alcohol

In northern China, pottery dating from 9000 BC was found to have traces of mead, the BBC reported, meaning that mead is thousands of years older than the wheel. 

The beverage was first brewed in Europe between 2800 and 1800 BC, according to the BBC. Mead, Herz said, is "literally living liquid history in a glass." 

The earliest forms of mead, Herz said, were made from rainwater and natural fermentation processes. "Since the days that rainwater first diluted a honeybee hive inside the trunk of a tree and wild yeast fermented it, this 'wine' has made the world a better place," she said. 

                      Mead has been brewed for thousands of years and is older than the invention of the wheel. (iStock)

Even today, mead is still brewed with these same ingredients. 

The main ingredients in a traditional dry mead are just water, honey and yeast, the website for the American Homebrewers Association said. 

4. Mead (maybe) gave us the term ‘honeymoon’ 

After a wedding, it is very common for the newly married couple to go on a "honeymoon."

One theory of why this trip is called a "honeymoon" has to do with mead, Dictionary.com claims. The term "honeymoon" comes from the Old English term "hony moone," said Dictionary.com.

"There are several theories [about] where this name came from. The name may refer to the 'Mead Moon' or 'Honey Moon,' an old name for the June full moon," it said. 

At the time, mead was thought to increase fertility and bring luck to a couple, the website Batch Mead said — so newlyweds would drink mead for a full moon cycle.

https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/mead-alcohol-better-known-honey-wine-liquid-history-glass

With an abundance of honey: Zydeco Meadery brings mead making tradition to Massachusetts

From recorder.com

Non-drinkers like me may tend to think of mead — honey wine — as a beverage no one has consumed since Medieval times. Eric Depradine of Zydeco Meadery in North Attleboro begs to differ.

Depradine and his wife DeAundra have been making mead for more than a decade, first in Louisiana, later in Missouri, and now in Massachusetts. He told me in a recent telephone interview that mead is still produced in China, in India, in West Africa, and in Europe … basically wherever bees are raised.

“To be honest with you,” he said, “all cultures practice beekeeping. And many beekeepers inadvertently make their own mead by harvesting their honey too soon.”

Eric Depradine and his wife DeAundra have been making mead for more than a decade, first in Louisiana, later in Missouri, and now in Massachusetts. / Courtesy Jason Dailey

The Depradines didn’t start out with the intention of making mead. After meeting in college in Louisiana and getting married, they spent their honeymoon in Washington state. There they enjoyed sipping riesling. 

They returned to Louisiana intending to try making that wine themselves, only to discover that the grapes for it couldn’t be raised in the Deep South. Instead, Depradine said, “My wife purchased a book for me on mead making because Louisiana has an abundance of honey.”

The pair moved to Missouri, where in his spare time Depradine took a winemaking class at Highland Community College. The college opened a winemaking incubator, where clients could learn more and share expensive equipment.

Eventually, the Depradines were ready to begin selling their mead. They decided to pay tribute to the idea’s origins by calling their enterprise Zydeco Meadery. Zydeco is the distinctive African-American style of music that came out of Opelousas, Louisiana, where the couple once lived.

Eric Depradine is happy to be back in Massachusetts; he grew up here before heading to Louisiana for college. He sells four types of mead today. One of these, called Yankee Heritage Cyser, was inspired by a visit to Cider Days here in western Massachusetts in 2020.

“My mother, Gail Depradine, and I made the trip from Boston to the Shelburne Falls area and tasted a colonial-style hard cider at the former Bear Swamp Orchard and Cidery,” Depradine recalled.

                 A five-gallon bucket of crystalized Massachusetts knotweed honey. / Courtesy Zydeco Meadery

“It was barrel-aged with apples, brown sugar, and raisins — rich, rustic, and deeply rooted in New England tradition. I took a bottle back to Kansas City for my wife to try, and she immediately asked, ‘Can you make a mead version of this?’”

After some thinking, he explained, “I reimagined the recipe, swapping brown sugar for knotweed honey from Crystal Honey in Billerica, and initially using apples from New York’s Finger Lakes region. Later, I turned to fruit from Pine Hill Orchards in Colrain, coming full circle back to the orchards of western Massachusetts.”

I asked how the Cyser differs from the hard cider to which we are accustomed. Depradine suggested that the alcohol content is slightly higher and that the mead might be a little sweeter, thanks to the knotweed honey he adds to his apple juice.

He added that the blend of apples he uses for juice, a mixture of aromatic and bittersweet apples, contributes to the mead’s unique flavour.

Depradine hopes to return to Cider Days another year, perhaps to sell his mead. Meanwhile, he and his family (the Depradines have two children) are busy making mead and selling it at various farmers markets. Locally, it is available at Ryan & Casey Liquors in Greenfield.

Despite his passion for making mead, Eric Depradine is determined to keep his business from getting too large, in part to ensure consistent quality, and in part because his weekday work is his family’s primary source of income. “It gives me more stability than is available to other winemakers,” he said of the job.

In the distant future, he and his family hope to expand to make more mead and perhaps even to open a restaurant. For the moment, he is proud of the product he makes and the public’s reaction to it.

I asked Eric Depradine for a recipe, and he gave me instructions for making mead at home.

He noted that the specialized equipment — the carboys, etc. — can all be purchased at a homebrew supply store or an online homebrewing site.

Homemade Mead a la Zydeco

Ingredients:

3/4 pound local honey plus more honey to taste much later

1 1/4 gallons unpasteurized local apple juice

1 handful raisins

1 packet wine yeast

2 potassium metabisulfite tablets, separated

a small amount of potassium sorbate 

Instructions:

Sanitize your equipment. Place the 3/4 pound honey and the apple juice in a 3-gallon bucket.

Place the raisins in cheesecloth, and tie the cheesecloth to create a secure bundle to keep the raisins in place. 

Add the wine yeast and the cheesecloth-covered raisins to the bucket of honey and apple juice.

Cover the bucket, and let it sit and ferment for 2 weeks.

Sanitize a glass carboy. Remove the raisin packet from the liquid, and transfer the mead to age and clarify in the carboy. Add a potassium metabisulfite tablet to prevent oxidation.

Allow the mead to sit for 30 days. Look at it and sniff it. It should be relatively clear with no smell like vinegar or nail polish. If it is okay, let it sit for another 30 days. Look and smell again.

If you do get the smell, you will have to start over again, making sure to sanitize all equipment and to top off the carboy to minimize oxygen exposure.

If your mead looks and smells okay at the end of the 60 days, sweeten the mead with a little more local honey to taste; then add a little potassium sorbate to prevent re-fermentation.

Add another sulfite tablet to prevent oxidation.

Either transfer the mead to a clean carboy or bottle and cork it in smaller quantities. Share with friends and family. You will end up with a little over 1 gallon of mead.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.

https://recorder.com/2025/10/27/with-an-abundance-of-honey-zydeco-meadery-brings-mead-making-tradition-to-massachusetts/ 

How To Make Mead From Honey

From chowhound.com

You may not have noticed, but mead is having a moment. The fermented honey drink, once a niche product rarely seen Stateside outside of medieval fair food tents and historical re-enactments, is slowly growing in popularity among mainstream social drinkers looking to mix up their beer and hard seltzer routines. Meaderies large and small have emerged across the country in recent years, and experts predict the U.S. mead market will expand to $281.57 million by 2032.

If you're curious to try mead but don't have a meadery or a well-stocked bottle shop near you, you can still satisfy your curiosity: Do as medieval cosplayers and homebrewing hobbyists have done for decades and make it yourself. The process isn't as complicated as you might imagine. Basic mead contains just honey, water, and yeast, which are mixed together and allowed to ferment. To show you the ropes, we've enlisted help from a team of certified mead-tasting judges — Richard Furlong, Matt Nielson, and Dan Short — who are also award-winning mead makers.

What is mead?

                                                                                                                 Murziknata/Getty Images

An alcoholic beverage made from honey, mead is not quite the same as wine, though the two share some similarities. If you're picturing a syrupy sweet drink that tastes like watered-down honey, though, you're in for a pleasant surprise — the world of mead is a lot more diverse than most people realize. Even if you're not a fan of sweet drinks, you can still enjoy dry meads. If you enjoy the bubbles of beer and seltzer, you can also find sparkling meads. Love hard cider? Try cizer, mead flavoured with cider or apple juice. And fans of fruity drinks can enjoy melomel, or mead flavoured with fruits such as berries or citrus. Finally, those who love cocktails with spiced or herbal notes may enjoy metheglin, a mead flavoured with herbs and spices.

Most of us know of mead's ancient history because of its association with medieval Europe. But in fact, its roots go far deeper. The earliest meads appeared in Africa and are thought to date back 20,000 to 40,000 years. The ancient Greeks so revered mead, they considered it the drink of the gods, with all the magical and curative powers that suggests. Elsewhere, cultures around the world, from the Incas and Aztecs of the Americas to Scandinavian countries and Egypt, all developed their own varieties of mead. So if you're a fan of mead, you're part of a bigger club than you might realize.

Before you make mead

While making a basic mead requires relatively little hands-on work, it still needs care and time. Like all alcoholic drinks, it needs to ferment and age, and this could take several weeks, with the exact time depending on the type of mead you're making and the yeast you're using. If you want to make homemade mead for a special event, plan your production schedule accordingly — like all home brewing projects, mead-making is an exercise in delayed gratification.

And while you might imagine the process of making an ancient brew such as mead to be rough and rustic, getting the mead you want requires attention to detail. Every step, from cleaning your equipment to mixing in your honey, must be done with care to ensure you don't end up with any off flavours. So be prepared to have fun — but pay attention to each step of the process.

What you'll need to make mead

                                                                                    Bogac Erkan/Shutterstock

Mead doesn't need expensive equipment. The earliest meads were simply honey dissolved in water and fermented by airborne wild yeast, the same way natural wines are produced today. For beginners, a bare-bones approach can work well for mead, with easy-to-find household equipment. "You will need a fermenting vessel, some form of an air lock, and cleaning chemicals," Dan Short says. While home brewing shops offer a range of specialized equipment for home fermentation, Short advises that you can get by with a clean gallon pickle jar and use a balloon as an airlock — this serves to release the carbon dioxide generated by fermentation while keeping outside air and airborne contaminants out of the fermenter.

Matt Nielson recommends an alternate setup, saying, "For a novice, I would recommend a two-gallon food grade bucket as a main fermenter (since a bucket allows for easy access), and a one-gallon glass jug as a second, or aging, vessel (apple juice or cider jugs are my favourite source for this)." In addition, Nielson advises that you'll need an airlock and a length of tubing to siphon the mead from the fermenter to the aging vessel. If you're more serious about brewing mead, though, Nielson recommends some advanced gear. "Some additional, recommended equipment would be a hydrometer or refractometer (for measuring the progress of fermentation), a medium to large scale (for measuring out honey into the fermenter), and a small jeweller's scale with 0.1 gram resolution (for measuring out nutrients and stabilizers)."

Gather your ingredients

                                                                                                                Kolderal/Getty Images

The most important ingredient in mead is honey, and you'll need a lot of it. "To make a wine strength (12-14% ABV) traditional mead, approximately 3 pounds of honey will be needed per gallon of liquid. One gallon of honey (about 12 pounds) would be needed for a 5-gallon batch of mead," Matt Nielson said. And your choice of honey matters. "My favourite thing about mead is the wide variety of honey available: Wildflower honey is probably the truest expression of terroir," Nielson said. For beginners, Dan Short recommends orange blossom honey. "It is the most forgiving, I think, in terms of a sweetness to retained flavour, because as you ferment it out, you're going to lose a lot of flavours," he said.

You will also need yeast, and for this, you'll need to look for varieties specifically formulated for brewing — the packet in your pantry for baking won't do. And to ensure a predictable fermentation, Nielson also recommends yeast nutrients. "One thing to remember is that honey itself is very low in nitrogen, a requirement for yeast health and growth," he explained. "It is highly recommended to use a supplemental yeast nutrient (such as Fermaid O), as this will vastly increase the quality of your mead."

Sanitise your equipment

                                                                                                                               Glenn Price

Before you start making your mead, you must sanitise everything your mead ingredients touch — measuring cups and spoons, funnels, stirring implements, and your fermenting vessel and airlock. While your gear doesn't need to be clean-room sterile, it needs a more thorough cleanse than the standard trip through the dish sink. "Not keeping stuff sterile, that's the biggest mistake," Dan Short says. Don't take any shortcuts with the process, either — dust or bacteria on a stirring implement or in a fermenter can doom your mead before you've even started to make it. As Short explains, "75% of any brewing is cleaning."

"All the equipment should be cleaned with either dish soap, an enzymatic and fragrance-free detergent," advises Nielson, who recommends a product like Seventh Generation dish soap or a specialist cleaning agent like Powdered Brewery Wash (PBW). You'll need to make sure any visible dirt is removed before the final sanitisation step. "A food grade, no-rinse sanitiser such as StarSan is highly recommended," he says. "These only need a short contact time and do not require any rinsing." Nielson said. If you use StarSan, don't worry about the residual foam that may remain in your fermenting vessel after you sanitise it — it's perfectly safe and won't affect the flavour or fermentation of your mead.

Combine your honey with water

                                                                                               Glenn Price

Many people envision homebrewing as a complex process involving lots of boiling and mixing, and it can be if you're making some types of beer. But mead — especially if you start with a basic, beginner-friendly recipe — is surprisingly straightforward to make. All you have to do is mix your honey with water until it's dissolved, then add your yeast and yeast nutrient, then wait. You don't even need to heat up the water. "Heating or sterilising the water first is not necessary, explains Matt Nielson. Being naturally antiseptic is why concentrated honey never expires, and all the other equipment should have already been sanitized. While regular tap water will work, Richard Furlong noted, "I would suggest using bottled water from the store."

But if you've ever fought to stir a stubborn gob of honey into a cocktail in place of simple syrup, you'll know that getting honey to dissolve can take some elbow grease. This is especially true if you're working with several pounds of the sticky stuff along with a gallon or more of water. Nielson likes to incorporate half of the water into the honey before topping it off with the remaining water. While you can use a long-handled spoon or balloon whisk to stir the honey and water together, Nielson speeds up the process by using a lees stirrer, like this Stainless Steel Mix-Stir, attached to a cordless drill. As he says, "Work smart, not hard."

Add the right yeast for the mead you want

                                                                             Martinprague/Getty Images

Yeast is the secret ingredient that turns honey-sweetened water into mead. And to get great mead, it's crucial to choose the right yeast and give it a healthy environment so it can do its job properly and give you the flavour profile you want. Fortunately, as Dan Short explains, "There are a lot of commercial examples of mead-specific yeasts now.". He added that possible yeasts range from traditional wine yeasts, which will produce drier meads, to special mead yeasts that stop fermenting sooner, leaving behind more residual sugar and giving sweeter finished meads.

"Some of the best options for new mead makers are wine yeasts that have low nutrient requirements and wide fermentation temperature ranges," Matt Nielson said. "Lalvin QA23 and K1V-1116 are two great choices." To keep yeast healthy, Richard Furlong injects oxygen into the mead before adding the yeast. "I would suggest to add pure oxygen with an oxygen wand you can get from the brew shop to oxygenate your mead," he says. "It is impossible to get the proper amount of O₂ into your mead by just shaking, using the pure O₂ will help prevent stuck fermentation. You just need about 30 seconds of O₂ for a 5-gallon batch." And as Nielson noted earlier, adding a yeast nutrient can help ensure that your yeast will thrive.

Find a safe place for your mead to ferment

Once you've added yeast to your mead, it's time to let it ferment. Because the mead will bubble and expand as the yeast releases gas, you should ensure your fermenting vessel is big enough to hold everything without leaking. "One potential issue during fermentation is that a vigorous fermentation can overflow your container (especially if adding in a nutrient addition). This is easily mitigated by using a larger vessel," Matt Nielson says. "The best container for fermenting mead is one that allows for easy access, and is about 1.25-2 times larger than the batch you are making. For a 1-gallon batch, a 2-gallon bucket is great; for a 5-gallon batch, a 6.5-gallon bucket allows for plenty of room."

Once your mead is in the fermenter, your next step is to set it aside in a space with a fairly stable temperature. "Don't make it and keep it in your kitchen," Dan Short warns. "It's going to have temperature fluctuations and it's going to be too hot. Sometimes too cold." These fluctuations, he explained, can stress yeast. You don't have to overthink possible storage areas, though. "I always tell people, pick the closet you go into the least and put it in the back," Short mentions. Fermentation, Richard Furlong explains, takes three to five weeks. "You will also have a yeast sediment at the bottom of your carboy. That is when you want to rack your mead to the smaller carboy," he says, noting that this will prevent oxidation by reducing the headspace. This shorter, secondary aging period, Furlong explains, is to separate the mead from the yeast and allow it to settle and clarify.

Add flavourings, if desired

                                                                                           rsooll/Shutterstock

One of the things mead makers — and drinkers — love about mead is the endless variety of flavours it can have, depending on what the maker decides to add. Creative mead makers have concocted versions flavoured with everything from berries to chilis to spices and chocolate (or even take inspiration from Mexican hot chocolate and use a combination of these). While it's probably wise for novices to keep their first batch simple, it's never a bad idea to learn about your other options.

You can add flavouring agents either during the first fermentation period or during aging, after the mead has been taken off the yeast and moved into a smaller container. "In general, ingredients added during the fermentation period will likely have their flavours transformed by the yeast, and ingredients added after fermentation is over/during aging will be truer to character," Matt Nielson explains. "For fruits, add them during aging for a fresh fruit character and during primary fermentation for a more integrated, wine-like character. Spices should be added during aging." Richard Furlong recommends adding delicately flavoured fruit such as mangos and peaches during the aging stage. To flavour your mead with spices, he says to "boil your spices to make a strong tea and add by taste."

Bottle the finished mead

                                                                                                          Vitaliy Kyrychuk/Shutterstock

Once your mead has settled (and been flavoured), it's time to bottle it for storage and serving. "Bottles of various sizes are a standard packaging option for mead," Matt Nielson says. "Standard 12-ounce beer bottles and caps are an easily accessible and affordable option, as are swing top bottles with rubber/silicone seals. Wine bottles (either 375 or 750 ml) are an attractive option."

To easily transfer your mead from its aging vessel to the bottles, you'll need a racking cane (a siphon that lets you control the flow of liquid into your bottles) and food-grade plastic tubing to channel the mead from the aging container — these can sometimes be bought together, like with this Fermtech Stainless Steel Auto-Siphon. You may also need metal caps, with a capper to clamp them to the bottles, or alternately, corks and a corker if you're using wine bottles. No matter how you plan to bottle your mead, keep everything that touches the beverage fastidiously clean. "Once again, sanitise everything," stresses Richard Furlong, "bottles, caps, bottling bucket, and bottling cane."

Store and enjoy

                                                                                                   Elizabeth Livermore/Getty Images

Once you've bottled your mead, it's ready to share and enjoy. You're not going to drink it all at once, so to ensure every bottle is as good as the last, you'll want to store it safely. "Wine bottles with natural corks should be stored on their side; all others should be stored upright," Matt Nielson advises; storing wine bottles on their sides keeps their corks from drying out, keeping them airtight, allowing unopened wines to last for a long time. Sealed bottles don't need to be refrigerated, but they should stay in an area with a stable temperature. "Store mead inside, not in the garage with wild temperature swings," Richard Furlong advises.

So how should you serve the mead you've worked so hard to make? The short answer is any way you like. "To borrow from one of my favourite distilling people, the best way to enjoy it is whatever you think tastes best," Dan Short says. "Okay, if it's chilled because you like it chilled, do it that way. If it's room temp because you like it room temp, do it that way. If it's supposed to be bubbly and you hate the bubbles, I know plenty of people that are like, 'I don't do bubbly drinks' and let it go flat and drink it that way."

How long does mead last?

If you make a one-gallon batch of mead, chances are you'll finish it all or give it all away before it has a chance to go bad. But if you plan to store some away for a special occasion, you should know what to expect as it ages. "Mead lasts about 3 years in bottles," says Richard Furlong, noting that using a preservative like food grade Potassium Sorbate will help it to last. "After 3 years, oxidation will start to occur, and the sorbate can chemically change and give off a celery flavour."

How you seal your bottles can also impact their longevity. Dan Short notes that if you're keeping your mead in beer bottles, you might start to notice some off-flavours after about a year. Corked bottles, he adds, can last longer, depending on the type of cork you use — some are rated for longer storage periods, such as corks intended for aged red wines, while others are intended for wines meant to be drunk young. The alcohol content of mead also plays a role in its shelf life. "As with any alcoholic beverage, a higher ABV can yield a higher aging potential," Matt Nielson says. "An 18% ABV mead packaged in wine bottles with high quality corks can last decades."

https://www.chowhound.com/1718798/how-to-make-mead-honey/

Alaska: A Homer business takes a local approach to brewing mead, with help from thousands of bees

From alaskapublic.org

On an early summer morning, amidst the heavy buzz of energetic honeybees, Jason Davis opened one of his hives and pulled out a frame. It was dense with bees and more crawled in and out of the entrances of colorful stacks of polypropylene boxes that surrounded him.  

“As soon as they start landing, you’ll see that they have little balls of yellow or orange pollen on their legs,” Davis said. 

Davis has twenty five colonies, over a million bees, in the backyard of his meadery in Homer, Sweetgale Meadworks and Cider House. 

“This is a happy day for the bees because it’s either above 50 already, or it’s about to be, and there’s almost no wind and it’s sunny and the dandelions are out,” Davis said. 

Davis turned around and squatted down in front of a row of low bushes. He’s planted rows of nagoonberries, also called Arctic Raspberries. Davis said he discovered nagoonberries in the wild as a teenager and has had a special connection with them ever since.They look like raspberries but have a distinct tangy flavor that Davis now treasures for making mead. 

“It’s hard to get enough from the wild so I grow them here,” Davis said. “I have about 20,000 plants. And last year I harvested almost 500 pounds of berries- mainly my son harvested, but I help him when I can.”

Nagoonberries, honey and water are the only ingredients in Davis’ most popular drink, a wild fermented mead. Producing locally-grown food and drink in Alaska can be challenging and it’s especially true of alcohol, which often relies on imported fruits, grains, and yeasts, even when they’re brewed in-state. But since he began commercially producing meads and wines, Davis has pursued making them with all-local ingredients. 

Jason Davis holds a frame from one of his honeybee hives, in the yard of his meadery in Homer, AK. (Jamie Diep/KBBI)

Davis walked back to his meadery kitchen to explain his fermenting process.

“We do everything in five gallon batches,” Davis said, stirring a ladle in one of a cluster of silver pots. “And this is the wildflower honey, which is our traditional straight mead. So there’s nothing in there but honey and water.”

Pure honey is antibacterial and antifungal, which means bacteria and yeast can’t survive in it. But when it’s mixed with water, yeast can eat the sugars and ferment it into mead, an alcoholic drink that tastes like a honey wine.

Davis ferments with local raspberries, currants, chaga mushrooms, apples for cider, and of course, honey. As of this year, his bees only provide about a third of the honey he needs, though his long-term plan is to produce all his own. Local honey comes with a steep price tag: it’s more than five times the cost of bulk clover honey, and that increases his bottle prices. 

“I sell it mostly for around $30 A bottle,” Davis said. “But I could sell it for half that if I was using Costco honey.”

He said he can’t sell much of his mead in stores around Alaska because the profit margins are too low, but he does sell directly to consumers online. 

Davis said a higher price for local ingredients is worth it; he buys berries from several local farmers and he said the flavors far surpass anything you can find in a grocery store. He said local honey is also much better for making mead. 

“If I make a raspberry or black currant or, or a blueberry mead, if it’s fireweed honey, you don’t taste the honey there at all,” Davis said. “The focus is all on the fruit. Whereas if I get clover honey from Costco, it costs a fraction of the price but it has a very distinct medicinal flavour that comes out once you remove the sweetness.”

But Davis said using all-local ingredients isn’t just about flavour. 

“It’s a desire to support local agriculture and to be local,” Davis said. “And just the craft industry aspect of making an amazing, I think, world class product just using local ingredients from here.”

Davis said it’s hard to find locally grown and produced alcohol in the state. Alaska has many breweries and wineries, but he said water is often their only local ingredient. 

As far as he knows, his commercial meadery makes the only consistently locally grown and produced alcohol in the state. 

And in the long term, Davis said making food and drink with local ingredients makes businesses and the community more stable. 

“I think the more we can do here locally, the better it is,” Davis said. “So we don’t have to ship everything up from the lower 48 where it’s a little bit vulnerable.”

Davis said if for some reason the road system failed, he could still produce everything for the meadery. 

Davis said every year business gets a little bit better than the year before and this year has been good for the bees. In midsummer, he temporarily moved some of his hives to a higher elevation so they could gather fireweed pollen in open meadows, boosting their productivity and giving him a higher yield of the honey that is the backbone of his business.

https://alaskapublic.org/2024/08/06/a-homer-business-takes-a-local-approach-to-brewing-mead-with-help-from-thousands-of-bees/ 

How to Bee Happy: Let Me Tell You About Mead

From resto.newcity.com

By Tom Keith

Scene: A guest comes over.

Person 1: Would you like a Melomel? A Pyment? A Braggot? How about an Acerglyn? Bochet? Capsicumel? Cyser? Hippocras, Hydromel, Tej, Metheglin, Morat, Omphacomel, Oxymel, or a Rhodomel?*

Person 2: Could you please speak English?

Person 1: I am. I’m a mazer.

End scene.

*These are various styles of meads. I’ll explain later what a few of them are, but there’s not enough bandwidth here to detail them all. You have heard of Google, right?

Mazer? What the heck is a mazer?

That was the question I got a few years ago when I’d brought a mead to a party. The questioner was an accomplished lawyer, and a dedicated foodie. Since I’d made the mead myself, I told him “Well, I guess I’m a mazer.” He’d never heard the term mazer. (Lawyers… really…)

It was a reflection of how far off mead is from most people’s radar screens. (A mazer is someone who makes mead, just as a vintner is someone who makes wine, and a brewer is someone who makes beer.) And, despite a small base compared to brewers, the Chicago area has a few commercial mazers making meads for us all. (More on that later, too.)

What is mead?

So, what is mead, really? Basically, it’s diluted, fermented honey, sometimes flavoured with other stuff. It may be the oldest fermented beverage in existence.

One story suggests that some honey once dripped into a tree stump, then rain filled the stump with water. Airborne yeasts got a hold of it. (You know we’re all surrounded by airborne yeasts, right? The Belgians have made an industry out of it, with some of their ales.) Someone then decided to drink the result, and, shall we say, got happy.

Mead is usually described as “honey wine,” although that’s not strictly accurate. By the usual definitions, fermented fruits (especially grapes) are considered wines, and fermented grains are considered beers (that sake you like should be called a rice beer). So, mead is its own category. (Just like mushrooms, they’re not plants, they’re not animals, they just do their own thing.)

Mead is even credited for the term “honeymoon.” It was historically served at weddings and given to newlyweds. The couple would drink it in excess for a “moon”—or month—after their ceremony to enhance fertility. So, drink mead, especially if: a) you want to procreate, or if not, b) you’re a woman on the pill, or c) you have a decent-sized stash of condoms nearby.

How is mead made?

In some ways, mead isn’t too tough to make. To make a beer, you have to coax the starches in the grains to become sugars (usually with amylase, an enzyme that naturally occurs on the grains). That allows yeast to have something to munch on (and poop out alcohol and CO2). With a mead, since you’re starting with honey, the sugars are already in there. (Although, if you want to nitpick, the yeasts really appreciate it if you give them a few more nutrients, just as some people may do better with multivitamins. The yeasts like the added nutrients. They’ve told me so.)

On the other hand, mead-making requires a lot of work. Luckily for us, it’s not human work. That honey that went into your 750ml bottle of an average mead took about 30,000 bees traveling 27,500 miles and visiting more than a million flowers to gather the nectar required for that mead. I’m just guessing, but I doubt you could get 30,000 humans to travel 27,500 miles and visit a million flowers to get their share of the price of a bottle of mead—even an expensive one, at $50 or so.

Based on watching the honeybees in my backyard catmint plants, I can authoritatively state that each bee typically spends under one second on each flower, so using that, each 750ml bottle of mead may represent approximately 300 hours of work; hence the term “busy bee.”

                                                               Wild Blossom Meadery & Winery/Photo: Tom Keith

Where can I buy mead?

In addition to the meaderies themselves, and a limited few restaurants, most good liquor stores will have a small selection of meads—a recent visit to my local store found thirteen bottles of mead, among its many thousands of bottles of liquors, wines and beers.

Mead is the fastest growing of all major fermented beverages—albeit from a small base. Between 2011 and 2014, the American Mead Maker’s Association reported mead sales had grown 130 percent. Craft beer sales in that period grew just thirty-nine percent, and wine sales a scant six percent.

Talk with a Mazer

Driving down the 4000 block of Elston Avenue the other day, I noticed a rather enigmatic sign. It was a large picture of a bee, encased in a dripping hexagon. Why was there a picture of a bee on Elston Avenue?

Peter Schultz knows why. He’s the mazer at Second City Meadery.

“I started brewing because my wife was really into mead. I was really into beer. We would go to dates to Haymarket, and she found out pretty quickly she was not into beer. But Haymarket serves a variety of things, so she was able to try a bee nectar.

“After graduating, I was a CPA for seven years. It’s as catastrophically boring as you can imagine. So, my wife sees me home-brewing, really loving it, and going to a cubicle every day and really hating it. She started pushing me to make this my job.”

What should a mead be? And I don’t mean it as “bee.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of puns in the industry, for sure.

“A mead should be smooth, with no off flavors. It takes a long time to figure out how to do that. It took me two years of homebrewing before I learned how to make good mead and ferment honey, without off flavors. I like mine a little more on the luscious side, a little more thick, with a heavier body. I like mine sweet, but I also like it balanced with a lot of fruit acidity. You have to use interesting honeys.

“Like, wildflower is great for some things, but it can only get you so far. What I strive to do is make people taste things they haven’t tasted before. That’s why I love honeyberry. I love Szechuan peppercorn, ingredients that people aren’t that familiar with.

“I love raspberry mead, but I know what it tastes like. If I’m gonna do a raspberry mead I want to use a weird honey or I want to use raspberry and some other fruit that’s less popular, or some spice that’s less popular.

“When we opened, so many people would come in and they would say ‘tell me about mead; I’ve never had it before.’ Now I’m getting a lot more that ‘we’ve had mead, but we’ve never been here. Tell us about your mead.’ So that is a big difference. I’m excited for three years from now, five years from now. But it would be tough for me to see it growing the way craft beer did. It’s a little more boutique. It’s not gonna be that all of a sudden there’s 200 meaderies in Chicago—that’s never gonna happen. But if we could get a dozen meaderies, twenty-five meaderies in Chicago in the next five or ten years—that would be incredible.

“It’s been interesting to see who’s easier to convert to a mead lover. It’s not wine people. It’s beer people. Like, if you already like barrel-aged stouts, mead is not that far off, in terms of mouthfeel and flavor complexity.

“People like mead. It’s made from honey, so immediately they think it’s gonna be super sweet. You pull out a dry. Yeah, and they’re going to question… this has honey in it? It’s great to blow people’s minds that mead can be dry.”

Types of mead

Basic or traditional meads are simply diluted fermented honey. But there are so many variations—dry, sweet, still, sparkling, as alcoholically strong as a port, or as weak as a light beer; here are a few.

• Melomel—while it sounds like a character named Mel in an R. Crumb comic, it’s actually a mead flavoured with fruit.
• Metheglin is a spiced mead. The name comes from the Welsh language word meddyglyn, meaning healing liquor, for its supposedly medicinal qualities.
• Braggot doesn’t refer to your friend with a massive ego. It’s basically the bastard child of mead and beer: a beer made with roughly as much honey as beer ingredients.
• Cyser, similarly, is a mead made with honey that’s diluted with apple juice (which is why the name resembles “cider”).
• Pyment uses grape juice instead of water to dilute the honey before fermentation.
• Acerglyn is a mead made primarily with maple syrup. Its flavors are somewhat similar to fenugreek.
• Bochet is a mead where the honey is boiled and caramelized (a very messy operation—boiling honey foams up like crazy). The caramel flavors come through.
• Tej is an Ethiopian version of mead, frequently available at Ethiopian restaurants. It’s distinguished by its use of gesho (the bark of a local buckthorn shrub) for flavouring. In Ethiopia, it’s often homemade, so versions can vary significantly.

A Few Chicago-Area Meaderies

Wild Blossom is Chicago’s oldest and largest meadery, an offshoot of the home-brewing store Bev Art, originally in the South Side’s Beverly neighbourhood. Both are now located in a large, modern building at 9030 South Hermitage. Most large liquor stores will have a few of their bottles. Wild Blossom is distinguished in that it attends to its own beehives and produces its own honey.

Manic Meadery is Peter Schultz’s favorite meadery in the Chicago area. “I can’t say enough good things about Manic Meadery. Easily one of my favorites.” It’s at 1003 East Summit, Crown Point, Indiana.

Second City Meadery is a small-batch meadery that you already know about if you’ve read this far. 4465 North Elston.

Standard Meadery is a meadery associated with a tiki bar. 11 West Park Boulevard, Villa Park.

Misbeehavin’ Meads is a meadery that focuses on making meads with a focus on fun. 65 Franklin Street, Valparaiso, Indiana.

Pips Meadery also offers wine and cocktails. It’s in the former Only Child Brewing space. 1350 Tri State Parkway, Gurnee.

https://resto.newcity.com/2024/05/17/how-to-bee-happy-let-me-tell-you-about-mead/