'Game of Thrones' brought an ancient drink back from the dead — here's what mead really is and how to drink it

By Tom Murray
From businessinsider.com

Mead is coming.
Thanks to the likes of "Game of Thrones" and the surge in popularity of other fantasy series, mead — the ancient alcoholic beverage made from honey — is making a comeback.
Mead, which is probably the world's oldest alcoholic drink, fell out of popularity when improved medieval farming methods produced cheaper alternatives like beer, and later when West Indian sugar imports reduced the incentives to keep bees.
Mead kept a cult following, though, thanks to its association with medieval and fantasy thematics — it's a popular choice at medieval tournaments and fayres.

                  King Robert Baratheon drinks from a horn in 'Game of Thrones' season one.

                                                                         HBO                                           

However, mead is not just the sickly reserve of castle gift shops. In recent years, mead has rebounded. Its affinity with "Thrones" fans and the rise of "craft" has jetpacked the beverage to lofty new heights both in terms of volume and taste.

A 2017 industry report from the American Mead Makers Association found that the number of meaderies in the US has risen from just 30 in 2003 to 300 in early 2016.
According to The Drinks Business, 67% of American meaderies have been open for less than five years.
Tom Gosnell, the founder of Gosnells of London mead, told Business Insider that sales were up 60% year on year, and that the majority of his fellow mead makers or "mazers" were seeing similar gains.

                                    Tom Gosnell, founder of Gosnells mead. (Gosnells)

Business Insider spoke to Gosnell about why mead is more than just a novelty, and how it should be enjoyed.

Good mead is made from honey

It sounds like a no-brainer but, actually, not all meads are made from honey alone. Because honey is expensive, some producers will bulk out their liquid with apple or grape juice, which provides the sweetness without the cost.
This isn't the Gosnells way.
"We always make everything just with honey — there's nothing else in there," Gosnell told us.
"A castle gift shop mead is really sweet and really strong — [it] gives you a really thick hangover. Ours is really light, fresh, and crisp. It's quite a different drink really."
Part of the success of Gosnells mead is down to its low ABV content — 5.5%, which feeds into a larger trend as consumers look for lower alcohol options.
"It kind of reminds me of summer a bit really," Gosnell said. "You can taste the flora, you can taste the citrus, it's crisp, it's fresh, it's light, it's not heavy, it's not sweet, it's not strong."
Gosnells brews its mead by dissolving a Spanish orange blossom honey in warm water before transferring the mixture to a fermenter, where a pilsner yeast is added, and leaving it for a week.

                                                 The Gosnells mead team. (Gosnells) 

Mead makes a mean cocktail

While drinking mead from an ivory horn or a flagon might seem appealing to any fans of Middle Earth and beyond, mead is actually a great lengthener and a sweetener in cocktails, Gosnell said.

While the classic way to serve mead is chilled right down, in a glass, all on its own, Gosnell has found some cocktails that mead compliments particularly well.
"We have a nice gin one, which is a play on a French 75," he said.
"It's gin, lemon juice, topped off with mead.
"Another one which is nice, is a bit like a dark and stormy with ginger, dark rum, and lime muddled together and topped up with Gosnells."

In terms of what you should eat with mead, spicy, fatty dishes are optimum, as are hard cheeses. "There's a really good northern Thai restaurant in Soho [London] that serves our mead, and it cuts through the spiciness," Gosnell said.

'We'd like to create a product that can stand on its own ... that's a lot more interesting than the 'Game of Thrones' bit'

While Gosnell is happy that the popularity of shows like 'Game of Thrones' are increasing mead awareness, he said he wants his product to be able to stand on its own "without needing that kind of baggage."
"There are a couple of entry points where people have heard about it and actually that helps people understand that it's a thing and then we can take them on this sort of honey journey, and that's a lot more interesting than the 'Game of Thrones' bit," Gosnell said.
"So it can only help in terms of giving people even just a nugget of a reference point here and there."

https://www.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-has-brought-mead-back-from-the-dead-2019-6?r=US&IR=T

Unbeerlievable! Ancient Egyptian ale recreated from 5,000-year-old yeast

From sciencefocus.com/news

As far as taste goes, apparently "the beer isn’t bad."

This really raises the bar: scientists have resurrected beer from yeast found in antique pottery, giving a taste of life in ancient Egypt.

Beer was a staple food in ancient Egyptian times, drank as part of the daily diet as a safer alternative to water, and also playing an important role in religious ceremonies.

In a bid to find age-old yeast, Israeli researchers examined shards of ancient jugs believed to have contained either beer or mead, found at two ancient Egyptian sites in the Holy Land, as well as sites associated with the Philistines and Persians.
Six different strains of yeast were isolated from the pottery. Incredibly, the yeast had survived for up to 5,000 years inside the ceramics’ microscopic pores.
When the researchers sequenced the genomes of the yeast strains, they found similarities with the yeasts used in traditional African brews, such as the Ethiopian honey wine ‘tej’, and also those used in modern beer.
When it came to recreating the bygone beer, three of the yeast strains were particularly successful, producing an “aromatic and flavourful” drink with 6 per cent alcohol content.

“The greatest wonder here is that the yeast colonies survived within the vessel for thousands of years, just waiting to be excavated and grown,” said Dr Ronen Hazan, a microbiologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who was co-leader of the study. “This ancient yeast allowed us to create beer that lets us know what ancient Philistine and Egyptian beer tasted like. By the way, the beer isn’t bad.”
The researchers say that their techniques aren’t limited to yeast, and could be used to detect the ancient bacteria used in the production of foods such as cheese and pickles. Pharaoh fondue, anyone?

                        L’chaim! The Israeli research team samples their ancient brew © Yaniv Berman,                                                             Israel Antiquities Authority
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/unbeerlievable-ancient-egyptian-ale-recreated-from-5000-year-old-yeast/

Scientists use ancient yeasts to brew beer

From nypost.com

JERUSALEM — Israeli researchers raised a glass Wednesday to celebrate a long-brewing project of making beer and mead using yeasts extracted from ancient clay vessels —some over 5,000 years old.
Archaeologists and microbiologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority and four Israeli universities teamed up to study yeast colonies found in microscopic pores in pottery fragments. The shards were found at Egyptian, Philistine and Judean archaeological sites in Israel spanning from 3,000 BC to the 4th century BC.
The scientists are touting the brews made from “resurrected” yeasts as an important step in experimental archaeology, a field that seeks to reconstruct the past in order to better understand the flavour of the ancient world.

Shmuel Naky, craft brewer from Biratenu, (right) pours beer during a press conference in Jerusalem. AP

“What we discovered was that yeast can actually survive for a very, very long time without food,” said Hebrew University microbiologist Michael Klutstein. “Today we are able to salvage all these living organisms that live inside the nanopores and to revive them and study their properties.”
Beer was a staple of the daily diet for the people of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Early Egyptian texts refer to a variety of different brews, including “iron beer,” ″friend’s beer,” and “beer of the protector.”
The yeast samples came from nearly two dozen ceramic vessels found in excavations around the country, including a salvage dig in central Tel Aviv, a Persian-era palace in southern Jerusalem and ’En Besor, a 5,000-year-old Egyptian brewery near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip.

Other researchers of ancient beers, such as University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern, have concocted drinks based on ancient recipes and residue analysis of ceramics. But the Israeli scientists say this is the first time fermented drinks have been made from revived ancient yeasts.
Aren Maeir, a Bar Ilan University archaeologist, excavates at Tel es-Safi, the biblical city of Gath, where ancient Philistine beer pots yielded yeasts used to brew a beer offered to journalists. He likened the revival of long-dormant yeast to the resurrection of ancient beasts fictionalized in “Jurassic Park,” but only to a point.

“In Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs eat the scientists,” he said. “Here, the scientists drink the dinosaurs.”
“It opens up a whole new field of the possibility that perhaps other microorganisms survived as well and you can identify foods such as cheese, wine, pickles,” opening a portal into tasting cultures of the past, he said.
For this initial experiment, the team paired up with a Jerusalem craft brewer to make a basic modern-style ale using yeast extracted from the pots. The ale had a thick white head, with a caramel colour and a distinctly funky nose. The mead, made using yeast extracted from a vessel found in the ruins of a palace near Jerusalem that contained honey wine roughly 2,400 years ago, was champagne bubbly and dry, with a hint of green apple.
The beer incorporates modern ingredients, like hops, that were not available in the ancient Middle East — but it’s the revived yeast that provides much of the flavour.

“We tried to recreate some of the old flavours that people in this area were consuming hundreds and thousands of years ago,” said Shmuel Naky, a craft brewer from the Jerusalem Beer Centre, who helped produce the beer and mead. Yeasts, he said, “have a very crucial impact on flavour.”
Naky described the beer as “spicy and somewhat fruity and it’s very complex in flavour,” all attributes produced by the ancient yeast.
Genome sequencing of the yeast colonies extracted from the pots showed that the ancient strain of yeast was different from the yeast used in beer-making today but similar to those still used to make traditional Zimbabwean beer and Ethiopian tej, a type of honey wine.
The researchers said their next aim is to pair the resurrected yeasts with ancient beer recipes to better reproduce drinks from antiquity.

https://nypost.com/2019/05/22/scientists-use-ancient-yeasts-to-brew-beer/

Mead in Australia: a long-forgotten drink makes a comeback

From afr.com/lifestyle

Once thought fit only for medieval tankards or Viking drinking horns, this ancient honey wine is being revived and refined by local makers such as Louis Costa.

Louis Costa grew up in a village in Bordeaux surrounded by vineyards. Like generations of his family before him, he became a winemaker, working in the local chateaux before travelling the world.

Arriving in Australia, he made wine at Vasse Felix in Margaret River before settling in Byron Bay, northern NSW.

Wine grapes don’t grow well in this warm, damp part of the world, so Costa turned his passion for winemaking into a new career, finding a job at local brewery Stone & Wood. He couldn’t shake the winemaking bug, though, so he started experimenting with another source of fermentable sugar that also happens to be abundant in Byron: honey.

“My grandfather in France was a keen apiarist,” says Costa. “When I was growing up I remember him making beautiful, pure varietal honey. So, in Byron I decided to start making honey wine – mead.
"Honey wine in France has a really bad reputation. It is very sweet, with a coarse flavour. I wanted to create something that is different: clean and more refined, less sweet and heavy, more refreshing.”

Over the past five years, Costa has made countless small trial batches of mead, fermenting honey from single orchards and single flower types and adding local fruits and native botanicals to make still mead and sparkling mead, dry mead and sweet mead.
Now he’s on the cusp of launching the first commercial bottlings under his Aurum brand with locally grown ingredients – a dry mead made from macadamia honey, and an off-dry sparkling rosé mead infused with hibiscus flowers and strawberry gum.
“Rosé wine is very popular at the moment,” says Costa. “Especially rosé from Provence. I wanted to produce a rosé for the Byron Bay lifestyle, using the flavours of where we are.”

Louis Costa is one of a growing number of new Australian mead makers invigorating an almost forgotten drinks category. For many years, pretty much the only maker of mead in this country (apart from a handful of very smaller regional producers and a few keen home brewers) was Maxwell in McLaren Vale, and mead consumers were dismissed as people who liked to dress up as Vikings, or indulged in medieval role play and drank honey wine from tankards.

Mead heads

Now, there’s a surge of interest in this ancient drink, with a new wave of producers looking for more diverse markets and adventurous brewers such as Two Metre Tall in Tasmania delving into the world of mead-making.

Stone Dog Neadery near Goulburn, NSW has gained an enviable reputation for its range of meads since it opened in 2015, with mead maker Steve Kirby in demand as a judge at the growing number of local wine and brewing shows now exhibiting meads.

Sydney wine retailer and producer Brendan Hilferty from Sparrow & Vine  makes his Project B mead using urban honey sourced from Newtown. And Sunshack Cider in the Southern Highlands of NSW now also produce a range of sparkling products under the Bee Mead label, bottled in 500ml bottles aimed at the craft beer consumer.
Another new NSW producer, Sunlight Liquor, has a range of meads that is also aimed at the craft beer and cider markets: the two products currently in the range are available in cans, have bold, exaggerated flavours, and are infused with the kind of botanicals you’d find in a gin, vermouth or sour ale.
In an extraordinary coincidence, the Sunlight Liquor's Gums and Roses is, like Aurum’s sparkling pink mead, infused with hibiscus and strawberry gum – albeit in a much punchier, less subtle way.
Rather than appealing to the craft beer consumer, though, Louis Costa sees his Aurum meads sitting on dining tables next to fine wine.
“I can see them working really well as part of a degustation of food made from native ingredients,” he says. “After all, they're made with wholly native ingredients; we didn’t have to cut down any forests to plant a vineyard. That’s where the added value to this product is: to have it next to the new beautiful Australian gastronomy.”

https://www.afr.com/lifestyle/food-and-wine/wine-and-spirits/mead-in-australia-a-long-forgotten-drink-makes-a-comeback-20190411-p51d8j

Venerable mead!

A rare collaboration braggot from Giant Jones and Bos Meadery

From isthmus.com

A braggot is a combination of beer and mead. It’s a rare treat when one turns up commercially, especially a Wisconsin-made one. Federal laws are different for meaderies versus breweries regarding what each can use as raw ingredients to make alcohol. Therefore, few choose to take on the challenge of making a braggot on their own. Suffice it to say, when Giant Jones Brewing and Bos Meadery worked together to create a dark braggot called Paint It Black, they stayed within the letter of the law.

What is it? Paint It Black is a braggot from Giant Jones Brewing Company and Bos Meadery.

                                                                  Robin Shepard
Style: Braggot, sometimes called bracket or brackett, is closely related to mead, a drink that can be traced back thousands of years — it’s one of the oldest alcoholic beverages. Braggots are commonly made with a high percentage of honey, sometimes at levels of more than half of the fermentable sugars. Because honey is so easily fermented by yeast, it adds strength and unique sweetness to the brew. Braggots will range from 6 to 12 percent ABV.

Background: Any type of honey and any style of beer can go into making a braggot so they have a wide range of qualities in their aroma, flavour, colour and strength. The base beer for Paint It Black is Giant Jones’ Extra Stout. It’s a robust dark beer that the brewery recently introduced as a late winter/early spring seasonal. Brewmaster Jessica Jones says she chose the stout because of its full-bodied creamy texture that blends well with what honey brings to a braggot. Jones wanted to avoid a thin, lifeless braggot without much taste.
Giant Jones and Bos Meadery are only a block apart, so a collaboration braggot seemed like a good fit; the two business owners are also good friends. A few weeks before brewing, Jones sat down with meadery owner Colleen Bos to sample different meads with the stout in order come up with the right match. “If you like stout, you’ll like this braggot, says Jones, adding, “It has the body of the stout with a strong honey component.”
Raw Wisconsin wild flower honey from Pure Sweet Honey Farm of Verona contributes to the mead side of the recipe.

One of the key techniques that Bos and Jones used was to gradually add a mixture of honey and water along with a strain of yeast, four times over eight days, after the stout had finished its primary fermentation. The process kept the yeast active which allows more mead-like character to come through rather than just raw honey. “The mead is quite apparent, and it doesn’t disappoint on the beer front either,” says Jones. The ratio of beer to the mixture of honey and water is roughly 2 to 1. That leaves the braggot at around 8 percent ABV.
Paint It Black sells for $5/glass in the Giant Jones taproom and Bos Meadery’s mead hall. The launch party for Paint It Black will be Wednesday at Bos Meadery with the official tapping at 5 p.m. It goes on tap at Giant Jones beginning Thursday at 4 p.m.

Tasting notes:

• Aroma: A roastedness much like you find in most stouts, only with a light floral background from the honey.
• Appearance: Dark black body, with a bubbly brown head.
• Texture: Medium- to full-bodied with creaminess from the flaked barley that goes into making the stout.
• Taste: The roasted malty stout character is up front and prominent. The honey comes in just a little later with floral and raisin sweetness that lingers.
• Finish/Aftertaste: As the braggot warms, more of the floral honey notes come through. There’s a light spicy sweetness that blends with the roasted coffee-like maltiness. Also, faint hints of stone fruit sweetness from the dark malts come in late.

Glassware: The Belgian-style tulip glass with a slight inward taper helps focus the floral honey notes, so you notice a blend with the roasted malts.
Pairs well with: maybe nothing. It’s a very nice after-dinner drink, and best on its own to showcase the layers of flavour. Allow it to warm to experience more of the mead-like character.

The Verdict: I’m a fan of braggots and I admire anyone who tackles making one. Paint It Black didn’t disappoint. Most braggots I’ve had have been sweeter, which I attribute to being made with base beers like barley wines or scotch or amber ales. Instead, Paint It Black surprised me with its initial wave of roasted dark malts and coffee accents of the stout. I had to wait for the mead flavour. As I sipped, my taste buds gradually became more attuned to the complexity and layers of flavour from the honey. There’s a smooth creamy texture from the flaked barley; however, this isn’t a sticky-sweet drink. Floral, earthy spiciness comes from the honey. This is a nice addition to the taps of both Giant Jones and Bos Meadery.

https://isthmus.com/food-drink/beer/giant-jones-and-bos-meadery-collaboration-braggot/

Major mead momentum for Lost Cause

From sandiegoreader.com/news

Suzanna and Billy Beltz show off the five medals they earned in March at the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition

Launched in November 2017, Lost Cause Meadery has quickly established itself as one of San Diego’s top mead makers. According to the results of this year’s Mazer Cup International Mead Competition, it also ranks among the best in the world.

Married Lost Cause co-founders Suzanna and Billy Beltz returned from the annual Colorado contest with five of the 69 medals awarded: a gold, three silver, and one bronze. Only one other meadery equalled the five-medal count.

The haul lends an air of legitimacy to a craft beverage still standing in the shadow of San Diego beer. However, these awards merely punctuate a year of successful growth for Lost Cause. According to Billy Beltz, tasting room sales are up 80 percent in the first quarter of 2019, compared to the same time frame a year ago.

Much of that is positive word of mouth spreading among local beer enthusiasts, but there’s a burgeoning national recognition as well. “We’re getting a lot of people from around the country,” Beltz adds, such as a recent guest from Michigan who showed up to buy a case of mead at the behest of a bottle share group back home.

That can be a significant investment. Mead costs more to produce than beer, and single Lost Cause bottles range in price from 17 to 34 dollars. The Beltzes had always hoped an audience of beer drinkers would embrace the premium beverage, and launched the business with dry, sparkling, core offerings they presumed would appeal to local craft fans.

However, most of the meadery’s recent growth may be credited to surprising styles. It turns out, “A lot of people like the bolder, sweeter, still meads,” reports Beltz. A particularly big hit for Lost Cause has been a style of mead called a bochet. It’s made from caramelized honey, which yields a richer, more potent beverage. Beltz likens the appeal of bochets to that of pastry stouts, a massively trending beer style that dresses a big, roasty stout with rich and sweet flavours such as chocolate, maple, and/or coconut. A blueberry, cinnamon, and vanilla bochet, Blåsväder, earned Lost Cause one of its silver medals.

The bochet’s success led Lost Cause to the same realization many local beer makers have faced in recent years. “What people want,” says Beltz, “is something new.” Thus, Lost Cause has shifted its focus to produce more limited, small batches, including barrel aged meads and those made with specially sourced honey. To wit, its gold medal came from a collaboration with local homebrew guru Brian Trout, made from pink peppercorn blossom honey sourced from Brazil.

Such small and barrel aged batches will provide a focus for Lost Cause’s next stage of growth: a new meadery. The Beltzes recently secured a production space in the Morena District, and while Lost Cause will continue to operate a tasting room in the Miralani Makers District space it shares with Serpentine Cider, it will move production to the larger property this fall, where it will have room to stage more mead education events.

Beltz sees local mead as being roughly where local beer stood in the 90s, when drinkers stopped viewing hops as too bitter, and started appreciating the nuanced flavours they provide. With mead, he says, local palates are coming around to distinguish the characteristic sweetness of differing honey varietals in much the same way. Rather than chalk mead up as “too sweet,” we’re learning to swirl it in the glass, enjoy its floral aromatics,

It bodes well for the future of mead in San Diego, which is looking bright. A couple of local meadmakers also brought home medals form the Mazer Cup have their own professional aspirations. Gold medallists Jared Ayo and Sean Callahan are in the early stages of planning The Swarm Meadery, while silver medallist Eric Olson and his wife Anya Gonzalez eventually plan to open Mjødhall Meadery.

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2019/mar/29/beer-major-mead-momentum-lost-cause/#

Nectar of the Gods: A Quick Lesson in Mead

From thatsmags.com

That's columnist Chris Foste is a bearded beer fanatic whose frothy pint glass of knowledge flows over with wisdom on the wetting of one's whistle.

In the time before planes, trains and automobiles, when wooden vessels dominated the high seas, very little was known about brewing. Rough, bearded men used magic wooden paddles that would miraculously cause their vat of sugar water to foam up and transform into luscious alcoholic liquid. Now, brewing historians know that it was the yeast and bacteria that had buried itself deep into these wooden paddles that would initiate fermentation, but thousands of years ago this wasn’t science, it was magic! Which concoction was early man’s first brew of choice? Wine? Nope. Beer? Negative. The first liquid that man magically fermented was none other than mead!

Early documentation of history state that mead was popular up to 4,000 years ago. A fermented mixture of honey and water, mead is sweeter than wine and can be combined with any number of fruits and spices to further enhance the flavour. Known to be an enchanted drink, promoting virility, vitality and heightened intelligence, gods of ancient lore were often depicted slamming back giant ram’s horns filled with mead to maintain and enhance their divine abilities. 

While still being a delicious way to imbibe, mead has fallen from the limelight of alcoholic popularity. One of the reasons why mead recently has fallen off in popularity is the production time for the product. More similar to wine than beer, mead requires anywhere from two weeks to four weeks just to complete the initial fermentation. From here, mead will still require anywhere from 6-12 months of aging to round out the flavour, making it smooth and delectable. Otherwise, there is a sharp alcoholic flavour in mead directly after fermentation.

In stark contrast, beer can be fermented and ready to drink in as little as 10 days. Wines, while some do require proper aging, do not possess nearly as sharp an alcoholic flavour as mead once fermentation has completed. In addition to the preparation time, honey and the scarcity of good beekeepers makes the initial costs higher. Securing a steady and cheap supply of honey can be done, but not as easy as finding grapes or barley. Thus, the nectar of the gods has become a novelty instead of its once predominate staple in the household.

With mead not being a readily available product in the marketplace, home brewing is the best method to get a chance to taste this fantastic beverage. The most difficult part of mead is securing the proper honey, as most honey found in markets are used for cooking and will only result in a basic product. The quality of ingredients you use always represents the quality of output in the brew. In China, mead brewers also must be wary of fake honey, since many market-based kinds of honey are not really honey, but instead a viscous, dyed sugar water mixture. One can only imagine the disastrous hangover obtained from drinking the sweet imposter brew. 

The process of mead making is simple. Boil water for 10 minutes to sanitize it, then let the water cool to 70 degrees Celsius and let it sit at this temperature for another 10 minutes. At this time, add your honey, along with any yeast nutrient and energizer. Since honey does not contain the same minerals as barley (beer) or grapes (wine), the yeast will need something else to consume other than the honey sugar to achieve strong fermentation.

Now, the honey and nutrients have been stirred in and the mixture has set at 70 C for 10 minutes. The resulting concoction is called must. Now, the must needs to be chilled to around 25 degrees Celsius in order to pitch the yeast. If the temperature is too high when the yeast is added, it will kill the yeast and no fermentation will occur. From here, add the yeasty must to a fermentation vessel and cap it off with an airlock. 

Fermentation should be completed after around two or three weeks. At that time you will want to separate your mead from the yeast, so siphon it to another vessel and let it age for another 6-12 months. From this point, the mead is drinkable but won’t taste that good. The longer it ages the better the taste. Some meads even require as long as three years before they begin to ‘hit its stride.’

With an ABV similar to wine, mead is an absolutely delightful way to reach inebriation. If there is a chance to taste some mead, do it. Even better, brew at home to customize the honey wine to your liking. While a decent' amount of time is necessary to acquire a good mead, patience is a virtue when it comes to this historic drink of the gods. 

http://www.thatsmags.com/china/post/27256/nectar-of-the-gods-a-quick-lesson-in-mead