From a very simple perspective, mead is the result of honey, water, and yeast left to ferment until alcohol has been created.  On a more technical note, mead is any alcoholic beverage where more than 50% of the fermented sugars originate from honey.  Beer, likewise would be a beverage fermented from greater than 50% cereal grains (typically malted barley), wine is from greater than 50% grape juice, and cider is from greater than 50% apple juice.  But what is mead really?  Where does it come from? What does it taste like? And what happens if we decide to mix up the alcohol types, and we want to make a mead + beer combination, or a mead + cider combination?

Mead in History

Mead has been cited in many places as the oldest alcoholic beverage made by humans. This may or may not be true, although it is easy to build the case that mead may have spontaneously fermented for early humans. What we do know for a certainty is that mead has been around for a very long time, with the earliest records dating to 6500-7000 BC China [1]. Mead has been found and referenced around the world, including in Bronze Age Europe with the Bell Beaker Culture, ancient India in the hymns of the Rig Veda, Northern Europe with the Vikings and their mead halls, and modern day Ethiopia in the form of tej.

There exist many hypotheses explaining the early fermentation of mead, but one of the more prominent involves early humans coming across honey during a hunting party (check out these stunning photos of honey hunting in Nepal). Honey hunting specifically has been dated to at least 8000 BC in Valencia, Spain, from cave paintings of the “Man of Bicorp” climbing vines to gather honey [2]. To bring the honey back to the tribe, one could imagine the party members emptying their water skins, leaving only a small amount of water mixed with the honey. The dilution of the honey allows the wild yeasts to begin fermentation. The hunting party, and the tribe, notice the bag expanding as the yeast release CO2 to make alcohol. The bag takes on a mystic quality, and when the tribe drinks from the water skin they feel giddy with the buzz from their first alcohol.

Over time, the tribe selects the water skins that created the best tasting drinks when collecting the honey. This would be an early form of yeast culturing, and with repeated practice the early humans would be able to create a relatively consistent mead from their wild captured yeast.

Now this story could play out similarly with wild collected fruit left in a jar, or juiced for better storage. The wild yeast would ‘infect’ the fruit juices, and naturally ferment the must. Because of this, it is impossible to determine if mead is in fact the oldest fermented beverage. However, it predates agriculture, certainly placing it in history prior to beer, wine, and spirits, the pillars of the modern alcoholic beverage world.

Mead and Its Many Variants

Mead is generally considered to taste like a white wine with a predominant honey flavor. However, depending on the types of honey used and the yeasts selected for fermentation, meads can have a surprising range of flavors from one to the next. This is further complicated by the great number of mead types that have been developed through history.

Here is a short list of some of the known mead types. For the purposes of these definitions, it should be remembered that at least half of the fermented sugar for all of these types should come from honey.

Meads are generally categorized as having three different alcohol strengths. These distinctions can be combined with all of the later definitions, e.g. cyser of hydromel strength, or metheglin of standard strength.

• Hydromel (or session): This is a low alcohol mead, often served carbonated similar to beer. It will have a final alcohol by volume (ABV) level of 3.5 – 7.5%.
• Standard Mead: This is a mead of table wine strength, that is, 7.5 – 14% ABV.
• Sack Mead: This is a mead of high alcohol content, greater than 14% ABV.

The final sugar content of a mead also puts mead in specific categories, as follows.

• Dry: specific gravity less than 1.006
• Semi-sweet, or medium: SG between 1.006 and 1.012
• Sweet: SG between 1.012 and 1.020
• Dessert: SG greater than 1.020

There are two categories of mead where honey is the only fermentable.

• Traditional Mead: These are meads fermented with honey, water, yeast, and yeast nutrients.
• Show Mead: This category defines those meads fermented only from honey, water, and yeast. These meads do NOT have additional nutrients added to the must to improve fermentation. They often will take a long time to completely ferment as nothing is there to help the yeast, and may take even longer aging to smooth out the flavors produced during a relatively stressful ferment.

The following are the types of fruit meads available. A general mead from fruit and honey is classified as a melomel, but specific names have been given to many of these combinations.

• Melomel: This is a mead fermented with fruit.
• Pyment: This mead is fermented from honey and grape juice.
• Cyser: Pronounced size-er, this is produced from honey and apple juice.
• Morat: Mead from honey and mulberries.
• Capsicumel: Mead fermented from honey and chili peppers.

Then there are the metheglins, grouped as such for convenience, even though some are stretching it.

• Metheglin: Mead made from honey and a combination of spices, added either during or post fermentation.
• Rhodomel: Mead fermented from honey and rose petals.
• Braggot, bracket, or brackett: Originally, this was a mead fermented from honey with hops added, but this category has evolved to include meads fermented with malted grains in addition to the honey.

The following two meads really do not seem to fit any of the above categories as I have outlined them, but are worth mentioning as mead types.

Lastly, we don’t want to leave off Tej, an Ethiopian variety of mead fermented with honey and gesho.

If we’ve left off any meads, and we most certainly have, let us know. Considering the number of fruits and spices available, the mead combinations are truly endless.