Mead

THEY LOOKED LIKE YOUR TYPICAL BROOKLYN BARTENDERS: handlebar mustaches, pink hair, leather aprons, and tattoos—lots of tattoos. They muddled mint, juiced limes, pinched nutmeg in empty glasses, clanked tin shakers with rhythmic precision, and poured fragrant libations into ice-filled glasses.

It was 2012, and these hipster bartenders were competing in a bourbon cocktail contest. I judged every drink they made, assessing techniques, analyzing flavor balance, and weighing creativity. I looked for the little things: Did they slap the mint to maximize the herb’s in-the-glass aroma? Was everything fresh?

Contestant one mixed bourbon with a muddled apple, lemon juice, and a branded margarita mixer—one of the cheap ones laden with high-fructose corn syrup. He unenthusiastically shook the tins and then strained and poured the mixture over a small ice ball in a collins glass. The drink tasted unbalanced and lacked creativity—ugh, store-bought mixers!

Contestant two shook bourbon, vermouth, and amaro as if he were a mechanical paint mixer. He strained and poured the contents over small ice in a coupe glass, garnishing it with an orange twist. The presentation was fine, but every bartender should know when all the ingredients are alcohol you stir them. Without a juice or solution of some kind, the shaken alcohols bruise and struggle to form a bond. He didn’t meet my expectations.

Then, in a far corner, a young woman pulled out a slightly amber-colored bottle and poured it into her shaker. What was this? It bore no label. As I pondered over what the liquid might be, she added bourbon, lemon juice, and strawberry jam. With all the contents securely in the mixer—the bartender didn’t spill a drop, impressive!—she fastened the tin shakers, raised them above her shoulders, and in one seamless motion sloshed the contents back and forth, perfectly melding the ingredients. Only single strained, she poured the drink over crushed ice in a rocks glass and garnished with the perfect lemon twist. Its aromatics were sound, the flavor was part strawberry, part bourbon, part lemon and honey. Wait—did I see her put honey in the cocktail mixer?

“I’m tasting a little honey in this cocktail. Did you add honey while you made it and I just missed it?” I asked.

“No, that’s my homemade mead,” she said.

Ah, that must have been the amber liquid I spied. For my palate, this was the best cocktail of the competition, dominating in creativity. Who makes their own mead? The drink was a whiskey sour meets the Brown Derby, only better. The pronounced bourbon and the amazing honey flavor just rocked me. I gave the cocktail a 9.4 out of 10, easily my highest score for the day.

Alas, my fellow judges didn’t agree. One said: “Who the hell makes mead?” Another: “Is that even legal? Can you make your own alcohol?”

She didn’t win or even place. The other judges scored her entry below a 5. And they were wrong: they were knocking her drink not because it was inferior, but because they didn’t understand mead.

Since that cocktail competition, I’ve watched mead grow from a virtual unknown into an international curiosity behind the bar. Australia’s popular bar The Powder Keg boasts the Medieval Mule: bourbon, mead, fresh-pressed apple, and sea salt topped with ginger beer. Charleston’s Cocktail Club sells a lot of the drink Pass the Mead: Chaucer’s Mead and Peychaud’s muddled berries topped with crushed ice and Montelliana Prosecco. And London’s We Are Bar has made its Yellow Bee famous. It is a combination of Polugar No. 4 vodka, Nardini Acqua di Cedro, lemon juice, honey, and mead. Bar menus around the world are adding mead drinks every day, while at-home mead making is at an all-time high. Many credit this to the rise of craft beer and home brewing, suggesting mead has captured curious audiences at a time when people want to drink what’s new, special, and different. Others say popular television series Game of Thrones and Vikings have made medieval life cool again to the benefit of mead.

Of course, mead was cool far before Tyrion Lannister drank himself silly. (Coincidently, Tyrion usually drinks wine or ale.) Some 8,000 years ago, somebody left a pot of honey outside in the rain. It fermented, and people drank it. Mead was born. Truthfully, how mead came to be is an educated guess, at best. But the earliest confirmed alcohol did contain honey. In Neolithic Chinese jars, researchers discovered 9,000-year-old alcohol from honey, rice, and fruit. Whatever this concoction was called, we do not know. But it’s quite clear that mead thrives as the world’s first branded alcohol type.

Zeus and Cronus are both said to have kicked back a few cups. When Jesus Christ was alive, the Romans sipped on mead, too. In the epic poem Beowulf, Danish warriors drink mead, and it was the elixir of choice for the Vikings, who were incorrectly thought to have enjoyed mead from the skulls of their enemies, and medieval Poles, whose dukes gifted visiting kings with mead. Queen Elizabeth I drank so much mead that she had her own recipe.

The medieval and Victorian Russians cherished mead and created gold kovshes from which one should only drink the finest meads. They believed in pure honey wine, while the Ethiopians liked a little spice in their mead. Mead was the noble’s drink and also used for medicinal purposes. The Physicians of Myddfai, historic herbalists in Wales who reigned from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, recommended mead for inflammation and general home remedies, including tooth, eye, and muscle pain, while many doctors suggested it helped hurting stomachs and even eased wound pain. But mead’s medicinal dominance faltered with the rise of household distilled spirits, which influenced one 1865 account in The Medicinal Times & Gazette: A Journal of Medical Science, Literature, Criticism, and News: “I suspect that the custom of making mead is, like other branches of housewifery, dying out amongst the West Saxon peasantry. When I was a boy, brought up in a part of the ancient Wessex, a drop of mead was offered on calling at a better class cottage. Now, it was with the utmost difficulty that the messengers… could collect a few driblets of the liquor.”

This mid-nineteenth-century assessment offered the grim truth: mead’s heyday had been the ancient world. Wine, beer, and spirits became more accessible as time went on, slowly knocking mead off its pedestal. By 1898, the New York Times noted, “[Mead] has fallen from the position it once held… and the method of its manufacture is lost. In this part, mead is made to a very limited extent, and by persons who dispose of it at fairs, markets, and such like gatherings.”

As you will learn in this book, mead’s creation is dependent upon honey, good fermentation, and a lot of patience. Perhaps these tenets were not strictly adhered to by our forebears, casting mead into twentieth-century obscurity. Oh sure, an occasional brand appeared here and there, such as Wassail Mead, advertised as the “Love potion of the Vikings,” and at-home meaderies found fame in local newspapers. But honey wine remained a blip on the alcohol radar.

Until recently, that is.

Mead is now back with a honeycomb vengeance.

In hundreds of commercial and at-home meaderies across the United States, the modern mead maker is part historian, part honey expert and fermentation guru. In the world of alcohol production, mead makers are booze’s Swiss Army Knife, seemingly understanding all aspects of drinks. Perhaps that’s because the makers all come from other alcohol backgrounds and mead itself is so versatile and storied. “Mead hails from all over the world. Since honey was the first sugar known to humankind, it was the first fermented sugar,” says David Myers, owner of Redstone Meadery in Boulder, Colorado. “Mead predates wine and beer by several thousand years. They started blending in grapes and grain, and eventually these beverages become wine and beer. Honey with malt is known as a braggot (or bracket depending on the publication), and honey with grapes is a pyment.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. government does not recognize mead variants. Instead, it classifies all mead as honey wine. But that may soon change. In recent years, the American Mead Makers Association has lobbied for the passing of the Mead Equality and Definition Act, introduced by Representatives Mark Sanford (R-SC) and Paul Tonko (D-NY). The bill didn’t make it out of committee, but the act aimed to “allow, in the production of mead, the addition of wholesome fruits (including fruit juices, fruit puree, fruit extract, or fruit concentrate), vegetables, spices, and other ingredients suitable for human food consumption that are generally recognized as safe for use in an alcoholic beverage.…” In other words, mead just wanted protection for its historic production methods.

Legislation and awareness aside, mead is amazing and can be made at home.

For those not interested in making mead, rest assured, you will find a burgeoning mead shelf at your local liquor store. Some of it is as sip-worthy as a glass of California chardonnay, as refreshing as a craft IPA, and as rich as a rare Bordeaux. This is not to mention mead’s flexibility as a cocktail component complementing bitters, amaro, or vermouth.

This book’s intent is not to replace anything behind the bar or in your home. Rather, it’s to open your eyes and palate to the world’s oldest alcohol and to introduce you to the royalty, raiders, and gods who sipped and glugged mead. You shall discover a new additive for your whiskey, rum, vodka, and gin cocktails, while learning how to make your own at home or in the bar. And if you’re a bartender and somebody says they want to drink like a Viking or Zeus, you now have something for that. You can tell them that mead is made today the same way it was during Pliny the Elder’s time. Just ask the bees.