What Is Mead, And What Does It Taste Like?

While walking the aisles at your local liquor store or the alcohol aisles at your local grocery store, you may have come across bottles of mead and wondered what it is and what it tastes like. It's often grouped with saké and other specialty wines, making you ask if it's just another wine varietal to mark off your list. If that's the case, why are there so many different types and flavors? Is it even wine at all?

If you've found yourself utterly stumped by mead but afraid to dive in without more information, you can rest easy. We're covering all the bases on mead, including the what, where, and why of how it's made, along with how it tastes, how much of a buzz you can expect to get from it, and what kinds of foods to enjoy with it. You may not become a total mead expert, but you'll certainly have a starting point to go out and try some (or maybe even try brewing your own). 

Despite not actually being wine, mead is sometimes referred to as honey wine. In its most basic form, Mead is made from fermented honey and water. Wine, on the other hand, is made from fermented fruit juice (most often grapes). The use of the term "honey wine" to refer to mead likely comes from the fact that the fermentation process is similar to winemaking. 

Whether "honey wine" and "mead" can be used interchangeably is mostly a matter of preference, though there are some requirements for what constitutes mead. According to batchmead.com, it must be 60% or more fermented honey to be considered mead. While some wines may use honey as a sweetener or as one of the fermented ingredients alongside fermented fruit, they're not mead. So where does the confusion about terminology originate? According to the folks at Hidden Legend Winery, the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which regulates alcohol in the United States, required mead to be labeled as "honey wine" until 2016.

Although you may just be hearing about mead for the first time, it's far from a new drink. In fact, it's considered the oldest alcoholic drink in the world. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the consumption of mead has been traced as far back as China in the 7th millennium BCE. According to NPR, it was also one of the preferred drinks of ancient Egyptians and Vikings. Wine Enthusiast magazine goes even further, asserting that mead can be traced back 20,000 years to prehistoric Ethiopia, where feral bees were making honey that was eventually fermented with water to make mead. 

Regardless of when exactly mead originated, we know that it's older than both beer and wine by thousands of years. According to Dave Goulson in his article, "The Beguiling History of Bees" for Scientific American, the oldest bee found preserved in amber is approximately 80 million years old. While it isn't a honeybee, that gives you some idea of the timeline we're working with. Where there were bees, there was honey, and where there was honey, there was mead. 

One factor in a mead's flavor is the type of honey used to make it. You may already know that different types of honey are made when the bees that make it obtain pollen from a particular source. You've probably seen clover honey, orange blossom honey, and Manuka honey, but it also comes in varieties like sage, eucalyptus, acacia, chestnut, rosemary, and more! While the honey won't taste overwhelmingly like the flora used to make it, the varieties do have unique flavors and qualities that impact mead. 

The honey in mead is what gets fermented, so the honey itself is subtle, giving it a flavor somewhere between wine and beer. What distinguishes many types of mead is what flavors are added to it after the fermentation process. Some mead varieties go all in on honey and add unfermented honey at the end, while others add flavors from different fruits, herbs, and spices. Further adding to the complexity of flavor is the aging process some mead makers use. The best way to figure out what mead tastes like is to try a few!

In general, the alcohol content of mead ranges anywhere from 3% by volume (ABV) to a whopping more than 20% ABV. Because there are so many different types of mead, it's probably no surprise that the alcohol content of different meads also varies a lot. Great mead (sack mead) has a higher alcohol content than other mead because it has a higher percentage of honey. More honey means more sugar to ferment into alcohol. Hydromel (session mead) is made with a higher percentage of water than honey and, therefore, naturally has a lower alcohol content. 

On average, a glass of mead has a higher alcohol content than a typical beer or glass of wine (save for the intentionally higher ABV beers and wines). That means you'll want to be careful as a mead newcomer. The drink of the gods can pack quite a punch!

It's no surprise that a drink as old as mead can be found throughout classic literature. In "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer, we see mead used "The Miller's Tale" as a means of courting a "town-bred" lady. The drink has become so closely associated with the author that Chaucer's Mead has become the go-to mead at many Renaissance festivals.

In the epic poem "Beowulf," mead is a focal point of happiness and celebration in the mead hall known as Heorot. We're told Heorot is a place where mead flowed freely before the beast Grendel laid siege to it for 12 years. There, Beowulf meets and defeats Grendel, after which mead is consumed in celebration.

If poetry isn't your thing, you can always look to "The Lord of the Rings" for your literary mead fix. In J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, miruvór is the reviving cordial of the Elves in Rivendell. As you may have guessed, given the restorative properties often attributed to mead in the Middle Ages and before, in the Elvish poem "Namárië" (Galadriel's lament), miruvór is translated to English as mead. 

These days, a honeymoon lasts anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks (likely limited by whatever personal or vacation time you can take off work), but the term describes a time when that period lasted for the cycle of the moon —a month. While the "honey" part of the name typically refers to the sweet period right after a wedding, its origins are in our favorite honey-based drink. 

The term comes from the Old English "hony moone" and the European tradition of supplying the newlyweds with enough mead to last them for a month. As we know, mead was thought to confer all sorts of medicinal and somewhat magical properties, such as health and immortality. Drinking mead for the moon cycle after getting married was thought to bring newlyweds good luck and fertility in their marriage, as mead was also thought to be an aphrodisiac. 

Whether you want to get in on the booming trend of making mead and start branching out into distribution, or you just want to try brewing it at home to see what you end up with, mead-making requires few ingredients and tools. The most important thing for any home brewing is sterilizing your equipment. The right gear, some high-quality honey (if you know a local beekeeper and can attest to its origin, even better), mead yeast, something to feed your yeast (also called yeast nutrition), water, whatever fruit and spices you'd like to add, and a recipe are the main things you'll need to get started. Well, that and some patience while the fermentation occurs. 

Perhaps you'd like to try your hand at Queen Elizabeth's metheglin, or maybe a traditional or session mead is more your style. If it doesn't come out perfect on the first try, don't give up. After all, if they could make mead thousands of years ago, surely you can pull this off.