Mead

• 1. Introduction

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  Mead, a drink made by fermenting honey with water, has a founding legend in Norse mythology. In that story, the Mead of Poetry was crafted from the blood of Kvasir. Anyone who drank it became a poet or a scholar.

  Real mead is humbler, though its reputation has always been large. It also goes by the names honey wine and, when its alcohol is low, hydromel. Its strength runs from about 3.5% alcohol by volume to more than 20%. Fruits, spices, grains or hops sometimes join the honey and water. Mead may be the most ancient alcoholic drink of all.

  How old is it, and who first wrote about it? Why did poets and warriors in so many cultures place it at the center of their feasts? Why did it nearly vanish from the market, and what brought it back?

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• 2. Ancient Traces

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  Between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, early humans may already have been drinking mead. That is the possible window of discovery, before farming and before ceramic pottery existed. Fermentation happens naturally, and honey-producing insects lived across the world. The drink may therefore have been found several times, or passed between early peoples, so its true origin cannot be pinned down.

  Pottery vessels from northern China, dating from at least 7000 BCE, offer firmer evidence. Their chemical signatures are consistent with honey, rice and the organic compounds linked to fermentation.

  The earliest surviving written record of mead may be the soma mentioned in the hymns of the Rigveda. This sacred book of the Vedic religion, later Hinduism, is dated to around 1700-1100 BCE. It predates the separation of the Indo-Iranian peoples, which is dated to roughly 2000 BCE. So the mention may originate on the Western Steppe or in Eastern Europe.

  Greek writers knew the Abri, a northern Illyrian subgroup of the Taulantii, for their skill at preparing mead from honey. During the Golden Age of ancient Greece, mead was said to be the preferred drink. Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, discussed mead made in Illyria in his Meteorologica and elsewhere. Pliny the Elder, who lived from 23 to 79 CE, used the name melitites in his Naturalis Historia for a wine of grapes and honey.

  Around 60 CE, the Hispanic-Roman naturalist Lucius Columella set down a recipe in De re rustica. He called the drink mella or aqua mulsa, which means honeyed water. His instructions began with rainwater kept for several years. One sextarius of that water was mixed with a Roman pound of honey. For a weaker mead, a sextarius of water took only nine ounces of honey. The mixture sat in the sun for 40 days and then moved to a shelf near the fire. If no rainwater was available, Columella advised boiling spring water instead.

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• 3. Halls and Heroes

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  The Greek writer Pytheas described a drink of grain and honey, similar to mead, that he met while travelling in Thule. According to James Henry Ramsay, this was an earlier version of Welsh metheglin. That Welsh drink still carried meaning in 1642, when 12-year-old Prince Charles II visited Wales. Welsh metheglin was served at the feast as a symbol of Welsh presence in the emerging British identity. That identity was taking shape between the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707.

  The Welsh bard Taliesin, who lived around 550 CE, is credited with a poem called Kanu y med, the Song of Mead. In Welsh it is Cân y medd. His contemporary Aneirin, the poet credited with Y Gododdin, set the legendary drinking, feasting and boasting of warriors in the mead hall of Din Eidyn, which is modern-day Edinburgh. In the Old English epic Beowulf, the Danish warriors drank mead. Across Insular Celtic and Germanic poetry, mead was the main drink of heroes and deities.

  In medieval Ireland, mead was called mid in Old Irish and was a popular drink. Beekeeping arrived around the 5th century, traditionally credited to Modomnoc, and mead came with it. A banquet hall on the Hill of Tara was known as Tech Mid Chuarda, meaning house of the circling of mead. Irish mead was often infused with hazelnuts. Legends of many saints mention it, as does the tale of the Children of Lir.

  That Old Irish word mid has cousins in languages from Scandinavia to South Asia, and even in Chinese.

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• 4. A Family of Words

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  The English word mead comes from the Old English meodu or medu, which descends from the Proto-Indo-European root *médʰu. Its relatives include Old Norse mjǫðr, Proto-Slavic medъ, Middle Dutch mede and Old High German metu. Sanskrit has madhu. Even the ancient Irish queen Medb belongs to the family.

  The Chinese word for honey, mì, written 蜜, reaches the same family by a longer road. It comes from the word mit, which was borrowed from the extinct Indo-European language Tocharian B.

  Hydromel, the French name for mead, comes from the Greek hydromeli, literally water-honey. Italian idromele, Spanish hidromiel, Catalan hidromel and Portuguese hidromel follow the same pattern. The name is also used for light, low-alcohol mead.

  Metheglin has a stranger story. The Welsh word for mead is medd, and metheglin derives from meddyglyn. That compound joins meddyg, meaning healing, with llyn, meaning liquor. The name suggests that many metheglins were first used as folk medicines, made by mixing honey with a decoction of herbs.

  Such spiced mixtures were only one branch of a very large family of named styles.

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• 5. Fermentation Craft

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  Meads often ferment at the same temperatures as wine, and the yeast is often identical to the kind used for white wines. Mead makers read a hydrometer or refractometer before and throughout fermentation to measure specific gravity. That reading lets them work out the alcohol by volume of the finished drink.

  Most producers borrow techniques from winemaking, including racking into a second container for a secondary fermentation. Racking lets the mead sit away from the lees, the dead yeast cells left behind. Time away from the lees helps it clear. Cloudiness can come from yeast, from suspended protein molecules, or from the pectin in any fruit used.

  A maker can clear the haze by cold breaking, which means leaving the mead in a cold place overnight. Another route is a fining material such as sparkolloid, bentonite, egg white or isinglass. A maker who wants to backsweeten the mead, or protect it from oxidizing, adds potassium metabisulfite and potassium sorbate. Then the mead is bottled and distributed.

  Primary fermentation usually takes 28-56 days. The must then moves to a secondary vessel for 6-9 months of aging. Those timings shift with the floral origin of the honey, its sugar and microorganism content, the water percentage, the pH, the additives and the yeast strain. Adding micronutrients has been tested, but it did not shorten fermentation or improve quality with dark honey, which is often rich in micronutrients already. Cell immobilization methods did improve quality across several honey varieties.

  Historically, meads fermented with wild yeasts and bacteria on fruit skins or in the honey itself, as the Columella recipe implies. Wild yeasts give inconsistent results. Yeast companies have since isolated strains that reliably produce pleasing mead, including strains chosen because they preserve delicate honey flavors and aromas.

  Mead can also be distilled to brandy or liqueur strength, and it is then sometimes called a whiskey. A version called honey jack comes from freezing part of a batch and straining out the ice. This freeze distillation works the same way as applejack made from cider.

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• 6. Honey and Its Companions

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  A mead made with cinnamon and apples can be called either a cinnamon metheglin or an apple cyser. The naming system works by ingredient, and it is detailed.

  A mead with spices such as cloves, cinnamon or nutmeg, or with herbs such as meadowsweet, hops, lavender or chamomile, is a metheglin. A mead with fruit such as raspberry, blackberry or strawberry is a melomel. Melomel also served as a way to keep summer produce through the winter. A mead fermented with grape juice is a pyment, and one made with apples is a cyser. If most of the fermentable sugar comes from apples instead of honey, the result is a honey cider.

  A bochet starts with honey that is caramelized or burned separately before the water goes in. It yields flavors of toffee, caramel, chocolate and toasted marshmallow. A capsicumel is flavored with chili peppers, hot or mild. A rhodomel takes its name from the Greek for rose-honey and is made with flowers. An oxymel blends honey with wine vinegar, and the name means vinegar-honey in Greek.

  Meads at or above 14% alcohol by volume are generally considered sack strength. They use more honey than usual and are often sweet, though dry sack meads exist. One theory traces the name to a sherry that was nicknamed sack in England. Another proposes a link to sake, but that idea is doubtful. Shakespeare referred to sack in Henry the IV with the line "If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!"

  Sweetness varies widely. Some meads keep the sweetness of the honey and can be dessert wines. Others are dry or semi-sweet, and some are sparkling. The common belief that mead is always sweet is a misconception.

  Imitations exist too. Some producers have sold white wine sweetened with honey after fermentation as mead, sometimes spelling it meade. Others ferment honey blended with white refined sugar and mislabel the result. That product is closer to a hypocras.

  Show mead, also called traditional mead, is the plain style of honey, water and yeast. Honey alone often cannot feed yeast through its whole life cycle, so makers may add a yeast nutrient and enzymes.

  At Christmas time, mulled mead is flavored with spices, sometimes fruit, and warmed. The traditional method is to plunge a hot poker into it.

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• 7. Regional Traditions

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  In Finland, a sweet, quick-fermented mead called sima belongs to the vappu festival. Modern makers often use brown sugar instead of honey. During secondary fermentation, raisins are added to give the yeast more sugar. They rise to the top of the bottle once the sugar is sufficiently depleted, which signals that the sima is ready. It is commonly served with the pulp and rind of a lemon.

  In Ethiopia, the mead variant tej is usually made at home. It is flavored with the powdered leaves and bark of gesho, a hop-like bittering agent that is a species of buckthorn. A sweeter, less alcoholic version called berz is aged for a shorter time.

  In Kenya, a home-made variant called muratina is used at many important religious and social events. The Kikuyu, Embu, Meru and Kamba peoples make it by fermenting honey and water with Kigelia.

  Poland has made mead for over a thousand years, and its names describe the recipe. A dwójniak uses equal amounts of water and honey. A trójniak uses two units of water for each unit of honey, and a czwórniak uses three. A półtorak, the great mead, reverses the balance with two units of honey for each unit of water.

  Lithuanian midus is made from natural bee honey and berry juice. It is infused with carnation blossoms, acorns, poplar buds, juniper berries and other herbs. Most of it holds between 8% and 17% alcohol. It is also distilled into mead nectar or mead balsam, and some varieties reach as much as 75%.

  In Brittany, the protected name chouchen can be used only for products from that region. Chouchen is mead flavored with fermented fruits or cider.

  Far away in Western Australia, the Noongar people traditionally make a sweet mead-like drink called mungitch. They use flowers of the moodjar tree during birak, the first summer in the Noongar calendar. The moodjar is a very sacred tree to them. In Nepal, a mead called dandaghare combines honey with Himalayan herbs and spices. It has been produced in the city of Pokhara since 1972.

  Traditional Russian myod comes in three major forms. Aged mead undergoes a very slow anaerobic fermentation in airtight vessels for 12-50 years, in a process similar to making traditional balsamic vinegar. The result is rich, complex and expensive.

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• 8. Decline and Revival

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  Honey could not compete on price. Other alcoholic drinks relied on fermentable sugars that were cheaper and easier to obtain. Taxation and rules on the ingredients of alcoholic beverages added to the pressure. Commercial mead became relatively obscure until recently. Some monasteries kept the tradition alive, making mead as a by-product of beekeeping, especially where grapes could not be grown.

  Since the turn of the 21st century, mead production has seen a renaissance around the world. According to MeadWorld, there were at least 850 commercial mead producers in the world as of 2025.

  In the United States, the revival began with small home meaderies and grew to include a number of small commercial ones. As mead became more widely available, it drew more attention from the news media. The trend also shows in the UK and Australia, particularly in lower-alcohol session styles. Mead-beer hybrids called braggots are part of the wave too. The name comes from the Welsh bragawd, and a braggot is made with malt as well as honey. Historic braggot, contrary to the modern definition, was most often a back sweetened spiced ale.

  In the Philippines, the first International Mead Day celebration took place on the 3rd of August 2024. Artisanal bazaars and trade fairs such as Artefino and Maarte Fair have shown off locally produced spirits and liquors, including mead. La Mesa Mead is the first commercially available Filipino mead, and it was dubbed one of the best things tasted at the Maarte Fair.

  Filipino mead makers are also working in older traditions. Bais, a native mead of the Mandaya and Manobo people of eastern Mindanao, is made from honey and water fermented for at least five days to a month or more. The Mansaka people make byais by fermenting galanga roots with honey. Kabarawan, a pre-colonial drink from the Visayas Islands, uses honey and the pounded bark of Neolitsea villosa.

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