Mead is honey wine. You ferment honey with water, and that honey is what makes it mead instead of beer or wine. It’s an old drink. Archaeologists have turned up traces of fermented honey from roughly 9,000 years ago, which puts it ahead of both grape wine and beer. The recipe at its plainest is honey, water, yeast, and enough patience to let it finish.
A drink older than the history books
Before anyone was writing things down, people were already drinking fermented honey. The Norse passed mead horns around their halls. It turns up in old stories out of Greece, Ethiopia, China, and the British Isles. For a long stretch of human history, mead was simply the drink you reached for. Pour a glass today and you’re drinking the same thing they were.
What it actually tastes like
That comes down to the honey. Wildflower honey gives you something bright and floral. A darker honey leans toward caramel and warmth. From there it’s up to whoever’s making it. Some meads finish dry like a white wine. Others stay sweet and slow, more like a nightcap. If you’ve had one mead you didn’t care for, you’ve had exactly one mead. The next can taste nothing like it.
Mead, beer, and wine
The difference is what the yeast eats. Beer’s sugar comes from grain. Wine’s comes from grapes. Mead’s comes from honey. That’s also the reason a mead made with only honey, water, and yeast has no gluten in it.
Made with Oklahoma honey
We make ours in small batches in Broken Arrow, with honey from Oklahoma beekeepers we actually know. Not sure where to start? The palate quiz will point you at a style, or you can read up on the kinds of mead we make.