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A Guide to Mead

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The mention of the word mead brings to mind images of fierce Nordic warriors at a feast hall consuming mutton.  In reality, mead is an ancient beverage, but a good quality mead is more like a fine white wine – a refined beverage.  The mixture of water, honey, and yeast, mead is a beverage that takes patience to brew.  The full fermentation cycle of a mead usually runs at about a year.  Bottling a mead sooner will usually endanger the bottle with explosion unless it is pasteurized.  On top of that, proper aging brings out even more of the subtle characteristics of the mead, making mead a prime candidate for collecting and aging.

When purchasing mead in the store, you should be careful to note the ingredients in the alleged “mead”.  Some companies produce white wine with just some honey added and call this “honey wine” or even “meade” – this is not mead, it is merely honey-sweetened wine.  Now, don’t get me wrong – there are many types of mead, including that made with grapes – but unless the honey has been fermented, it is not mead.  A simple addition of honey as a sweetener does not count.  Many people may still refer to a real mead as a honey wine as a descriptive term, however.

Many of the offshoots of mead are quite delectable, and no guide to mead would be complete without their mention.  There is cyser, which is a delectable combination of mead and hard cider.  This drink is especially enhanced by the addition of a bottle-conditioned piece of candied ginger on the bottom.  A little more savory than the worm in the tequila bottle, no?  Although, in this case, the cyser would also be a metheglin.  Metheglin is any kind of mead that has herbs or spices added, such as a mead flavored with clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon – which could be called a wassail metheglin I suppose.  This might be nice served hot!  The proper nomenclature for a cyser with such spices could be apple metheglin or simply spiced cyser.

One of the earliest ales was actually a mead.  Made first with honey and hops, later malt was added as an adjunct and eventually replaced the honey all together.  This kind of mead, or early ale is referred to as Braggot.  Another mead combination is that of honey and grapes, creating a kind of honey-wine mixture that is called Pyment, and either white or red grapes are used, depending on taste.  Some of the fine meads I have tasted are very similar to a fine wine, so I do not doubt that this combination is tasty.

There are many more possibilities, of course, but in any case where mead is mixed with fruit, the resultant drink may be referred to as Melomel.  This encompasses cyser, Pyment, and Morat (mead with mulberries).  The reason why so many meads have adjunct fruits is that yeast finds it difficult to take root in a true mead.  In addition to fruits and even grains and malt, some meads are made with the further addition of flower petals (could be considered a metheglin) such as roses, morning glory, and honeysuckle.

It is always possible for you to flavor your mead after buying it.  You can simply spice your mead for a mulled mead experience, add some candied ginger as recommended above, or even put a slice of apple or strawberries right in the bottle!  Allowing a month or so for these flavor to seep into your mead will greatly enhance the drink and personalize it, making for a fine gift idea or just to share with friends.  Mead is an exotic beverage as it is, but with your own special touch, it is sure to be a flavor to remember.

Beer, Wine, and Mead in Myth

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The history and folklore surrounding beer, wine, and mead in myth is extensive.  For as long as history has been recorded, all around the world, we can see examples of these beverages being enjoyed and even fought over.  In the Bible, alcoholic drink is mentioned often.  Going further back, mead is mentioned in the ancient hymns of the Rigveda of India, poets of the Middle ages, and plays an important role in the Nordic mythology of the Eddas.  Wine goes very far back, of course, mentioned often by the philosophers of the ancient Greeks.  It could be said that, as far as we know, the arts of fermentation were among the first technologies developed by humans. 

It appears that beer may be the most ancient of beer, wine, and mead in myth – at least, as far as we know.  Beer is mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and beer has been discovered in archaeological sites to be chemically dated back to the year 5,000 BC.  Samples from pottery jars found in the cradle of civilization, what is today known as Iran, yielded these findings.  It is likely that the creation of beer goes back farther than that, but there is little evidence that has survived.  In my estimation, is has all been drunk.

Many more recent examples of the mythic legacy of beer exist – it is widely held that ancient Egyptians enjoyed beer, partially, perhaps, as a method of purifying water.   One myth surrounding beer is the ancient hymn to Ninkasi, which identifies this Sumerian Goddess as one of fermentation, dated back to around 1900 BC.  For most of recorded history, we can see this myth played out in different religious and cultural venues again and again.  Spiritualism was the explanation for everything back then, and the presence of beer, wine, and mead in myth is telling of mankind’s ubiquitous application of supernatural elements to all processes of life.  But, perhaps, the reverence with which humanity approached fermentation in ancient history is also indicative of a deeper appreciation of the experience of inebriation.  In this day and age, such appreciation is not as common, except, perhaps, among the educated – beer fans and connoisseurs.

It took a long time for brewers to discover the creature that is in actuality the cause of the fermentation process: yeast.  Before yeast was discovered, brewers in the Nordic regions would yell and shout obscenities at the beer, hoping to wake up the spirit contained within and excite it to ferment the beer.  Many monasteries during the middle ages would fervently pray over the beer, anointing it with many blessings from the Lord that He may bless the beer with the so-called “miracle” of fermentation.  This process continued for quite some time, and as the church became more and more of an institution for societal control, it became necessary for brewers to hire a priest to bless each batch of beer.  When these blessings became law, it effectively created a church rendered tax on brewing, which, I speculate, lasted in many regions of Europe until the Renaissance period.

In general, the Old Testament is in favor of drink, while the New Testament stands firmly against it (that’s old world values for you).  Never the less, wine has for many centuries played an important role in the religious rites, including that of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, and the Catholic Eucharist and its derivatives.  There are many Hebrew words for differing kinds of wine and alcoholic beverage.  According to the Bible, Noah was a vintner, as well as Jesus (although in rapid fashion).  There are many warnings against the imbibing of wine as well, and it seems that the myths of many cultures contain this dichotomy concerning alcohol.  There is great appreciation for it, and many warnings against misuse of the beverage.

In the region now known as Mexico, Pulque, a drink similar to a wine cooler, had prohibitions against who could partake. Known among indigenous peoples as Neutle, the drink made from a mixture of fermented Agave nectar and fresh Agave nectar.  This was sometimes mixed with Peyote or other mind altering, or entheogenic plants.  Neutle was a drink reserved for the shaman and for royalty.  Severe penalties awaited those who were caught drunk who were not allowed the drink.

Mead appears most notably in Norse mythology as the tale of the mead of inspiration.  In the days of this story, Odin and his brethren (the Aesir) had made a treaty with the former rules of the heavens, the giants.  Odin had heard of the mead of inspiration, made from the blood of a god mixed with honey.  As the story goes, this mead was being guarded by either a dwarfen woman or a giantess.  Odin convinced the giantess to let him have but one sip of the mead in exchange for a night of lovemaking.  After the long night had ended, Odin took his drink, but swallowed all of the mead.  He then turned into an eagle and fled to Asgard, where he regurgitated the mead for all the Aesir to benefit from.  But as he fled from the Giantess’s house, her father in hot pursuit, some drops of the mead landed to the earth.  From these drops sprang entheogenic mushrooms, from which the poets of man gained their inspiration.

Wine is most notably apparent in the rites and myth surrounding the Greek god on Wine, Dionysus.  This God was always known as a troublemaker, being the spurned offspring of god and man, and an insufferable partier.  Like Dionysus himself, the followers of this God often were called out as rapscallions for their wine enhanced orgies and wild rites.  Known also as Bacchus to the Romans, the rites of this God were outlawed by the senate at a certain point because it was suspected that they were used as a guise to plan the overthrow of the government.  If they weren’t before, they probably were after.

This article is, of course, to short to go into much detail surrounding the presence of beer, wine, and mead in myth.  There are numerous tales of such drinks throughout the world, including Africa, Asia, Russia, and many  more countries.  The book Sacred and Healing Herbal Beers by Stephen Harrod Buhner is a good source of information concerning beer, wine, and mead in myth.  May your further researches be fruitful.