Now Beer This: Mead All About It

If you’re a beer lover, and you probably are if you’re reading this, then you have probably had a little dalliance with mead at some point. Mead, as you might well know, is a fermented beverage made with honey. It’s generally vastly more potent than beer (normally well north of 10%, and often nearing 20% ABV) and from a brewing perspective, a bit of a pain. It’s not necessarily all that hard to make – you could put equal parts fresh, unpasteurized honey and water in a vessel and it will ferment all on its own! The difficulty comes in that you just have to wait so. Bloody. Long. Often it’s at least 6 months from start to drinkability, and that’s not a timeframe that many of us are willing to put up with.

But there’s a ton of stuff about mead that makes it interesting and worth investigating. As mentioned above, honey naturally contains wild yeast — so if you get the good stuff straight from the comb, water it down a smidge and let it sit, you’ll get mead eventually.

What’s even more interesting is that mead isn’t just mead. There are TONS of different sub-types of mead. I’ll talk about a few of them here:

Still Mead is mead made as simply as possible, just honey and yeast and water and boom. But there are no bubbles, so it has a very vinous character.

Sparkling Mead is just like the above, except it is either bottle conditioned — meaning the fermentation process is sealed so as to create carbonation — or it’s artificially carbonated with carbon dioxide.

Melomel is mead made with the addition of fruit. It’s hard to go wrong here, as honey by itself can be somewhat overwhelmingly sweet, so a fruit that adds some contrast (tartness, sharpness, mellowness, etc.) really helps to balance things out and make it fun.

Metheglin is mead made with spices. Once again, the idea is to help balance it out/mix it up. The usual suspects are nutmeg, clove, and cinnamon. But you can do whatever.

Pyment is a mead made with grape juice. To make it more confusing, Hippocras is a pyment to which spices have been added.

This brings up the fact that mead people are really, frustratingly taxonomic. I mean, it’s honey alcohol, so why don’t we call it mead whether we add fruit or whatever? But names are important, I guess. Better to use them than not.

To wrap up this list, I’ll add my favorite, the Braggot! This is a beer/mead hybrid. It normally is offered in the form of a beer that happens to have had honey added to the wort. But I suppose you could make a mead and add liquid malt extract to that. But if you do, I bet the bloody mead people will name it something else… a Toggarb maybe? Weirdos…

Anywho, honey ferments, and alcohol is good, whatever you want to call it. Go getchoo some!

 

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