FOOD & DRINK
MEAD
By Alana Lauren Photo Jacqui Chaisson
What is mead? In short, mead is honey and water fermented by yeast, and it can also be flavoured with fruits, spices, grains and/or hops. Mead is really in its own category somewhere between beer and wine. Mead is like beer and not like beer; it’s like wine and not like wine. That’s really one of the benefits of mead: the diverse flavours and tastes you can create. Meads can be super sweet, super dry, or anywhere in between. A good place to start is picking a mead flavoured with a fruit or spice you know you like. If a mead is blueberry- flavoured, and you know you like blueberries, you can expect to taste blueberries as well as some degree of honey in that mead—and you can probably expect to like it. Mead is made by diluting honey with water so that it’s not too dense with sugar to ferment. Any fruit or spice additions get tossed in after dilution, but before fermentation starts. Fruit and/or fruit juice can replace some or all of the water needed to make the dilution happen. The diluted honey mixture is known as “must.” It is often heated to kill any unwanted bacteria, which can create “off” flavours. (However, some mead makers don’t do this, because they believe it kills some of the honey’s delicate natural flavour.) Then, mead makers add the yeast for fermentation, as well as oxygen, because honey and water alone don’t have all the nutrients yeast needs to convert the sugars to alcohol.
A few different factors determine how sweet or dry, and how low or high in alcohol, mead is: how diluted the honey is, what kind of yeast is used, and the fermentation temperature. Once fermentation happens, mead is aged anywhere from a few months to a few years. Mead was associated with good health and vitality in ancient cultures, and was called “the drink of the gods” in Greek mythology. Do those claims hold up today? Maybe. It’s believed that mead has some health benefits because of its star ingredient, honey, which has strong antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. While mead has gotten a medieval reputation thanks to movies and TV shows, its history stretches back much further. With its simple fermented-honey-plus- water recipe, mead was one of the very first alcoholic beverages ever made, predating beer and wine—it dates as far back as 3,000 BCE. It’s thought that mead was first created when rain dropped into a pot of honey, and that the first people to drink and make it were those of China’s Henan province. Mead then became a staple for the Greeks, Romans, Vikings (to whom it has a strong bond in pop culture), Poles, Russians, and Ethiopians, who have their own form of mead called tej. You can find mead shout-outs everywhere from the Bible to Chaucer to Aristotle to Beowulf. Personally, I drink mead because it’s made from my favourite ingredient—sweet honey—and really, what could “bee” better?
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