Mead is the oldest known fermented beverage, with archaeological evidence dating back to 7,000 BCE in northern China — predating both beer and wine. Honey mixed with water ferments spontaneously thanks to wild yeasts, meaning the first mead was likely an accidental discovery by a negligent beekeeper. But mead is far from a single drink: it encompasses melomel (with fruit), cyser (apple juice), pyment (grapes), and metheglin (herbs and spices), the latter of which was prescribed as medicine in medieval Wales and England. The tradition never broke in two places: Poland, where legally defined honey-to-water ratios like półtorak (one part honey to half a part water) are protected under EU law, and Ethiopia, where tej — fermented with gesho buckthorn — is still served in dedicated tej bets. In the United States, commercial meaderies have grown from roughly 30 in the early 2000s to over 500, driven by the craft beverage movement, gluten-free demand, and the appeal of Viking-era storytelling. Homebrewing mead is simpler than beer: mix three pounds of raw honey per gallon of water, add commercial wine yeast like Lalvin D47, and don't skip yeast nutrient — honey is a nitrogen desert for yeast. Sanitize everything, use a hydrometer to track fermentation, and let time do the rest. The result is a beverage that connects you to 9,000 years of human history.
#2659: How to Make Mead: Ancient Honey Wine's Revival
Mead predates the wheel. Here's how to brew it at home — and why it's making a comeback.
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New to the show? Start here#2659: How to Make Mead: Ancient Honey Wine's Revival
Daniel sent us this one — he wants to talk about mead. The ancient honey wine that shows up in Beowulf and Viking sagas and then basically vanished from the popular imagination. He's asking about its history, where it's still actually consumed today, and how to homebrew the stuff. Which, knowing Daniel, means he's probably already got a fermentation bucket bubbling somewhere in Jerusalem.
I would not be surprised. And look, mead is one of those things where people think they know the story — medieval knights, goblets, maybe a Renaissance fair — but the actual history is wild. We're talking about a beverage that predates the wheel. The oldest archaeological evidence of fermented honey drinks goes back to about seven thousand BCE in northern China, based on pottery residues found at Jiahu in Henan province. And by the way, today's episode is powered by DeepSeek V four Pro writing the script.
Good to know. So seven thousand BCE — that puts mead ahead of beer, ahead of wine, ahead of pretty much everything except maybe water that someone left fruit in by accident.
And the reason is straightforward — honey mixed with water ferments naturally. Wild yeasts are everywhere, honey diluted with water is a perfect sugar source, and you get spontaneous fermentation without anyone having to figure anything out. It's probably the first alcoholic beverage humans ever made, and it wasn't because anyone was trying to be clever. It just happened. Someone left honey and water in a container, wild yeast did its thing, and the next person who drank it had a very interesting afternoon.
Which means the first mead maker was almost certainly a negligent beekeeper who forgot about a pot.
I mean, that's the sloth take, but yeah, basically. The thing that most people don't realize is that mead isn't just one drink. There are dozens of traditional variations. You've got melomel, which is mead fermented with fruit — that's what most modern commercial meads actually are. Cyser is mead made with apple juice instead of water. Pyment is mead with grapes. Metheglin is mead with herbs and spices, and that's a whole category that connects to medieval medicinal traditions. The word actually comes from the Welsh "meddyglyn," from "meddyg" meaning healing and "llyn" meaning liquor.
Medieval people were basically doing kombucha before kombucha. Honey wine with herbs, calling it medicine, and probably not worrying too much about the distinction between a drink and a prescription.
That's actually more true than you'd think. Metheglin was literally prescribed by physicians in medieval Wales and England. Different herb blends for different ailments. And honey itself has genuine antimicrobial properties — we know that now from modern research, hydrogen peroxide generation and low water activity — but they didn't need to know the mechanism to notice that honey-based preparations seemed to work differently from other things.
Alright, so let's back up. You've got early evidence in China, but mead shows up independently basically everywhere humans lived near bees, right?
The Rigveda, the ancient Hindu text from around fifteen hundred to a thousand BCE, mentions a drink called soma that some scholars think was a mead-like preparation, though that's debated. The ancient Greeks had "hydromel" — literally water-honey — and Aristotle wrote about it. The Norse had a whole mythology around mead. The Mead of Poetry in Norse legend was made from the blood of a wise being named Kvasir, mixed with honey, and whoever drank it became a poet or a scholar. Which is a pretty good pitch for a beverage.
Drink this and you'll become eloquent. That is a strong marketing angle that modern meaderies are completely sleeping on.
They really are. But the Norse connection is actually where mead gets its strongest cultural associations in the West. The Vikings drank mead, yes, but it wasn't an everyday beverage for most people. Honey was expensive. You needed a lot of it — roughly two to three pounds of honey per gallon of mead — and beekeeping wasn't trivial. So mead tended to be a drink for special occasions, for the wealthy, for ritual use. The everyday drink was ale.
Which explains why mead faded when sugar got cheap and beer got industrial. Honey was always the bottleneck.
That's exactly the economics. When you look at the decline of mead in Europe, it maps pretty closely to the availability of alternative sugar sources for fermentation. Grain for beer was cheap and abundant. Grapes for wine, in the right climates, were a reliable agricultural product. Honey required beekeeping at scale, and the yield per acre is much lower. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mead was already in decline across most of Western Europe.
Yet it survived in pockets. You were telling me before we started — Ethiopia, Poland, Russia?
Poland is the big one. Poland never stopped making mead. It's called "miód pitny" — literally drinking honey — and it's been produced continuously since at least the tenth century. There are traditional Polish classifications based on the ratio of honey to water. "Półtorak" is one part honey to half a part water, so extremely dense and sweet. "Dwójniak" is one to one. "Trójniak" is one part honey to two parts water. "Czwórniak" is one to three. These are legally defined categories in Poland now, protected under traditional specialty guaranteed status in the EU.
One part honey to half a part water. That's not a beverage, that's a syrup with ambition.
It takes years to mature properly. Półtorak can age for a decade or more before it's ready. And the result is incredibly rich, almost liqueur-like. But the Polish tradition kept mead alive as a serious cultural product while the rest of Europe let it become a historical footnote.
What about Ethiopia? I remember reading something about tej.
Tej is Ethiopia's traditional honey wine, and it's still widely consumed. It's made with honey, water, and gesho — which is a type of buckthorn, the leaves and stems — and it's fermented in vessels called gänbó. Tej has been made in Ethiopia for at least two thousand years, probably longer. It's served in tej bets, which are essentially mead houses, and it's a living, thriving tradition. Not a revival, not a historical reenactment — it's just what people drink. The flavor is distinctive because of the gesho, which adds a bitterness and an herbal quality you don't get in European meads.
Ethiopia and Poland are the two places where the tradition never broke.
Russia has medovukha, which is similar but distinct. It's traditionally made by fermenting honey diluted with water, sometimes with added fruit or spices, and it was a common drink well into the imperial period. But the Russian tradition did weaken during the Soviet era. It's had a bit of a revival more recently, but it's not the continuous unbroken chain that you see in Poland or Ethiopia.
Let's talk about the modern revival, because that's where things get interesting. Mead has been coming back in the United States and Western Europe for what, the last fifteen, twenty years?
There's a good NPR piece that tracked this — the number of meaderies in the United States went from something like thirty in the early two thousands to over five hundred by twenty twenty. And the growth has continued since then. The American Mead Makers Association has been tracking this, and they've seen sustained double-digit growth in the number of commercial meaderies opening each year.
What's driving that? Is it the craft beer spillover? People who got bored with IPAs and wanted something different?
The craft beverage movement created a market of people willing to try new things and pay premium prices for small-batch production. But there's also the gluten-free angle. Mead is naturally gluten-free, which opened up a market that beer couldn't reach. And there's the historical romance — mead has a story that beer and wine don't quite match. You can tell the Viking tale, the medieval feast imagery, the "nectar of the gods" framing. It markets itself.
The reenactment crowd must be a substantial customer base.
Renaissance fairs and medieval reenactment events are definitely a distribution channel. But the bigger shift has been mead moving into regular retail. You can now find commercial mead in wine shops and even some grocery stores, positioned as an alternative to white wine rather than as a novelty. The quality has improved dramatically, too. Early commercial meads in the revival were often cloyingly sweet and one-dimensional. Modern mead makers are doing dry meads, sparkling meads, barrel-aged meads, session meads at lower alcohol by volume.
That's a phrase that would have confused a Viking.
A Viking would be horrified by session mead. The ABV on traditional meads could range from eight percent up to eighteen or twenty percent for some of the stronger Polish styles. Session meads are typically around four to six percent, designed to be drinkable in quantity. It's a very modern concept.
Alright, so the history is deep, the revival is real. Let's talk about the homebrewing part, because that's the practical side of Daniel's question. How hard is this actually?
It's one of the easiest fermented beverages to make at home. Easier than beer, because you don't have to deal with mashing grain or managing hop additions. The basic process is: mix honey with water, add yeast, wait. That's it. The simplest traditional recipe is literally just honey, water, and time.
Wait, no yeast added? Just wild fermentation?
If you want to go fully traditional, yes. Wild yeast will eventually find your honey-water mixture and start fermenting. But it's unpredictable — you might get something delicious, you might get something that tastes like a barn. Most modern homebrewers use commercial wine yeast or a dedicated mead yeast. Lalvin D forty-seven is a popular choice, or K one V dash one one one six if you want something that'll ferment clean and neutral.
The baseline equipment is what — a fermentation vessel, an airlock, some sanitizer?
That's basically it. A one-gallon glass carboy is a common starting setup. You need a food-grade sanitizer — Star San is the standard — because anything that touches your must, which is what the unfermented honey-water mixture is called, needs to be sanitized. Contamination is the main thing that can go wrong. You also need a hydrometer to measure specific gravity, which tells you how much sugar is in the must and how fermentation is progressing. And you'll want a racking cane and some tubing for transferring the mead off the sediment. The sediment, by the way, is called lees, same as in winemaking.
For someone who's never fermented anything before, what's the actual step-by-step? Sanitize everything, then what?
Step one: sanitize everything. I cannot overstate this. Step two: mix honey with water. A typical starting recipe is about three pounds of honey per gallon of water, which will give you a mead in the twelve to fourteen percent ABV range, depending on the yeast. You want to use good honey — not the stuff in the plastic bear, because that's often been heated and filtered to death. Raw, unprocessed honey will give you more character. Step three: add yeast nutrient. This is the step beginners often skip, and it's why a lot of first-time meads stall out. Honey is surprisingly low in the nutrients yeast need — nitrogen, mainly. Unlike grape must or malted barley, honey is a nutrient desert for yeast. So you add a commercial yeast nutrient, or you can use raisins if you want to keep it more traditional, though that's less reliable.
Raisins as yeast nutrient. That feels like the kind of folk wisdom that someone's great-grandfather swore by.
It works, kind of. Raisins provide some nitrogen and other micronutrients, but not in controlled amounts. Modern yeast nutrients like Fermaid O or diammonium phosphate are much more predictable. After you add the nutrient, you pitch the yeast — that is, add it to the must — and then you attach the airlock and wait. Primary fermentation typically takes two to four weeks, though it can vary.
Then you've got mead?
You've got young, raw mead. It'll be drinkable, probably, but it won't be great. Mead benefits enormously from aging. Minimum, you want to let it sit for three to six months after fermentation is complete. Many meads improve for years. The harsh alcohol notes mellow, the honey character comes forward, and if you've added fruit or spices, those integrate rather than sitting on top.
It's a patient person's beverage. Which, speaking as a sloth, I appreciate. But I can see why beer won the mass market — you can go from grain to glass in two weeks with beer. Mead is a commitment.
And that's probably another reason mead declined historically. When you have faster, cheaper options, a beverage that takes six months to a year to reach its peak is a hard sell for everyday consumption.
What about the variations? If someone's going to try this, what are the most rewarding styles to start with?
For a beginner, I'd recommend a simple melomel — mead with fruit. A berry melomel is forgiving because the fruit adds acidity and tannins that balance the honey sweetness, and the fruit character can cover up any minor flaws. Blueberry or blackberry work well. A cyser — mead with apple juice — is also a great entry point because apple juice provides nutrients and acidity naturally, so it's less likely to stall. And if you want to try something more traditional, a metheglin with ginger and orange peel is straightforward and gives you something that tastes intentionally spiced.
What about carbonation? Still mead seems to be the default, but I've had sparkling meads that were excellent.
You can make sparkling mead — it's called a hydromel in modern usage, though the term has shifted meaning over time. The process is the same as bottle-conditioning beer: you let the mead ferment completely dry, then add a small, measured amount of sugar or honey just before bottling, and the residual yeast produces carbon dioxide in the sealed bottle. You need to be precise with the sugar calculation, though. Too much and you get bottle bombs.
That's a vivid image. Your mead becomes a glass grenade in the pantry.
It's a real risk if you're not careful. The standard priming sugar calculation for mead is about one ounce of honey per gallon for a moderate carbonation level. But you need to make sure fermentation is truly finished before you bottle, because any residual sugar plus the priming sugar can push the pressure too high.
Daniel, if you're listening — don't skip the hydrometer reading. Herman's medical license doesn't cover glass shrapnel injuries.
It doesn't. But I will say, the mead-making community online is incredibly helpful. The subreddit for mead is one of the most thorough and beginner-friendly homebrewing communities out there. They have a wiki that walks you through every step, with troubleshooting guides and recipe databases. It's a great resource.
Let's talk about the commercial side for a minute. You mentioned five hundred plus meaderies in the US. What are the big names? Where does someone start if they want to taste a good commercial mead before committing to making their own?
There are a few standouts. Schramm's Mead in Michigan is widely considered one of the best in the world — Ken Schramm literally wrote the book on mead making, "The Compleat Meadmaker," which came out in two thousand three and was the first serious English-language guide to mead in decades. Superstition Meadery in Arizona is another heavyweight. Moonlight Meadery in New Hampshire, Charm City Meadworks in Baltimore, Heidrun Meadery in California, which does sparkling meads in the méthode champenoise style — they're all producing world-class products.
Méthode champenoise mead. So they're doing secondary fermentation in the bottle, riddling, disgorgement, the whole thing?
The whole thing. Heidrun is actually based in Point Reyes Station, California, and they use honey varietals — single-source honeys from specific flowers — to make dry, sparkling meads that are essentially positioned as champagne alternatives. Orange blossom honey mead, wildflower, avocado blossom — each one has a distinct aroma and flavor profile that comes entirely from the honey source. It's a totally different product from the sweet, still meads most people imagine.
That varietal honey concept is interesting. Most people think of honey as honey, but the nectar source changes the flavor dramatically. Buckwheat honey versus clover honey versus orange blossom — they're as different as grape varieties.
That's one of the things that makes mead such a rich category for exploration. Wine has its grape varieties, beer has its malt and hop varieties, and mead has its honey varietals. A mead made from tupelo honey is completely different from one made from heather honey or manuka honey. The flavor compounds from the nectar source carry through fermentation. Some of them are subtle, some are incredibly distinctive. Buckwheat honey mead has this dark, molasses-like, almost barnyard character that's polarizing but fascinating.
Barnyard character is a tasting note that could go either way.
It's the kind of thing where you either love it or you pour it down the sink. There's not a lot of middle ground with buckwheat mead.
What about the global market? Is this a US-centric revival, or is mead growing elsewhere too?
It's happening in multiple regions. The UK has seen a mead revival, though it's smaller than in the US. There are meaderies in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Scandinavia has seen renewed interest, partly driven by the Viking cultural heritage angle. But the US is definitely the epicenter of the modern mead movement, in terms of both number of producers and innovation in styles.
The economics — what does a bottle of commercial mead cost? Because three pounds of honey per gallon is not cheap.
It's not. Even at wholesale honey prices, the raw ingredient cost for mead is substantially higher than for beer. A typical craft beer might have fifty cents to a dollar of ingredients per bottle. Mead, because of the honey, can be three to five times that. So commercial meads tend to retail in the fifteen to thirty dollar range for a seven hundred fifty milliliter bottle. Some of the specialty ones, the barrel-aged or limited-release meads, can go for forty or fifty dollars or more.
Which positions it more in the wine space than the beer space, economically.
And that's how meaderies tend to market themselves — as alternatives to wine, not as competitors to beer. The packaging is usually wine bottles, the pricing is wine pricing, and the tasting room experience is modeled on winery tasting rooms rather than brewery taprooms.
If Daniel is going to homebrew this, he's saving himself a lot of money. Fifteen to thirty dollars a bottle versus maybe three or four dollars of ingredients.
The economics of homebrewing mead are very favorable once you've got the equipment. Honey in bulk runs maybe four to six dollars a pound, so a gallon of mead — which yields about five standard wine bottles — might cost twenty to thirty dollars in honey plus a few dollars for yeast and nutrients. That's five to seven dollars a bottle for something that would cost twenty dollars commercially. And the quality can be just as good if you're patient.
The patience is the real cost. Six months of waiting.
Which is why experienced mead makers tend to have a pipeline. You start a new batch every month or two, and after the first year, you've got a steady stream of aged mead coming ready. It's a front-loaded hobby but very rewarding once the pipeline is established.
That sounds like a metaphor for something, but I'm too lazy to develop it.
It's a metaphor for sloth life, probably. Slow investment, long-term payoff.
Alright, let's dig into something that I think gets overlooked. The role of mead in religious and ritual contexts across cultures. You mentioned the Norse mead of poetry, but it's broader than that, isn't it?
The term "honeymoon" is often traced to the tradition of giving newlyweds enough mead to last a lunar month — a moon's worth of honey wine — because mead was believed to promote fertility and virility. The historical accuracy of that etymology is debated, but the association between mead and marriage rituals is well-documented across multiple cultures. In ancient Greece, mead was offered to the gods. In some African traditions, honey wine is used in ancestor veneration. The Ethiopian tej I mentioned earlier — it's integral to social and religious gatherings. You don't have a proper celebration without tej.
In medieval Europe, monasteries were often centers of beekeeping and mead production.
Monks kept bees for wax — candles for the church — and honey was a byproduct. They made mead, they made metheglin with herbs from the monastery gardens, and they were effectively the research and development centers of medieval European fermentation. A lot of what we know about historical mead recipes comes from monastic records.
The monks were the craft brewers of their day. Keeping the knowledge alive while the secular world was busy drinking whatever was cheapest.
That's a pattern that holds across a lot of food and drink traditions. Monasteries preserved techniques and recipes through periods when the broader culture moved on. Beer, cheese, wine, mead — if monks made it, there's probably a continuous tradition that survived because of them.
What's the oldest written mead recipe we know of?
There are recipes in Roman agricultural texts — Columella, who wrote in the first century CE, has a recipe for mead in his "De Re Rustica." He describes diluting honey with rainwater, then exposing it to the sun for forty days, then aging it. Pliny the Elder also wrote about mead, distinguishing between different types. But the Roman recipes are relatively late compared to how old mead itself is. The gap between the archaeological evidence and the written recipes is thousands of years.
Forty days in the sun. That's a very Mediterranean approach. Not going to work so well in Norway.
The Norse approach was different — they'd often heat the must, which helps dissolve the honey and also pasteurizes it to some degree. Heating the must, called a bochet if you caramelize the honey, changes the flavor profile dramatically. Caramelized honey takes on toffee, marshmallow, toasted notes. It's a whole substyle.
That's a new one on me. So you're cooking the honey before fermentation?
You're essentially making a honey caramel. You heat the honey slowly until it darkens — anywhere from a light amber to a deep, almost black color — and the longer you cook it, the more the sugars caramelize and the more complex the flavor gets. But you have to be careful, because hot honey is basically napalm. It holds heat, it sticks to skin, and it can cause horrific burns. Mead makers talk about bochet with a certain reverence and a certain fear.
If Daniel tries this, maybe don't start with the bochet. Start with the simple melomel and keep your skin intact.
That would be my medical advice, yes.
Let's circle back to something you touched on earlier. The fact that mead is gluten-free. How much of the modern revival is being driven by that?
It's hard to quantify, but it's definitely a factor. The gluten-free market has grown substantially, and while there are gluten-free beers made from sorghum or rice, they're often not great. Mead offers something that isn't a compromise product — it's naturally gluten-free and it's its own thing with its own tradition. For someone with celiac disease who wants a craft beverage experience that isn't a subpar beer alternative, mead is genuinely appealing.
Cider, too, I suppose. That's the other gluten-free ferment.
Cider and mead have both benefited from the same trend. And they're often made by the same producers. A lot of meaderies also make cider, because the equipment and the process are similar and the gluten-free customer base overlaps.
If you're looking at the beverage landscape right now, you've got craft beer maturing and maybe even declining in some markets, cider established as a category, and mead as the next frontier. What's the ceiling? Is mead going to become a mainstream product, or is it always going to be niche?
I think the honey cost puts a ceiling on how mainstream it can get. Beer can scale because grain is cheap and abundant. Wine scales because grapes are an agricultural commodity. Honey can't scale the same way — there's a finite supply, and the cost per pound is inherently higher because beekeeping is labor-intensive and bees are, frankly, struggling. Colony collapse disorder, pesticide exposure, habitat loss — these are real constraints on honey supply. So mead will probably always be a premium product.
Which is fitting, historically. It was always the premium option, the special occasion drink. It's returning to its traditional role.
The anomaly wasn't mead's decline — the anomaly was the brief period when cheap grain and industrial brewing made alcohol a commodity. Mead occupied the high end for most of human history, and it's returning to that position now.
Alright, let's get practical for a minute. If someone listening wants to try mead for the first time — not make it, just taste it — what should they buy and how should they serve it?
For a first mead, I'd recommend a semi-sweet traditional mead — just honey, water, yeast, no fruit, no spices — because it'll give you the clearest sense of what mead actually tastes like. Serve it slightly chilled, not ice cold. About fifty to fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, similar to a white wine. If you serve it too cold, you mute the honey aromatics, which are the whole point. Pour it into a wine glass, not a tumbler, because you want to be able to smell it.
Mead is surprisingly versatile with food. A dry traditional mead pairs well with roasted poultry, pork, anything with a bit of fat. A sweeter mead works with desserts, obviously, but also with spicy food — the sweetness balances heat. A fruit mead, a melomel, can pair with cheese, especially soft cheeses like brie or goat cheese. And sparkling mead is basically a champagne substitute — oysters, fried food, anything you'd pair with bubbles.
It's not just a novelty. It's a legitimate food beverage with range.
It really is. And I think that's the thing that surprises most people when they first try a good mead. They expect something cloying and one-note, and instead they get something with complexity and structure. The honey character is there, but it's not like drinking honey — it's fermented, it's transformed, and the result is its own thing entirely.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early fifteen hundreds, the region that is now Eritrea was home to an estimated one hundred and forty distinct species of lichen across the highland plateaus, many of which had never been documented by European botanists until the late nineteenth century.
Hilbert: In the early fifteen hundreds, the region that is now Eritrea was home to an estimated one hundred and forty distinct species of lichen across the highland plateaus, many of which had never been documented by European botanists until the late nineteenth century.
extremely specific, Hilbert.
I had no idea Eritrea was such a lichen hotspot in the fifteen hundreds.
We've all learned something. Daniel, if you're going to brew this — and we both know you are — start simple, be patient, and don't skip the yeast nutrient. The homebrewing community is out there, the resources are solid, and you've got access to some excellent honey in this part of the world. I expect a tasting when it's ready.
For everyone else, if you haven't tried mead since that dusty bottle at a Renaissance fair in the nineties, it's time to give it another shot. The category has transformed. There's probably a meadery within driving distance that's making world-class stuff. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this show running. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities.