Mead: honey's oldest use

The oldest drink there is, probably

Honey is one of very few foods that ferments itself given the chance. Diluted below roughly twenty per cent water content it stops being self-preserving, and wild yeasts — including those already present in the honey and on the comb — begin converting the sugars to alcohol. Rain in a hollow tree full of honeycomb produces mead without any human intervention at all, which is why the accidental-discovery story is more than a nice guess.

The oldest chemical evidence for a fermented drink comes from pottery at Jiahu in Henan, China, dated to around 7000 BCE, and it points to a mixed beverage of honey, rice and fruit. That predates the earliest firm evidence for either barley beer or grape wine, and it is the strongest reason to think honey got there first: honey required no agriculture, no domestication and no processing beyond adding water.

How it is made

1. 1DiluteHoney is mixed with water. The ratio sets the strength: roughly one part honey to three or four parts water produces something in the range of a strong wine, and more water produces a lighter drink.
2. 2Pitch the yeastModern makers add a selected wine or mead yeast. Historically, and in some traditional production still, fermentation relies on wild yeasts already present in the honey and the environment — slower, less predictable, and sometimes far more interesting.
3. 3FermentWeeks to months. Honey is low in the nitrogen yeast needs, so mead ferments more slowly than grape must and commercial makers usually add nutrient to prevent a stuck or stressed fermentation.
4. 4AgeThe step most beginners skip. Young mead is often harsh and yeasty; the same batch after a year is a different drink. Traditional strong meads reward several years.

The styles

Where it went, and why it came back

Mead was the ordinary drink of much of northern and eastern Europe well into the medieval period, and it sits deep in the literature — Beowulf's mead hall is a social institution rather than a set piece. Polish and Lithuanian mead traditions have been continuous for centuries, and Ethiopian tej is a living everyday drink rather than a revival.

It declined in western Europe for economic reasons rather than because anyone stopped liking it. Grape and grain cultivation spread and became cheap; honey stayed expensive because you cannot intensify a bee the way you can intensify a field. The dissolution of the monasteries in England removed a substantial part of the country's beekeeping infrastructure at a stroke, and cheap Caribbean cane sugar from the seventeenth century onwards removed honey's remaining role as the default sweetener. Mead became a curiosity.

Its recent revival tracks craft brewing generally, and the good modern producers are making something worth drinking rather than something worth reenacting. It is worth knowing, if the only mead you have tried was sweet and cloying at a historical festival, that the range runs from bone dry and sparkling to hopped, barrel-aged and fortified — a spread comparable to wine's, from a raw material most people have never seen fermented.