Is mead the oldest alcoholic drink?
Short answerNot settled
The question does not have a clean answer. The earliest chemically identified fermented drinks are mixtures — honey with rice and fruit, honey with grain — so fermented honey is among the earliest identified alcohols, but mead as a distinct category is a later tidying-up.
Where the belief comes from
A real finding — very early fermented drinks containing honey — compressed into a slogan by dropping the other two ingredients and by treating a modern drink category as though it existed in the Neolithic.
What the evidence actually is
Residue analysis of pottery from Jiahu in Henan, China, identified a fermented drink combining honey with rice and fruit, dating to around the seventh millennium BCE. It is among the earliest chemically identified alcoholic drinks anywhere. Fermented residues involving honey are known from later European contexts too.
Notice what that find is: not mead. It is a mixed ferment, in which honey is one of three contributors. Our categories — mead, beer, wine — describe drinks made from one principal sugar source, and that separation appears to be later than the practice of fermenting whatever was available together.
The argument for honey being early
There is a good a priori case that people fermented honey very early, because it is the easiest thing to ferment: dilute it and wait. No malting, no pressing, no crushing. A honeycomb left in the rain will do it unassisted. That plausibility is genuine, and it is not the same as evidence for a specific date.
Sources
- Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages — University of California Press (2009) · Monograph
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.