Cocktail
Wine,
Beer or
Mead ?
The honey-based
brew of the Middle
Ages is making a
comeback
BY CATHIE GANDEL
PHOTOGRAPH Y B Y KATHY CHAPMAN
“Mead: the oldest alcoholic beverage no
one has ever heard of,” reads the sign
in Paul Holm’s Long Island Meadery in
Holbrook, N. Y. But Holm and a handful of other mead makers are trying to
change that. One of their biggest hurdles: fighting the conventional wisdom
that mead is a cloyingly sweet drink.
“Just because mead is made with
honey, don’t dismiss it simply as a sweet
wine,” Holm says.
“Today, mead has endless flavor possibilities,” says Vicky Rowe, owner of
gotmead.com, a website dedicated to all
aspects of mead and mead making.
The consensus is that there are
between 60 and 80 commercial
meaderies in the United States—and
those numbers are growing. “Mead is
pretty much in the Wild West develop-
ment phase,” says Ken Schramm, author
of The Compleat Meadmaker. “It’s similar
to the craft beer movement in the 1980s,
and mead is going to catch on and take
o; in the same way.”
How Mead Is Made
There is evidence of mead in almost
every ancient culture, from the Greeks
to the Celts to the Vikings. Recently,
Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular
archaeologist—or archaeochem-ist—at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and
