In the year 914 the king of Wales, Howel the Good, issued an order to his people, an order as lyric as “Beowulf” and as sweeping as the Internal Revenue Code. The Laws of Howel, the order was called, and it touched on every aspect of life: sex, agriculture, civilization, brotherhood-and mead.
Mead, a beverage made from fermented honey, commanded even the attention of the king. He spelled out mead’s place in society and how it should be brewed, and he appointed the meadmaker to his highest circle of officers.
Mead, also known as ambrosia, the nectar of the gods and, in Howel’s time, mede, has been around for thousands of years, and some people claim it was the first form of alcoholic refreshment. It has been the drink of warriors, nobles, peasants and desert nomads. Almost every culture has its own ancient recipe, and many consider it an aphrodisiac. Today it is the drink of a small but reportedly growing group of hobbyists, small-time brewers and college students, all curious and passionate.
“It can be an awful beverage. But if you make it right, it can be the nectar of the gods,” said Suzanne Price, president of the American Mead Association. She encourages worldwide mead consumption out of her office in Boulder, Colo., by publishing a magazine (Inside Mead), sponsoring a mead-tasting competition (The Ambrosia Adventure) and supporting meadmakers in their art. “Our main goal is to get other people to know about mead, how to enjoy it,” she said.
Basic mead requires only four things: water, honey, yeast and time (anywhere from a few weeks to 50 years). Its alcohol content, usually about 12 percent, ranges from 6 to 20 percent. It looks like a light beer with bits of sediment floating at the bottom.
“It’s not a wine, it’s not a distilled spirit, and it’s not a beer,” said Russell Schehrer, brewmaster at Wynkoop Brewing, a Denver brew pub. “It’s its own thing.”
Today mead is experiencing “a renaissance,” according to Price. There isn’t a national mega-brand yet, no Bud Mead, but about 20 breweries and wineries, most of them regional, sell mead. There’s no telling how much of the golden brew is made in America, but the experts say it’s on the rise. The trend has been growing among microbreweries and brew pubs, classy watering holes that brew and serve specialized beers for local consumers. Only a few dozen of these existed a decade ago, Price said, but now there are about 300 nationally, with the numbers rising fast.
Charlie Papazian, president and founder of the Home Brewer’s Association, based in Boulder, has taught classes on the subject of mead, written about it in several books and magazines, and traveled the world tasting meads and talking to their brewers. He said mead consumption probably started simultaneously in many ancient cultures, including those of the Anglo-Saxons, Australian aborigines, Greeks, Romans and scores of African tribes.
A fruitful legend
Legend generally connects mead with Europe in the Middle Ages, especially with English weddings and the term “honeymoon.” As Papazian tells it, the town meadmaker would cook up a big batch for the newlyweds. The couple would take it to a cabin or hideaway for one cycle of the moon-one month-and drink a bit each day. The alcohol loosened any sexual inhibitions, and the sugar kick kept the newlyweds going for hours at a time. Needless to say, the bride would usually come home pregnant. If not, the couple blamed the meadmaker.
So what happened to mead? Why don’t bars have it on tap? Why can’t you drag home a keg of mead? Where are the ads for Budweiser’s Lite Ice Mead? Why is Beowulf the only person we ever hear about drinking it?
Papazian blames the colonizing of the Americas and the invention of the light bulb. During medieval times, it wasn’t unusual for a household to keep its own bees to provide sweet repast. Centuries later, when sugar cane started pouring in from the Caribbean, the only reason to keep bees was as a source of candle wax. After the light bulb arrived, almost everyone stopped keeping hives, and mead’s popularity flew the way of the domesticated bee population. It just wasn’t convenient anymore, Papazian said. Beer and wine became relatively less expensive and have dominated the beverage market for centuries.
Finding mead today is relatively easy in such brewing hot-spots as Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington. But even some Chicago-area liquor stores, bars and restaurants carry Chaucer’s Mead from Bargeto’s Winery in California, Bun Rady Mead from Ireland, Starpolski Mead from Poland and Tej, an Ethiopian-style mead brewed, of course, in Canada.
Meadmakers stick to the nomenclature developed over many centuries. Start with your traditional, no-frills mead. Add spices and you’ve got methaglin. Add fruit and it’s called melomel. Add malt and you’ve got braggot, a honey beer. Pyment, clarre and hippocras meads all derive from mixtures with wine. And the proper item from which to consume mead is a deep bowl on a pedestal called a mazer, although most people drink it from a wine glass or mug-or a recycled beer bottle.
The taste of mead varies from brewer to brewer, from recipe to recipe. But generally, says Wayne Waananen, brewmaster at the Hubcap Brewery and Kitchen in Vail, Colo., “it’s very light tasting, it has a residual sweetness.” Waananen makes a mead called Killer Bee Honey Ale and sells it in the Vail area.
Ah, regulations
Being an independent spirit poses some problems for mead. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms issues licenses for businesses to make malt beverages and wine, but it doesn’t allow both to be made on the same premises. Mead is legally a wine, said Susan McCarron of the bureau’s communications department, but beer brewers have all the right equipment for making it. Because only wineries can make traditional mead, breweries have to make theirs as malt beverages, adding as little malt as possible to meet the legal guidelines in the Internal Revenue Code and the Federal Alcohol Administration Act.
Some brewers, like Waananen and Schehrer, said they would rather make traditional mead and don’t understand why the government won’t let them.
As McCarron explained it, keeping breweries and wineries separate basically makes them easier to regulate. “We keep pretty close tabs on the beverage industry,” she said.
But home brewers don’t have to worry about the feds unless they sell their wares.
“Mead is real simple to make, compared to beer,” said Mike Soucy, a Gurnee home brewer. He cooks up a few gallons of mead on occasion, diligently noting what kind of yeast and spices he used, how long it fermented, what it tasted like after three months, nine months, etc. Many months may pass before he knows whether it’s delicious or if the recipe needs to be tweaked or scrapped. Once it’s bottled, he adds a label to each one with a picture of his dog and a warning: “May decrease sexual inhibitions.”
The cost and simplicity of meadmaking makes it appealing to amateur brewers, including three Northwestern University students who started mixing it in their dorm rooms.
“It hit me that you never see this stuff in the liquor store,” said one, a chemistry major who wanted to remain anonymous.
Tapping the mead god
“One of the benefits of this is saving money,” said another, a physics student who sacrifices much of his dorm room’s storage space to a 5-gallon bottle of fermenting fluid known as The Dwarf. “It’s almost like it’s free.” The students say they sometimes brew up to 13 gallons a week, all at less than half the price of buying beer.
When asked where they would put the tap to draw on information about mead in America, enthusiasts like Soucy and the students point to Boulder-and Papazian.
“Papazian is the god,” Soucy said. “I have three copies of his book.” The book, “Home Brewer’s Companion,” explains the basics of beer brewing and has a chapter on mead.
Papazian estimates that he has taught at least 1,000 people how to make mead through his home-brewing classes. This year he traveled to Scotland and England to tap the mental kegs of some aging meadmakers, he said, because “there’s some interesting old stuff that hasn’t been dug up.” For example, he tasted of a 46-year-old mead brewed by a monk at England’s Buckfest Abbey. “I could still taste and smell such things as cinnamon and cloves and rosemary,” he said.
He’s working on a revised edition of his book, fattening the mead chapter, adding to the history, legends and lore.
Some evidence has even surfaced to support the legendary efficacy of mead at honeymoon time.
Schehrer, the brewmaster in Denver, said he gave a bottle of Honeymooner’s Mead, a brew he makes for the Wynkoop brew pub, to a couple of regular customers as a wedding present. They drank it a few nights later on a train between Chicago and New York, and they swear it was the night they conceived their first child.
“They let me meet the kid,” Schehrer said. “I (thought), `Wow, I did that!’ “
