I think you will agree that mead is the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world. If you haven’t played vintage video games or understood historical drinks, you may not have heard of mead (at least in relation to alcohol).
Mead is probably the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world. This makes sense, because mead is one of the easiest alcoholic drinks to make, and its main ingredient, honey, has always been a common food item for humans. Mead is known to certainly predate wine and sake, although beer may be older.
Most people know that beer is a centuries-old beverage made from fermented grains and wine is an alcoholic beverage made from fermented fruits, but few have ever heard of mead, often called the “nectar of the gods,” made from fermented honey.
It is almost certain that mead is the oldest alcoholic beverage known to man, and may have been discovered before the invention of the wheel. Mead is considered to be the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world, with a record of its use dating back more than 15,000 years. Mead is an alcohol (such as wine or beer) made primarily from fermented honey.
Mead Is Sometimes Called ‘Honey Wine’
The term honey wine is sometimes used synonymously with mead, although wine is usually defined as a product of fermented berries or some other fruit, and some cultures have honey wines that differ from mead.
The honey used determines the overall flavor of the mead and can vary depending on the particular honeybee diet of nectar and pollen. Traditional meads often use soft honey such as orange blossom, clover, or acacia honey, but wildflower, blackberry, and buckwheat honey gives excellent results with a stronger, more spicy honey.
Like beer, traditional mead is sometimes flavored with fruits, spices, grains, or hops. After fermentation, the mead is aged for several months to several years before being released on the market. Some unconventional brewers run yeast to realize that their mead is brewed traditionally, but then pure alcohol is added to increase the alcohol and avoid the maturation period.
Some meads contain about 11-14% alcohol as in wine, while others are more beer-like, with 5-10% ABV. The strength of honey varies from 6 to 20%, depending on the fermentation; while wine and beer are usually much lower in strength. The hallmark of mead is that most of the fermentable sugars in beverages come from honey.
Honey as a Classic Foodstuff
The use of honey in our food is ancient, which suggests that honey has also been present in the daily life of humankind for millennia. In fact, honey is present all over the world and is available for consumption at any time of the year, and the fermentation of honey with water and wild aerial yeast, as well as the honey itself, creates more than ideal conditions for easy access to mead.
It is believed that mead was first created when rain fell into a jug of honey, and that the first people to drink and prepare it were the people of Henan province in China. Thanks to a simple recipe made from fermented honey and water, mead was one of the first alcoholic beverages ever produced, before beer and wine, as far back as 3000 BC.
Perhaps the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world, mead is essentially fermented honey and water and has a long and illustrious history. The oldest alcoholic beverage known to mankind, mead is, at first glance, a wine drink that is fermented with honey, not grape must. And while the early incarnations of mead were likely accidental, the spoilage product that accidentally became something to drink, honey in 2019 is completely deliberate.
There are honey factories that produce sparkling mead, dry mead, dry mead, and, in the case of Beacon Meadery, fruity mead. Mead makers can choose what type of mead they want to make, and the list is long.
Mead Is a Unique Beverage Among Alcohols
Mead made with honey, water and yeast rather than fruit falls into its own alcoholic beverage category. Mead flavored with various fruits is also not considered a wine. Historically, mead was fermented with wild yeast and bacteria (as indicated in the recipe above) that were found on the peel of the fruit or in the honey itself.
Today’s commercial mead manufacturers usually use a mixture of honey, fresh yeast, lemon and water. According to Mike Reiss’ serious snack mead guide, mead manufacturers first dilute the honey with water so that it is not too thick to ferment. Pure honey is diluted with water, then mixed with yeast and fermented to increase its alcohol content.
Some meads retain some of the sweetness of the original honey, and some can even be regarded as dessert wines. When people hear that mead is made from honey, they usually think that it is too sweet, but this is not always the case. Mead is like beer, not beer; it is like wine, not wine.
Scientific Appraisals of Mead
Compleat Meadmaker Ken Schramm notes that one similarity to beer is that honey comes in a variety of sub-styles (none of which are yet recognized by the US government; there is only one category, wine with honey). While many mead producers consider it part of the beer continuum, Beacon Meadery disagrees.
English honey – “fermented honey drink” – comes from Old English meodu or medu and from Proto-Germanic, * meduz. Its roots go back to clay pots found in modern China that contained the ingredients for fermenting mead. Mead is not beer, wine, or spirits in the usual sense of the word; it is its alcohol class and it is considered the oldest alcoholic beverage.
A Synopsis of the History of Mead
Mead has been central to many cultures over its nearly 8,000-year history and is still popular around the world today. Mead is not only a drink of Viking sailors and mummified royalty, it is also a popular drink today. Mead predates beer and wine not by hundreds, but by thousands of years. Historian, journalist and writer Magelon Toussaint-Samat even went so far as to say that mead can be considered “the ancestor of all fermented beverages that predate even the cultivation of the land” – and there is some evidence to support this.
Chemical analysis of ancient organic matter absorbed and stored in ceramic pots from the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Henan province in northern China has shown that a mixed fermented beverage made from rice, honey and fruits was produced 9,000 years ago, all in about the same time. that barley beer and grape wine began to be produced in the Middle East.
This discovery was followed by the first chemically confirmed barley beer in 1992 on another ship from the same room in Godin Tepe where the wine jugs were kept. Archaeological evidence shows that the drink consisted of wild grapes, honey and rice, the so-called wine honey, which is the oldest evidence for the existence of any alcoholic beverage. As soon as he sat down, the leaven was poured, and in a matter of days a simple alcohol / mead was prepared.
