Daniel's Mead Making Hobby Page

Show Mead/Traditional Mead

True mead is just fermented honey in water. At mead contests, this is known as show mead. You might wonder how mead makers can compete against one another with show mead. Shouldn't they all taste the same with the same ingedients? The secret is that there are many types of honey and many types of yeast.

A bee pollinating a clover flower

Many people may not know it, but there is a tremendous variety of honey out there. What most people think of when they think of honey is clover honey. In fact, most grocery stores sell only clover honey. If you look hard though, you can find other types. Types of honey come from the flower that the bees were pollenating when they made the honey. Now, the bee keeper of course doesn't watch every bee, they just brand the honey after the most prevalent flower in the area. I guess clovers must be a very common flower in the US. Clover honey by the way is not only cheap, but makes a good mead.

Another very common type of honey is wildflower honey. This just means that the bee keeper had no idea what the flower was. This might also result from travelling bees, that is, bees that are trucked to various farms to pollenate the crops. Wildflower honey can be tricky when making mead as it can give inconsistent results.

Different varieties of honey can have vastly different tastes and textures. As a result, there can be an equally vast variety of show meads. And, that's before taking the various types of yeast into account. Using various types of yeast, the mead maker can adjuct the alchohol content, taste, and texture of a mead.

Now then, once you start adding other ingreadients, mead starts to get categorized...

Metheglin is made with
spices like cinnamon

Metheglin

Technically, metheglin means that herbs and or spices have been added to the must or finished mead, but if you are looking for mead recipes, this is often used as a bit of a catch all for anything that doesn't fall under the other categories. This is the type of mead I mostly make. I personally like to use special prepared packages of spices we all know as tea bags. Though I also usually add loads of cinnamon too.

Rhodomel

Rose petals!? Strange as it may sound there is a type of mead made with rose hips, petals, or rose attar. I guess if you consider various rose parts to be a spice this would be a subcategory of metheglin. In fact, I've seen this called Lavendar Metheglin.

Melomel is made
with fruit

Melomel

If you add fruit or fruit juice to your must or finished mead, it is called a melomel. Adding fruit prior to fermentation won't necessarily add a fruit flavor to your mead. That is because fruit contains a sugar knows as fructose. This sugar will wind up getting processed by the yeast as well, so there can be some very interesting new flavors created.

Cyser, Morat, Perry, Capsicumel, Pyment, Omphacomel

Some fruits are so commonly added that they get their own names. Cyser is made by using apple juice instead of water to dissolve the honey into. Morat is made with mulberries. Perry uses pairs. I'm not sure if it's an official type, but I have across a few recipe's for Capsicumel, which is mead made with peppers added.

Pyment is perhaps the most special. It represents the joining of wine and mead by mixing grape juice into the must. It can also refer to wine that has been sweentened with honey, but, since the honey is not fermented, it would not officially be mead. Omphacomel is made by mixing in verjuice, which is mostly grape juice, so it is a type of Pyment.

Rhizamel

Rhizamel is much less common than melomel. It is mead made with added vegetables or vegetable juice. I guess you could go overboard and make a sort of alcoholic V8.

Braggot, Bracket, Bragawdor, Brackett

This is a mead-beer hybrid apparently of Welsh or Irish origin. It is known as far back as 12th century Ireland. It can be made two ways. The simple way is to pour beer and mead into the same glass and stir gently, but that's for amateurs. The way home brewers like to do it is to combine the ingredients for both before fermentation. They mix the wort (beer) and must (honey) and allow them to ferment together in the same vessel.

I currently have to batches of this underway, one with hops and the other without.

Lactomel

This may not be real, but I'm attempting it anyway. Lactomel uses milk rather than water for the must. So far, it's separated into a sort of yogurt/cheese and a clear light yellow liquid.

Sack Mead

This is really a traditional mead, but one that has had a shortened fermentation time to produce a super sweet mead.

Hydromel

Hydromel is quite often a synonym of mead, but sometimes can refer to mead with a low alcohol content due to a shortened fermentation time.

Oxymel

Oxymel is a type of mead in which the must has vinegar added, but it can also refer to an unfermented mix of honey and vinegar. Apparently Oxymel has been used as a medicine for centuries. Hippocrates prescribed it as an expectorant and for contipation, peripneumonia and pleuritic affections. Galen, a famous physician of the 2nd century also prescribed it for coughes.

Ethiopia

Tej and Berz

Tej is a sweet Ethiopian mead brewed with ground up leaves and bark of the Gesho, a shrub that acts much like hops in beer. Tej is drunk from a traditional vessel called a berele. Berz is a sweeter version of Tej with less alcohol. Apparently Tej is served in bars and pubs across Ethiopia. The best is supposed to come from Lalibela, a town in northern Ethiopia. Sometimes it is not a mead, but a beer flavored with honey. Apparently whether or not the honey is fermented varies from town to town.

Acerglyn

I'm not sure if this is an official name or just one made up by home brewers on the internet. Acerglyn is a mead made from mixing maple syrup into the must.

Fakers

There are serveral things that are sometimes mistakenly (or sometimes duplicitously) called mead, that are not. Pretty much, if the honey is not fermented, it is not mead.

Meade - When the extra "e" is appended, beware. This is more than likely white wine with honey added after fermentation.

Mulsum - Wine with added honey, made fresh, Often served with the first course of a Roman feast.

Conditum - Wine with added honey and spices, left to age. Another Roman feast alcohol.

Hippocras - This is often mistaken for mead and was a popular drink in the middle ages, but alas, it is really finished wine with spices and honey added. The name comes from Hippocrates, the ancient greek father of medicine. His medicines were often mixes of spices and alcohol. He would add honey too make it sweeter and more acceptible for his patients.