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Wednesday 27 April 2016

Mead

Mead is a fermented alcoholic drink created by fermenting honey with water, sometimes with various fruits, spices, grains, or hops.

Mead's history is possibly as old as that of beer. Archaeologists discovered that people were making the honey-flavored alcoholic beverage around 7000 BC. Pottery vessels from that period containing chemical signatures of a mixture of honey, rice and other fruits along with organic compounds of fermentation were found in Northern China.

The earliest surviving description of mead is in the hymns of the Rigveda, which is a Hindu religious text, dated around 1700–1100 BC.

In ancient Babylonia, the bride's father would give his son-in-law all the mead he could drink. Since the Babylonian calendar was lunar, this period was called the "honey month." Today it's called a "honeymoon."

The art of brewing mead reached northern Europe around 1000 BC. Here, because the climate was too cold to grow vines, iit became the principal drink for many. In Ancient Britain the ritual brewing of mead was one of the main activities that take place at sacred religious ceremonies.


During the Golden Age of Ancient Greece, the preferred drink was mead, a mixture of fermented honey from wild bees and water. It was popular with them as they considered bees to be a symbol of immortality.

The ancient Greeks generally avoided drunkenness with the exception of the cult of Dionysus, in which intoxication was believed to bring people closer to their deity.

Vikings were very fond of alcoholic drinks and one of their favorite drinks was mead made from fermented honey. Drinks were served in large horn-shaped cups made of glass or else in the hollowed-out horns of sheep and oxen. Drinking was part of social life, and it also was part of some religious ceremonies. At their banquets they often toasted each other from the skulls of their slain enemies. Drunkenness was common and it was a frequent occurrence for a Viking man to die from the effects of too much drink.

Later, taxation and regulations governing the ingredients of alcoholic beverages led to commercial mead becoming a more obscure beverage. Some monasteries kept up the old traditions of mead-making as a by-product of beekeeping, especially in areas where grapes could not be grown.

In 2013, Poland became the world's largest producer of mead made according to traditional methods 

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