What Is Mead? A Beginner's Guide to the World's Oldest Drink

Somewhere between beer and wine, older than both, sits a drink most people have heard of but few have actually tasted: mead. If you've ever wondered what it is, whether you'd like it, or why a little meadery in northern Michigan is so devoted to it — pull up a chair. This is Mead School, and this is lesson one.

Mead, in one sentence

Mead is honey wine. That's the whole idea. Where wine is fermented from grapes and beer from grain, mead is fermented from honey. You take honey, add water, add yeast, and the yeast does what yeast does — it eats the natural sugars in the honey and turns them into alcohol. Give it time, and what started as sweet honey-water becomes a bright, complex, and surprisingly sophisticated drink.

That's it. Three ingredients at its core: honey, water, yeast. Everything else is a variation on that theme.

The oldest drink humans have

Mead has a real claim to being the most ancient alcoholic beverage on Earth. It almost certainly predates both beer and wine, for a simple reason: nobody had to invent it. Rainwater collects in a hollow full of honey, wild yeast drifts in on the breeze, and nature makes mead on its own. All our ancestors had to do was find it and take a sip.

Traces of mead turn up across the ancient world, and the tradition never fully disappeared — in some cultures, honey is still fermented in simple vessels for celebrations and ceremonies, much as it was thousands of years ago. When you drink a mead today, you're tasting a thread that runs all the way back to the beginning of human civilization.

It all starts with the honey

Here's the thing about a three-ingredient drink: with that little standing between you and the glass, the quality of each ingredient matters enormously. And the star is the honey.

This is where we have an unfair advantage. Most meaderies buy their honey from suppliers they've never met. Ours travels next door. Every drop that goes into a St. Ambrose mead was harvested by our own beekeepers from our own hives at Sleeping Bear Farms — the same family operation that's been keeping bees for more than 45 years, working the wildflowers and star thistle of northern Michigan. We know exactly what's in the tank, because we pulled it from the hive ourselves.

Different honeys carry different flavors — a mild wildflower honey makes a very different mead than a bold, distinctive star thistle. That's part of what makes mead endlessly interesting: change the honey and you change everything.

Mead is a family, not a single flavor

The biggest myth about mead is that it's always thick, syrupy, and sweet. It can be — but it absolutely doesn't have to be. Mead ranges from bone-dry to dessert-sweet, from still to sparkling, from light and sessionable to rich and boozy. And because you can ferment honey with almost anything, mead has grown a whole family of named styles:

• Traditional mead — just honey, water, and yeast. The purest expression.

• Melomel — mead made with fruit. Raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, cherry — the fruit and the honey play off each other beautifully.

• Cyser — mead made with apples. Our best-selling X.R. Cyser blends apple, cinnamon, maple, and star thistle honey into what regulars affectionately call "apple pie in a bottle."

• Metheglin — mead made with herbs and spices.

• Sour mead — mead soured with friendly bacteria for a bright, tart finish.

• Barrel-aged mead — mead rested in oak, which layers in vanilla, caramel, and toasted-wood character.

That last pair, sour and barrel-aged, are two of the most exciting things happening in the mead world right now — and two things we're a little obsessed with. Each gets its own Mead School lesson.

Is mead for you?

If you like dry white wine, there's a dry mead you'll love. If you like fruit-forward ciders and sour beers, our fruit and sour meads are right in your wheelhouse. If you like a rich, barrel-aged pour by the fire, we make that too. Mead is less a single flavor and more a whole world — and the fun is finding your corner of it.

The best way to do that? Taste a few side by side.

Come learn at the source

Reading about mead is a fine start. Drinking it is the real lesson. Stop by the St. Ambrose Cellars tasting room in Beulah, Michigan, and let us pour you a flight across the styles — dry to sweet, still to sour to barrel-aged. Bring the family, bring the dog, catch some live music on the lawn, and taste the drink that started it all.

Class dismissed. See you at the bar. 🍯