Mead
Honey fermented, grain free, sugar unpredictable
Honey, water and yeast. The only mainstream drink with no grain, grape or agave in it, and the only one that is never vegan. Residual sugar is the variable that decides everything.
- Typical ABV
- 5–20%
- Base
- Honey, plus fruit or spice in melomels and metheglins
- Aging
- Stainless or oak, months to years
- Congeners
- Moderate
- Histamines
- Moderate
- Polyphenols
- Low
- Sulfites
- Moderate
- Tannins
- Very Low
- Sugar
- High
- Additives
- Low
Mead is the oldest fermented drink there is and the one modern drinkers know least about, which is why so much of what gets said about it is wrong. It is honey, water and yeast. No grain, no grapes, no agave. That makes it the one category on this site that is gluten-free by construction rather than by distillation, and the one category that is never vegan.
The chemistry problem with mead is not the honey, it is the sugar that survives. A dry mead ferments almost all of it away and drinks like a white wine. A dessert mead keeps a great deal of it and lands closer to a liqueur. Both are sold as “mead”, frequently in the same shape of bottle, and almost no producer prints a residual sugar figure. Combine that with an alcohol range that runs from 5% to 20% and mead becomes the hardest category on this site to generalise about. That range, not the honey, is why it has its reputation for bad mornings.
What changes the chemistry
- ▸Residual sugar runs bone dry to dessert sweet with no labelling standard
- ▸ABV spans 5% session mead to 20%, wider than any other category
- ▸Naturally gluten-free, since there is no grain unless it is a braggot
- ▸Sulfites are commonly added exactly as in winemaking
- ▸Fruit adds polyphenols; oak ageing adds the tannins mead otherwise lacks