Is HoneyRun Honeywine Mead? Mead enthusiasts call fruit honeywine, like ours, "melomel." Some melomels have specific names: apple honeywine is called "cyser", grape honeywine is called "pyment", a spiced mead is called "metheglyn" (sp?). Mead is made by fermenting honey alone. It is probably the very first fermented beverage discovered by humans. Before history, honey collectors would smash the honey comb and gather the honey that dripped out. Then they would put the comb into a vat of water to disolve the rest of the honey. Well, somebody didn't drink their sweetened water before it fermented into wine. And when they did, everyone else must have noticed how silly they became - Voila, honeywine. Some theorists believe that prehistoric humans ended their nomadic ways to settle down and grow crops because wine and beer were too heavy to move from place to place (the root of civilization). Try a search on "mead" for more information. Top of page. More Mead Mental Macerations copied from GotMead.com. "Mead - It was the drink of red-bearded Viking and sloe-eyed sorceress. It was already an ancient beverage when Aristotle drank it, already steeped in mythological mystery when Arthur toasted his Knights Templar".-- "Mad About Mead" by Pamela Spence "Mead is honey wine. It is made when honey is diluted and allowed to ferment. Mead is thought by many to have been the first alcoholic beverage made by man; there are many reasons why this might be true. Ancient men in Europe and Africa had no sugar and relatively few fruits. In fact, the diets of people of the Egyptian, Greek and Roman Empires, evan at their peaks, importance as a sweet, but it was one of the few things from which an alcoholic beverage could be made". -- "Making Mead (Honey Wine) History, Recipes, Methods and Equipment" by Roger A. Morse "Among the ancients mead was not merely drunk as a wine, a liquor to refresh and stimulate, and therefore valuable as such, but it was also partaken of as something which in itself had magical and indeed sacred properties. As a result, it comes about that we find mead, its raw material honey, and even the creature which provides it, the bee, all holding high places in the sacred mythologies of olden times. Thus honey was considered a 'giver of life', and the bee was associated with the souls of men, and was a messenger of the gods. Honey was believed to have come down from Heaven as a dew, and was gathered from the flowers by the bees". -- "Brewing Mead - Wassail! In Mazers of Mead" by Robert Gayre "Of Meade: Mead is mad of honny and water boyled both togyther; yf it be fyred and pure, it preserveth helth; but it is not good for them the whiche have the Ilyache or the Colycke. - Andrew Borde, "The Regyment, or a Dyetary of Helth", 1542" -- "A Sip Through Time, A Collection of Old Brewing Recipes" by Cindy Renfrow "Mead, as everyone knows, is a pleasant, alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey and water with yeast. Of all the crafts of mankind, mead-making is almost certainly the oldest. It is likely that mead was made even before the wheel was invented. Cave paintings of primitive stone-age men depict the collection of honey from bee colonies, and any addition of water to this would automatically produce a mixture which could be fermented by wild yeasts. The discovery of alcohol almost certainly occurred in this chance manner, and spread to all parts of the world". -- "Making Mead: Metheglin, Hippocras, Melomel, Pyment, Cyser" by Bryan Acton and Peter Duncan Top of page. |