FRESH VOICES: Why Mead? by Alyson Schramm Naeger

ON THE MYRIAD BENEFITS OF THE FERMENTED HONEY BEVERAGE

Featured in The Tasting Panel | Nov - Dec 2023

MEAD CAN BE A HARD SELL to a guest (or even to a friend or family member). Often it requires a more thorough explanation than would, say, a lesserknown grape variety like Xinomavro or Blaufränkisch: While wine is made from fermenting grapes and must and beer is made from malting and fermenting grain, mead is made from fermenting honey (often with fruit or other ingredients as well). Most consumers have only experienced the low end of the quality spectrum for mead; whether made in a friend’s basement or served at a Renaissance festival, it might have tasted like vaguely honey flavored nail polish remover. Yet at the high end of that spectrum, mead can be truly extraordinary.

Indeed, the world of mead is vast and intricate, yielding many different styles such as melomels (fruit meads), which include pyments (meads made with grapes) and cysers (apple meads); metheglins (spiced meads); and braggots (beer-mead hybrids).

“Mead can range from bone-dry to lusciously sweet and still to sparkling, and it can include almost any adjunct or fermentable available to the imagination. The majority of producers are more than willing to make custom blends for restaurants or retailers, which can be extremely advantageous to a beverage professional looking to create pairings for a multicourse dinner.”

Granted, while this diversity of options can result in extremely complex meads with a beautiful balance of sweetness and acidity, they can also become unbalanced kitchen sink–type beverages that would be impossible to hand sell to even the most adventurous customer.

But quality mead can be a beautiful bridge to take beer drinkers into the world of wine. Many craft-beer drinkers looking for gluten-free alternatives have turned to mead, which is naturally gluten-free. By adding mead to their inventory, wine buyers can use it as a gateway beverage to wine, which is likewise naturally gluten-free. It’s also worth noting that many craft-beer styles, such as trendy hazy IPAs, have a shorter shelf life than mead, which doesn’t require immediate sell-through and can be stored and aged next to the finest wines of the world.

Another aspect of mead that’s increasingly relevant for consumers is its defining characteristic: honey. Honey is the product of a lifetime’s worth of work for tens of thousands of honeybees. Climate change is being fueled by the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide due to human activity, causing many winegrowers and winemakers such problems as smoke taint from wildfires, higher alcohol levels, and lower acidity. Honeybees, on the other hand, do most of the heavy lifting in terms of bringing their high-quality fermentable sugar source to market, ensuring it has the lowest carbon footprint of almost any sweet thing on the planet. For consumers and buyers looking for earth-friendly beverages to drink, then, delicious, creative, and unique mead is hard to beat.

What’s more, every product from coffee and berries to avocados, apples, and almonds require the pollination services that only honeybees can provide at scale. Serving and selling mead can be a great way to support those beekeepers who are keeping almost a third of our American diet on the menu.

Alyson Schramm Naeger is the co-founder of Schramm’s Mead in Ferndale, Michigan, and Schramm’s Orchards in Rochester Hills, Michigan. She serves as the chair of the Mead Institute, a global membership–based nonprofit organization for industry professionals and consumers that promotes education and international quality standards for mead. She is also a Certified Sommelier, Certified Cicerone, Certified Specialist of Wine, Certified Specialist of Spirits, WSET Level 3 in Wines, and Beer Judge Certification Program Mead Judge.