Mead Day

What the day is

Mead Day is observed on the first Saturday in August. It was established by the American Homebrewers Association in the early 2000s to encourage people to brew mead and to drink it together, and mead makers still use the date for open days and group brews.

Mead is fermented honey and water. That is the whole definition, and everything else is variation.

Origin and background

It has a strong claim to being the oldest alcoholic drink. Honey ferments readily once diluted, because wild yeasts are already present and honey itself is too concentrated to spoil until water is added, so the discovery required no technology at all beyond a container and rain. Residue analysis of pottery from Neolithic China has identified a fermented drink combining honey, rice and fruit, dating back some nine thousand years.

It appears across an enormous range of cultures, and in northern Europe it carries literary weight: the mead hall is the social center of Old English and Norse poetry, and Beowulf opens in one. Its later decline was largely economic. As cane sugar became cheap and beer and wine industrialized, honey was too expensive to ferment in quantity, and mead survived mainly as a curiosity.

The modern revival came through home brewing, and the vocabulary came with it. A melomel is mead with fruit, a metheglin is mead with spices, a cyser uses apple juice, and a braggot includes malted grain. Styles run from bone dry and wine-like to sweet and dessert-strength.

The honey matters more than newcomers expect. Orange blossom, clover, buckwheat and heather honeys produce noticeably different drinks from the same recipe.

How to take part

• Try a dry mead if your only reference is the sweet renaissance-fair version. They are barely the same drink.
• Brew a small batch. Honey, water, yeast and a demijohn is genuinely the whole equipment list.
• Do not boil the honey. Heat drives off the aromatics that make good mead worth drinking.
• Be patient. Mead improves substantially with months in the bottle, and young mead tastes harsh.
• Buy from a local meadery if there is one; many open their doors on the day.