How to Bee Happy: Let Me Tell You About Mead

Scene: A guest comes over.

Person 1: Would you like a Melomel? A Pyment? A Braggot? How about an Acerglyn? Bochet? Capsicumel? Cyser? Hippocras, Hydromel, Tej, Metheglin, Morat, Omphacomel, Oxymel, or a Rhodomel?*

Person 2: Could you please speak English?

Person 1: I am. I’m a mazer.

End scene.

*These are various styles of meads. I’ll explain later what a few of them are, but there’s not enough bandwidth here to detail them all. You have heard of Google, right?

Mazer? What the heck is a mazer?

That was the question I got a few years ago when I’d brought a mead to a party. The questioner was an accomplished lawyer, and a dedicated foodie. Since I’d made the mead myself, I told him “Well, I guess I’m a mazer.” He’d never heard the term mazer. (Lawyers… really…)

It was a reflection of how far off mead is from most people’s radar screens. (A mazer is someone who makes mead, just as a vintner is someone who makes wine, and a brewer is someone who makes beer.) And, despite a small base compared to brewers, the Chicago area has a few commercial mazers making meads for us all. (More on that later, too.)

What is mead?

So, what is mead, really? Basically, it’s diluted, fermented honey, sometimes flavored with other stuff. It may be the oldest fermented beverage in existence.

One story suggests that some honey once dripped into a tree stump, then rain filled the stump with water. Airborne yeasts got ahold of it. (You know we’re all surrounded by airborne yeasts, right? The Belgians have made an industry out of it, with some of their ales.) Someone then decided to drink the result, and, shall we say, got happy.

Mead is usually described as “honey wine,” although that’s not strictly accurate. By the usual definitions, fermented fruits (especially grapes) are considered wines, and fermented grains are considered beers (that sake you like should be called a rice beer). So, mead is its own category. (Just like mushrooms, they’re not plants, they’re not animals, they just do their own thing.)

Mead is even credited for the term “honeymoon.” It was historically served at weddings and given to newlyweds. The couple would drink it in excess for a “moon”—or month—after their ceremony to enhance fertility. So, drink mead, especially if: a) you want to procreate, or if not, b) you’re a woman on the pill, or c) you have a decent-sized stash of condoms nearby.

How is mead made?

In some ways, mead isn’t too tough to make. To make a beer, you have to coax the starches in the grains to become sugars (usually with amylase, an enzyme that naturally occurs on the grains). That allows yeast to have something to munch on (and poop out alcohol and CO2). With a mead, since you’re starting with honey, the sugars are already in there. (Although, if you want to nitpick, the yeasts really appreciate it if you give them a few more nutrients, just as some people may do better with multivitamins. The yeasts like the added nutrients. They’ve told me so.)

On the other hand, mead-making requires a lot of work. Luckily for us, it’s not human work. That honey that went into your 750ml bottle of an average mead took about 30,000 bees traveling 27,500 miles and visiting more than a million flowers to gather the nectar required for that mead. I’m just guessing, but I doubt you could get 30,000 humans to travel 27,500 miles and visit a million flowers to get their share of the price of a bottle of mead—even an expensive one, at $50 or so.

Based on watching the honeybees in my backyard catmint plants, I can authoritatively state that each bee typically spends under one second on each flower, so using that, each 750ml bottle of mead may represent approximately 300 hours of work; hence the term “busy bee.”

Where can I buy mead?

In addition to the meaderies themselves, and a limited few restaurants, most good liquor stores will have a small selection of meads—a recent visit to my local store found thirteen bottles of mead, among its many thousands of bottles of liquors, wines and beers.

Mead is the fastest growing of all major fermented beverages—albeit from a small base. Between 2011 and 2014, the American Mead Maker’s Association reported mead sales had grown 130 percent. Craft beer sales in that period grew just thirty-nine percent, and wine sales a scant six percent.

Talk with a Mazer

Driving down the 4000 block of Elston Avenue the other day, I noticed a rather enigmatic sign. It was a large picture of a bee, encased in a dripping hexagon. Why was there a picture of a bee on Elston Avenue?

Peter Schultz knows why. He’s the mazer at Second City Meadery.

“I started brewing because my wife was really into mead. I was really into beer. We would go to dates to Haymarket, and she found out pretty quickly she was not into beer. But Haymarket serves a variety of things, so she was able to try a bee nectar.

“After graduating, I was a CPA for seven years. It’s as catastrophically boring as you can imagine. So, my wife sees me home-brewing, really loving it, and going to a cubicle every day and really hating it. She started pushing me to make this my job.”

What should a mead be? And I don’t mean it as “bee.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of puns in the industry, for sure.

“A mead should be smooth, with no off flavors. It takes a long time to figure out how to do that. It took me two years of homebrewing before I learned how to make good mead and ferment honey, without off flavors. I like mine a little more on the luscious side, a little more thick, with a heavier body. I like mine sweet, but I also like it balanced with a lot of fruit acidity. You have to use interesting honeys.

“Like, wildflower is great for some things, but it can only get you so far. What I strive to do is make people taste things they haven’t tasted before. That’s why I love honeyberry. I love Szechuan peppercorn, ingredients that people aren’t that familiar with.

“I love raspberry mead, but I know what it tastes like. If I’m gonna do a raspberry mead I want to use a weird honey or I want to use raspberry and some other fruit that’s less popular, or some spice that’s less popular.

“When we opened, so many people would come in and they would say ‘tell me about mead; I’ve never had it before.’ Now I’m getting a lot more that ‘we’ve had mead, but we’ve never been here. Tell us about your mead.’ So that is a big difference. I’m excited for three years from now, five years from now. But it would be tough for me to see it growing the way craft beer did. It’s a little more boutique. It’s not gonna be that all of a sudden there’s 200 meaderies in Chicago—that’s never gonna happen. But if we could get a dozen meaderies, twenty-five meaderies in Chicago in the next five or ten years—that would be incredible.

“It’s been interesting to see who’s easier to convert to a mead lover. It’s not wine people. It’s beer people. Like, if you already like barrel-aged stouts, mead is not that far off, in terms of mouthfeel and flavor complexity.

“People like mead. It’s made from honey, so immediately they think it’s gonna be super sweet. You pull out a dry. Yeah, and they’re going to question… this has honey in it? It’s great to blow people’s minds that mead can be dry.”

Types of mead

Basic or traditional meads are simply diluted fermented honey. But there are so many variations—dry, sweet, still, sparkling, as alcoholically strong as a port, or as weak as a light beer; here are a few.

• Melomel—while it sounds like a character named Mel in an R. Crumb comic, it’s actually a mead flavored with fruit.
• Metheglin is a spiced mead. The name comes from the Welsh language word meddyglyn, meaning healing liquor, for its supposedly medicinal qualities.
• Braggot doesn’t refer to your friend with a massive ego. It’s basically the bastard child of mead and beer: a beer made with roughly as much honey as beer ingredients.
• Cyser, similarly, is a mead made with honey that’s diluted with apple juice (which is why the name resembles “cider”).
• Pyment uses grape juice instead of water to dilute the honey before fermentation.
• Acerglyn is a mead made primarily with maple syrup. Its flavors are somewhat similar to fenugreek.
• Bochet is a mead where the honey is boiled and caramelized (a very messy operation—boiling honey foams up like crazy). The caramel flavors come through.
• Tej is an Ethiopian version of mead, frequently available at Ethiopian restaurants. It’s distinguished by its use of gesho (the bark of a local buckthorn shrub) for flavoring. In Ethiopia, it’s often homemade, so versions can vary significantly.

A Few Chicago-Area Meaderies

Wild Blossom is Chicago’s oldest and largest meadery, an offshoot of the home-brewing store Bev Art, originally in the South Side’s Beverly neighborhood. Both are now located in a large, modern building at 9030 South Hermitage. Most large liquor stores will have a few of their bottles. Wild Blossom is distinguished in that it attends to its own beehives and produces its own honey.

Manic Meadery is Peter Schultz’s favorite meadery in the Chicago area. “I can’t say enough good things about Manic Meadery. Easily one of my favorites.” It’s at 1003 East Summit, Crown Point, Indiana.

Second City Meadery is a small-batch meadery that you already know about if you’ve read this far. 4465 North Elston.

Standard Meadery is a meadery associated with a tiki bar. 11 West Park Boulevard, Villa Park.

Misbeehavin’ Meads is a meadery that focuses on making meads with a focus on fun. 65 Franklin Street, Valparaiso, Indiana.

Pips Meadery also offers wine and cocktails. It’s in the former Only Child Brewing space. 1350 Tri State Parkway, Gurnee.