I’ve always found history fascinating. After all, there’s much we can learn from those who came before us. In the realm of food and wine, it’s interesting to track the evolution of items we need for sustenance. We’ve gone from the necessity of finding a pristine spring or capturing rainwater to designer bottles of H2O.
Wine and beer entered the food chain because potable water was hard to come by. Paul Lukacs’ 2013 book, Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World’s Most Ancient Pleasures, makes it clear that ancient wine was vile, nasty, vinegary stuff. However, because water and milk carried disease, people drank it by necessity.
Mead (honey wine), it turns out, is the oldest alcoholic beverage out there. The drink is made by converting sugar into alcohol via fermentation with yeast, and instead of transforming grape juice, it uses honey and water. It may be still, carbonated or sparkling; dry, semi-sweet or sweet. Noted French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss makes a case for mead’s invention as a marker of the passage “from nature to culture.”
But the mind-blowing fact is that mead dates back to the discovery of late Stone Age jugs, suggesting that intentionally fermented beverages existed as early as Neolithic times — 10,000 BCE. Thus, mead can be regarded as the progenitor of all fermented drinks.
I had some fine mead served in tiny bowls at a medieval New Year’s feast last year at the Coombe Abbey hotel, 20 miles northeast of Stratford-upon-Avon. While I missed modern-day wine, the mead reinforced the banquet’s time-travel milieu, so I’m excited to see it making a comeback.
Last year, Cigar City Brewing opened Cigar City Cider and Mead in the former Ybor City police stable where Teddy Roosevelt boarded his horses after a “rough” day. Now, Jared Gilbert, head mead-itator, oversees a seven-day fermentation process, followed by clarification, filtering and bottling. He offers a rotating lineup of meads on tap, but he’s crafted 20 through his experimentation with what the Greeks referred to as “nectar of the Gods.” That was mead, baby!
A visit to the Ybor spot on North 15th Street can take you back to the days of Game of Thrones. You may order a flight paddle to carry and taste four meads of different sweetness levels and flavors determined by what’s added to the honey. Cigar City creates its mead with 100 percent Florida products, and the alcohol content varies from 7 to 18 percent, which runs the gamut from the high end of beer to blowing away a big California zin. There’s also a nice mead selection at Seminole Heights’ Mermaid Tavern and Black Fox Meadery in Palm Harbor.
Scientists worldwide are seeking new ways to combat the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. Finding an alcoholic drink that both raises the spirits and keeps you healthy has long seemed a fantasy, but Swedish scientist Tobias Olofsson is experimenting with lactic acid bacteria found in the honey stomach of bees that may well be a magic bullet. Time will tell. All we are saying is give mead a chance.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2015.