BBC News Magazine looks at the rise of modern-day mead in the North American market:
Long relegated to the dusty corners of history, mead — the drink of kings and Vikings — is making a comeback in the US.
But what’s brewing in this new crop of commercial meaderies — as they are known — is lot more refined from the drink that once decorated tables across medieval Europe.
[…]
Mr Alexander is not the only one to have caught on to the commercial potential of mead.
Vicky Rowe, the owner of mead information website GotMead, says interest in the product in the US has exploded in the past decade.
“We went from 30-40 meaderies making mead to somewhere in the vicinity of 250 in the last 10 years,” she says.
“I like to say that everything old is new again — people come back to what was good once.”
[…]
The mead of the past was often sweet, and didn’t appeal to many drinkers who were just looking for something good to pair with food. But mead has since changed.
“People don’t realise that just because it has honey in it, [mead] doesn’t need to be sweet,” says Ms Rowe, citing the proliferation of not only dry meads but also meads flavoured with fruits, herbs, and spicy peppers.
Yet hampering efforts towards building mead awareness is also the name mead itself.
Technically, mead is classified as wine by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which regulates alcohol sales and labelling in the US.
This means that mead has to be labelled as “honey wine”, which doesn’t help combat people’s perception of the drink as being as cloyingly sweet.
“How do people recognise it as mead if you can’t say the word?” says Ms Rowe.
