Mead Terms
Show mead: mead with no additional flavorings added
Mazer: a person who makes mead.
Melomel: mead fermented or flavored with fruit.
Cyser: a melomel made from apples or cider
Pyment: melomel with grapes or grape juice or a wine sweetened with honey after fermentation.
Hippocras: a pyment with spices added.
Metheglin: a mead fermented or flavored with herbs and spices.
Braggot: mead made with malted grain.
We serve our cider in beer glasses in our bar and restaurant.
Spicy food, like the gumbo we serve on Fridays, goes perfectly mead and cider.
Enjoying Mead
Being a mead snob is easier than being a wine snob because there aren't as many hard and fast rules for becoming a connoisseur. For instance, you can enjoy your mead at whatever temperature you prefer. Some find the flavor and aroma shows best at cellar to room temperature. Others prefer their mead chilled similarly to a white wine. Though white wine aficionados may think it a sin, you can even serve your mead over ice if you like. You can even heat your mead or add spices.
We encourage you to use any type of glass for serving your mead. A clear blown glass shows off the color best. Brandy snifters and wine glasses are good for concentrating the aroma. Margarita and martini glasses look refreshing, but you can use a cocktail glass if you want to go stemless. We hope you'll have fun and be creative serving your mead. Share your photos with us!
Mead, especially the sweeter varieties, pairs nicely with heavy or spicy foods. It makes a great pairing with most kinds of cheese. We always sample new batches of honey over goat cheese with a glass of mead. It goes equally well with white and red meats, cured meats and sausages, and fish.
You can't make a better reduction for all kinds of meat and fish than a mead reduction. Next time you caramelize onions, throw in a splash of mead at the end of the process for a burst of flavor. Feel free to use your own imagination and let us know the fantastic ways you discover to enjoy your Trazo mead.
We serve food like this Margarita pizza, that accentuate the meads.
History of Mead
Though it's hard to pin down dates when you talk about ancient history, most anthropologists and food historians agree that mead was produced before beer and wine, possibly as early as 8000 BC. The main reason we think this is that honey was harvested as a sweetener long before agriculture and fermentation became widespread. Evidence shows that bees were present across the world. It's reasonable to assume, then, that mead made from fermented honey, was the earliest fermented drink. Evidence shows the making of mead began in Africa and spread from there.
How did humans discover how to ferment the honey? Well, there are a couple of theories. One theory is that at some point, a human came across a wild hive exposed to rainwater. This human might have tried the drink, liked its effects, and then reverse-engineered the process. Another theory involves humans hunting for honey to harvest. They would have used bags made of animal skin to store their water for the journey. It's likely that someone put honey in a bag that wasn't quite empty and the honey and water began the fermentation. This would have caused the bag swelled. Imagine these hunters' surprise when they discovered the effects of the tasty new drink.
No matter how you interpret the origin date of mead, it has a long and prestigious history across the world. Central Africa has long made mead, called tej, and it remains a popular drink there. The Egyptians used honey as early as the 40th Century BC. Evidence of mead was found in King Tut's tomb. The Vedic hymns from the Rigveda contain the earliest surviving description of mead. The Greeks coined the term "ambrosia" and "nectar of the gods" to describe the intense taste of mead.
Ancient Romans often spiced their mead with floral Mediterranean herbs. Columella, a Hispanic-Roman naturalist wrote a recipe for mead in De re rustica around 60AD
The Welch word for medicine is Meddygllyan, which originally was their world for a type of honey wine. Many cultures infused medicinal herbs into mead.
Mead features heavily in Norse mythology. In a myth called the Mead of Poetry, a mead made by the gods purportedly endowed whoever drank it with all the knowledge in the world plus the ability to write poetry. Odin is said to have stolen the Poet's mead because he coveted intelligence.
In Beowulf, written somewhere around 700 BC, mead appears in the fourth line and virtually every few pages after that. Large quantities of mead are consumed in the mead hall to mark most major occasions in the story.
Even King Arthur got into this mix, later on, with references to mead in his tales. Then Arthur spoke:
“If I thought you would not disparage me,” he said, “I would sleep wile I wait for my repoast; and you can entertain one another with relating tales, and can obtain a flagon of mead and some meat…”
The word “mead” as it appears in Beowulf.
The Poetry of Mead
Bee skeps were used to keep bees inf ancient times.
“Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius of this water with a pound of honey. For a weaker mead, mix a sextarius of water with nine ounces of honey. The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire. If you have no rain water, then boil spring water.”
