Aside from making my own (which I would totally do if my homebrewing/vintning/meadmaking gear wasn’t all in storage), given that the makers of alcoholic beverages aren’t required to list ingredients (which I totally don’t understand), is there a way to tell, from the label, whether a given tasty adult beverage calling itself “mead” is actually mead, or just a grape wine with honey in it, or a mostly grape wine with honey fermented in it (making it a melomel rather than a mead)?
I’m assuming it falls down to “only buy mead from THESE guys, because they do it right”, or “don’t buy “mead” from THOSE guys, because they’re a bunch of lying posers.” If that’s the case, who should I be buying from?
Does true mead have any honey taste at all? I was told that true mead will taste significantly less like honey than grape wine or beer with honey added post-fermentation does. Never having had true mead, I don’t know if that’s true or not.
What brands are you looking at? I would just google it. I didn’t realize there were meads made from grape wine. The only ones I’ve ever bought (Chaucer’s and Wild Blossom) have been 100% honey or, if not, they mention the fruit they’re cut with (as in, “Blueberry mead” or similar.)
First of all, mead is insanely easy to make. I’ve done it in milk jugs with baker’s yeast and a balloon for a seal and it turned out fine–better probably than the batch with champagne yeast in a carboy and aged for two years. (I’ve only made a couple of batches, so I’m no expert. And I’d never done brewing or winemaking before, so it really is easy!)
Second of all, I’ve very rarely had decent commercial mead. That stuff with the King Arthur names is crap. One reason is that commercial meads pretty much invariably use lighter honeys like orange blossom or generic wildflower. I prefer at least some darker honey that has some character, but I may be a bit weird that way.
I also think mead should be as dry as possible. By “dry,” I mean no residual sugars; you’ll never get the kind of tannic dryness that you get in wine. (Technically, that’s called structure in wine, but it’s where the term dry comes from–the tannins denature the proteins in saliva and dry out your mouth. Whatever you call it, you won’t get it in mead.) Good mead tends to be rather floral and a bit nutty. It does taste like honey, but without the sweetness, which, of course, is what you associate most with honey. Just as with wine, when you eliminate the sweetness you uncover the other flavors that weren’t as noticeable before. But it can still be rather cloying.
To be honest even the best mead is . . . just good. There isn’t enough character in honey to produce anywhere near the complexity of even a cheap wine. Of course, from everything I’ve read, the same is true of barley: it’s the hops that give beer character. And I had a hopped, carbonated mead once (I think it was from Redstone Mead in Colorado, but I’m not positive) and I really liked it a whole lot! If you’ve got homebrew equipment lying around anyway, I say break it out and start experimenting! I think hopped mead and braggot (barley and honey fermented together, so a mead-beer) have a lot of potential, but I don’t have the equipment to find out for myself. I say it’s up to you!
To actually answer your question, even though alcoholic beverages don’t have to list ingredients, they do have to be labeled accurately. Most bottles should have some statement of what t’s made from, and I think anything labelled X wine (as in “blackberry wine,” “apple wine,” or for mead “honey wine”) has to be made entirely from X, otherwise it has to be labeled “wine with X flavorings” or something like that. If it says honey on the label and not grapes, it’s probably real mead, if not good mead.
(I just checked and the Code of Federal Regulations Title 27 § 4.21 (f) spells this out and specifically states that “honey wine” is made only from honey, though it may be fortified or sweetened (within certain limits). The term “mead” is regulated under Title 4 § 101(25), which states that mead “means an alcoholic beverage that is naturally fermented (not distilled or frozen) wherein the major source of fermentable sugars comes from honey.”)
Bump for a thanks on this. I’m buying some hard root beer tomorrow and Binnys’ web site also mentioned mead, which I’d like to give a try. Reading this helped me narrow down which to pick.