Honey is hwaaaay more expensive than Wheat and bad/cheap mead is really nasty stuff, while cheap beer is merely eh.
Mead can be sickly sweet or fairly dry.
There’s also this problem:
U.S. bee colonies decimated by mysterious ailment
Add that to the problems with parasitic mites and the introduction of Africanized bees to the U.S. and the future of honey production here isn’t looking too good, not to mention the problems with the pollenization of other crops. 
Ok, so honey is frightfully expensive & about to vanish off the planet, but somehow current mead prices don’t seem to reflect this.
Historically honey has been a low-yield luxury, which was my point back in post 3, but current honey prices are not responsible for the past adoption of beer, nor is the future of the honey bee the reason people drank wine.
The fledgling mead industry may well be facing some serious hardships, but the cost of their product doesn’t appear to be the major hurdle. $12 - $30 per bottle is hardly exorbitantly expensive, except perhaps to Milwaukee’s Best drinkers.
Product recognition (or lack thereof) and syrupy desert meads do more damage than honey being worth its weight in platinum. And the historic value of honey compared to malted grains or mashed fruits, I believe, played a major role in mead losing out to beer and wine lo those many years ago.
So if you agree that the price of honey is what has historically made mead a less popular product than beer or wine, then I don’t understand what your argument is here. You know honey was a luxury product long ago and mead was generally only consumed on special occasions. Other fermentable things were cheaper, so people used those instead. There hasn’t been anything that’s happened over the years to change that. Beer and wine taste pretty darn good to people who like alcohol, so what reason over all this time would there be to bring mead back into popularity again, given all the choices we currently have that are good and cost less? People tend to like what they are comfortable with, and that’s beer and wine. Why risk spending $20 on a bottle of mead - even good mead - when there’s a bottle of wine you know you like at half the price? Bad mead isn’t ruining any chance at a resurgence - there isn’t enough of any kind of mead around to make any sort of difference, and I can’t think of a single reason that makes any sort of financial sense to bring it back as anything other than a boutique product. A producer is just not going to make enough money.
A couple of posts made the claim that the current price of honey is astronomical, and that is false.
Except that the price of honey is a fraction of what it once was and the quality of commercial mead has improved. Many people choose to not drink the cheapest fermented product on the market.
This argument can be used against the introduction of any product. Why do we have so many microbrews when Bud is drunk by so many people and costs less? Why a good wine when Mad Dog is so popular and costs so much less?
Wine tastes terrible to some people, and mead tastes good. Some people are even willing to spend more than $20 on a bottle of wine that is nothing more than grape juice, right?
Because wine is nasty and I’m not always in the mood for beer. Some people aren’t afraid to try new things and appreciate choices
I guess it’s a good thing you aren’t running a meadery. “I have only had mead once: this last fall at the ren faire. It was very sweet and I didn’t care for it.” and “It’s extremely sweet and doesn’t go with a lot of foods” There’s two people that might have more interest in mead if they were served a decent product.
There are two discussions going on here, mead historically and mead currently. While the historical issues with honey apply to why it hasn’t been more popular, the current cost of honey doesn’t. The future of the honey bee is completely immaterial to the history of mead, right? So, while vital to our future (not just for mead but for pollination), it can’t really be said to have an effect on what people drank a thousand years ago.
My fiancee is a big mead enthusiast, and there is a bar in Allston that serves a great mix of meads. Our favorite is Kasztelanski Mead. It’s hard to find around here and about 40 bucks a bottle but it’s a good little luxury. I definitely wish there were more choices, but it seems it’s hard to get here in MA.
First of all, pure honey is the single most fermentable naturally found sugar (given no modern sugar extraction tech). Generally that’s a good thing.
But that also means the flavor is mostly gone after fermentation, compared to malted barley or grapes. Grapes add many tannins and obscure flavors to the mix which are evident in the final product.
Furthermore, with beer, we use hops to further flavor and add a bitter, flowery taste.
Therefore, given a beer to wine level of alcohol, you’re naturally left with the least flavor, when using nothing but honey.
QED.
“QED”… heh… it’s never really “QED”, is it?
Also…
Meads are often double or triple fermented with stronger yeasts, adding more and more honey, until the yeast can no longer ferment the sugars into alcohol, leaving unfermented honey in the mix, which leaves a stronger, sweeter final product. Also, spices such as cinnamon are added to further enhance the flavor. These, imho, are called “ciders”.
So you would prefer a Bud instead? :smack: 
Actually, this is a pretty uninformed opinion. You are saying you won’t drink something because of what the name sounds like? 
God forbid anyone offers you a Screaming Orgasm. 
Mead is not beer, it’s wine. Braggot (honey beer) doesn’t taste quite like beer and the hops do tend to overpower the honey. Total waste of effort, IMHO.
Honey, after the sugar is gone, leaves behind plenty of flavor. A mead made from orange blossom honey is not going to taste like a mead made from clover honey or the almost tasteless alfalfa honey. Subtle flavors, perhaps, but the essence of mead nonetheless.
By whom, may I ask? A quick look online comes up with few meads with the 18-22% alcohol that this technique can produce, and those are specifically marketed as “after-dinner sipping wines … similar to port or sherry”.
Cider, btw, is made from apples. Apples are a fruit that grows on trees that may or may not be pollinated by honeybees. 
Fermented honey with spices is metheglin, not cider.
Sounds like someone got some Chaucer’s - it comes with a bag o’ spices that can’t manage to cover up the cloying sweetness. Bunratty is another big name to avoid, IIRC it’s white wine flavored with honey “A mixture of wine, honey, and herbs, Meade is a completely authentic Irish drink.” - blech!
Dammit, when did they move the “Submit” and “Preview” buttons? :smack:
There is always the EDIT button in that case.
Isn’t there like a 10 minute limit to edit? Freakin’ work getting in the way of my posting…
I wanted to not post that until I checked it for general bitchiness, I’ve already at least one in this thread that sounded far more confrontational than intended.
For Christmas I received a bottle of Dry Mead, from Munro’s Meadery, located in Alviston Ontario Canada. It looks for all the world like a white wine.
What do you think, is it mead or is it wine?
Thanks for all the info on mead, by the way, I learned plenty in this thread.
(I don’t actually drink, but I’ll put it in the cupboard beside the untouched bottle of Absinthe my visiting Nowegian friends brought me!)
A lot of mead does look like white wine.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of mead. It’s a nice change of pace from wine and beer, but I vastly prefer both to mead–and I have had what I believe to be very good mead. I guess I just enjoy tannins and hops too much. Mead is a little too “clean” for me, if that makes sense.
I live in Scandinavia and know several people who made mead for several years. As a matter of fact, this January I was at a party where ten different meads with different recipes, brewed by ten different, serious guys, were served. Interesting, with all these flavours. You can do very much with mead, bitter, sweet, all kinds, and I recognize a fine mead, trust me, drank several kinds of home brewed in the eighties already. Nothing wrong with mead, and exciting brew it is.
However, when it comes right down to it, however exciting it is, it goes right out the window as soon as the cool Staropramen, Heineken, Bass, Guiness gets available.
Short answer: Beer (pilsner, lager, ale, stout, etc) is so much better!
Also (came to think of it flossing actually), if you read the Icelandic sagas, you find that beer was held in very high esteem compared to the old mead at the time (around 1000 AD). If them vikings got hold of a case of lager, I’m pretty sure noone would insist on the mead; simply because beer tastes so darn good, and mead is often of dubious quality. (Alright, off to brush them teeth too. - Mmm, beer…)