Mystery of Mead

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.
No. I didn’t forget this project. Book publication (Gold and Sweet, Ensnaring: Mead in Great Britain Prehistory to Elizabeth I - done and now available on Amazon), a wedding, a commissioning/graduation, life. I lost a few months. But I’m back … as we say in our household – first world problems.
Today, rather than showing my own work I will rely on someone else’s.
In modern mead making “traditional mead” means a mead made from just honey and water (plus yeast and some additives such as nutrients whatever other additives the mead maker uses, but no other flavor-focused additions).
Arthur Franke recently posted a summary of his research into the topic of when that term came into widespread use with that meaning. https://www.weirdomel.com/presentations-articles/the-birth-of-the-term-traditional-mead
Arthur concludes “it may have seen informal usage in the 1970s, saw more technical written usage beginning in 1980, then began to be prescriptively defined as of 1986.” The earlier uses he cites use traditional in a more cultural sense rather than as a description of a mead’s ingredients. Thank you, Arthur, for a very informative and thorough bit of research, and for helping me get away with an easy post on mead names.
I’m sure the reader will understand I cannot let the topic go without adding commentary.
Traditional applied as a modifier to mead is entirely ambiguous. Traditional when? To whom? Is it really specifically “traditional” to make mead only with honey and water?
As a mead historian I find the term more confusing than useful. I chose to use “plain mead” for honey-water drinks, which I think is much more self-explanatory. “Traditional mead” is well embedded and widely understood, I have no desire to change this, but I find it vague and confusing, especially in the context of a historical discussion and so do not to use it.
Today’s picture: mine, of honey.

It is done!

Now available on Amazon.

Gold and Sweet, Ensnaring: Mead in Great Britain Prehistory to Elizabeth I.

It has been a long road, and one I think very worthwhile and with a great number of wonderful discoveries as I've gathered and compiled information to seek a greater understanding of early mead history in Great Britain, and the essential nature of the drink produced by the 140 recipes featured in the volume.

As regular readers here may already have guessed, my biggest conclusion is that there is a lot more to learn. But that does not mean there isn't a huge amount of never-before-seen information in the current volume.

Gold and Sweet, Ensnaring: Mead in Great Britain Prehistory to Elizabeth I (Historical Brewing Sourcebooks) Gold and Sweet, Ensnaring: Mead in Great Britain Prehistory to Elizabeth I (Historical Brewing Sourcebooks)

"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means" – Inigo Montoya

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.

Today: Piment (piment, pimentum, pigment, pigmentum)

This is another in the list of words redefined in the 20th (19th?) century by relatively modern mead makers. The 2015 BJCP Mead Style Guidelines define pyment as “a melomel made with grapes (generally from juice)”, going on to define hippocras as a spiced pyment, taking another historical name from the realm of mixed wine drinks into fermented mead.

I find piment as a mead made from grape must and honey the least satisfactory of the modern redefinitions of mead names, probably because it bypasses a perfectly good historical word for that mead style – oenomel - to redefine a word that both sees wide historical use and is a notably different drink.

Piment, historically is a wine that has been sweetened with honey or sugar and spiced. The word, as the Latin pigmentum, derived from Greek, appears to have initially been a pigment or color mixed to produce a paint or ink. Its use relative to wine dates at least as far back as Pliny the Elder in the 1st century CE where he states “For the purpose of coloring wine we also add certain substances as a sort of pigment”, no sweetening or spices are indicated. In the 5th century (or earlier) cookbook of Apicius, the earliest known recipe for spiced and sweetened wine is called “conditum”. By the 11th or 12th century the drink called pigmentum appears somwhat widely as sweetened and spiced wine. The detailed evolution of the word in the first millennium must wait as a task for another day. Suffice it to say turning piment into mead isn‘t the first time the word’s meaning has changed, and the list of names for sweetened and spiced wine is almost as long (and as confused) as the list for mead.
Like other mead names that have been redefined (cyser, melomel, and bochet), the history of pyment as a mead is no more than 150 years old. Antique but still only a short time.

While I might wish Pyment had not been chosen as a name for the mead style and will cheer anyone who names their grape and honey mead Oenomel, language is a living thing, and this usage of pyment is firmly established. Awareness of the historical meaning of the word will provide essential context to any meadmaker going out to read more and encountering alternate definitions. Me, I’ll keep calling it Oenomel.

Today’s picture is from BnF Francais 22532, f.328v, showing making pyment as spiced wine. Thanks to the Bibliothèque nationale de France Gallica.

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.

Today: wanzuki

Wanzuki demonstrates both that mead history goes far beyond Europe and that it is a field with a great many unknowns. I am reminded:
“…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” – Donald Rumsfeld

I know a lot about the history of mead. But for mead names and history, there are many knowns that *I* don’t know (someone else does), as well as unknowns remaining to be discovered. There are still more unknowns that will remain unknown, lost in time, and we need to make conclusions from the best available knowledge.

Wanzuki is a Tanzanian name for mead. There, in 7 words, is the best information I have been able to pull out with any certainty after hours of research. Most sources indicate wanzuki is a plain mead: honey, water, and yeast, but others suggest it may have grain added or include flavorings. The oldest reference I could find is to the 1970’s but I am certain the drink goes much further back. I am also certain that if I were in Tanzania, I would be able to find much better information.

Wanzuki is a small piece of a very large and long tradition of mead making in Africa. The breadth and variety is illustrated by a chart I found of names for mead in varied Ethiopian languages (just Ethiopia!), which lists almost 100 names from four different language families. The best known of these is t’ej, which I believe has the longest continual history of any mead style/name in the world! Mead across Africa probably reflects hundreds or thousands of local cultures and traditions each with its own history, significance, and details.

Neil Rusch’s theory that mead in Africa could date back 40,000 years is neither unsupported nor far-fetched – see https://fermentology.pubpub.org/pub/qvos1avh/release/3 Just as with all historical research, context and details will be critical in setting out supportable data and timelines for any aspect of this history.

Today’s image a Little Bee Eater in Tanzania, courtesy of Thomas Fuhrmann CC 4.0. Looking closely, I think it really is eating a bee.

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.
Today: Adynamon (adynamon, adsynamon, assynamon, adsimanon).
The mead called adynamon is hidden under a more common use of the word. Adynamon is Latin, from the Greek ἀδύνατος, and means weak, ineffectual, or without strength. A second definition is wine weakened or diluted with water.
Most would probably conclude at this point that adynamon is a wine not a mead and go on to something else. They would, however, still only have part of the picture.
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History from the late 1st century CE in Book 14, Chapter 19 starts “The first of the artificial wines has wine for its basis; it is called adynamon.” The recipe, for invalids, mixes water and white wine must before boiling it back to the volume of the must. An option is given to mix water, wine must, seawater and rain water then “leave the whole to evaporate in the sun for forty days” (1850’s translation by John Bostock on www.perseus.tufts.edu). The word translated as evaporate -torrent - can also mean bake or roast. My choice would be to translate it as ferment, based on my experience with brewing and terms used in historical recipes, where “cook” and “boil” are often used to describe active fermentation.
All very interesting, but still not mead.
Finally, a contemporary of Pliny, Dioscorides, whose De Materia Medica was “published” only a few years (perhaps 10-20) before Pliny, also discusses adynamon. In this case Dioscorides writes that adynamon can be a mix of water and wine must boiled back to the volume of the must, OR, it can be made from equal portions of seawater, wine must, rain water and honey, set in the hot sun for 40 days. It reaches its full goodness after a year.
We have achieved mead! But not good mead … Made it, tried it. Much too salty for me, and I like salty flavors. Historically it may well have been mixed with water before serving.
This recipe has appeared periodically in the 2,000 years since it was written, usually with a fairly direct connection back to Dioscorides.
The (almost) duplication of the recipe between Pliny and Dioscorides points to both taking the information from an earlier source. This is believed to have been Sextius Niger whose lost pharmacology work was probably written before 40 CE. And who knows where he got his information from?
Not a mead name that is particularly useful, but hopefully still interesting.
Today’s picture is a 1560 image of the Ocean God courtesy of the Met Open Access Program.

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.

Today: Welsh Ale (wylisc elo, Wilisc ealoð).

The use of the name Welsh ale for a form of braggot is specific to the English speaking (Old English and Middle English here) portion of Great Britain between no later than the end of the 7th century and at least the 12th century.

About 694 CE, King Ine of Wessex established in his laws, a standard rent for 10 hides of land (nominally about 1200 acres, but quite variable) to include ten vats or vessels of honey, 300 loaves of bread, twelve ambers of Welsh ale (Wilisc ealað), thirty of clear (presumably clear ale), plus varied livestock, food items, and fodder. The volume of an Amber is unclear, but likely measures give an estimate of 100 to 400 gallons of this Welsh Ale. The earliest surviving written record of this law dates from about 930 CE, this section persists in law collections through the 12th century. Welsh ale also appears in a handful of other English documents through this period.

The name used for this drink – Wilisc – technically means “foreign” but was commonly also used to mean Welsh.

Identification of Welsh ale as braggot (bragaut in Welsh at that time) is done primarily through connecting names and drinks and is generally accepted by scholars. The descriptions and relative values of bragaut and Welsh ale align, and when various drinks named in texts are identified, Welsh ale and bragaut align nicely. As is generally true, the connection can be argued to be something else, but in this case, it seems extremely unlikely.

You might wonder if Welsh ale was named such because it was all imported to England from Wales. The broad locations where Welsh ale is mentioned and the situations in which it appears, make it clear to me that Welsh ale was almost certainly produced locally, across Britain.

My analysis of the available information leads me to conclude that Welsh ale did not include spices. The many places where you can find claims that it does, appear to look at bragaut / Welsh ale / braggot across almost 1000 years of history and assume the recipes from 1400 and later are definitive for the English drink of c.700 without questioning whether evidence supports that conclusion (sorry Wikipedia, the evidence does not support that).

My conclusion is Welsh ale was made from ale and honey, almost certainly mixed before fermentation, made by ale brewers, and with a regular ale wort (presumably using local ingredients and methods). Based on Welsh data for bragaut, it was fortified with one half to one pound of honey per gallon (US) of starting wort/must. (yes, that’s 30-40% of sugars from honey, and not a mead according to the 50%+ standard many of us hold to.)

Today’s illustration is the 1100-year old mention of Welsh ale in a manuscript of King Ine’s laws (and still more than 200 years after the laws were codified). Credit to The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College Cambridge.

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.
Today: Birch Wine
Starting in the mid-17th century English recipes for “birch wine” begin to appear. One of the earliest versions is in John Evelyn’s 1664 book called Sylva, about trees. After a description of how to collect birch sap, which is very much like the collection of maple sap. He instructs:
“To every gallon of Birch-water put a quart of Hony well stirr’d together; then boil it almost an hour with a few Cloves, and a little Limon-peel, keeping it well scumm’d: when it is sufficiently boil’d, and become cold, add to it three or four spoonfuls of good Ale to make it work (which it will do like new Ale) and when the Test begins to settle, bottle it up as you do other winy liquors. It will in a competent time become a most brisk and spirituous Drink, which (besides the former virtues) is a very powerful opener, and doing wonders for sure of the Pthisick”
This recipe appears in Evelyn’s personal papers as early as 1651 (British Library Add MS 78337) before being printed in his book, which became quite popular. Later versions appear in English texts and manuscripts regularly for the next several hundred years. Later 17th century versions often call for either honey or sugar, and somewhat later again (by the mid 1700’s) most versions use sugar instead of honey.
But this English recipe is not the only birch mead in historical evidence. Archaeological evidence from several European sites suggests or indicates use of birch sap to make alcoholic beverages, including a notable find of about 1500 BCE which indicates a mixed fermentation including birch sap, honey, berries, and grains, and another from the 4th century CE suggesting birch sap mead with hops.
An early tradition of fermenting birch sap exists across most regions where birch trees are common. As early as 921, Ahmad ibn Fadlãn’s account of his travels (famous for his writings about his encounters with the Rus Vikings), mentions drinking of fermented birch sap along the Volga River. Documentation of the addition of honey to make this a mead has so far eluded me but would bridge the archaeological evidence to the 17th century written record.
Today’s picture is a tap to collect birch tree sap made by the American Naturalist Henry David Thoreau in the mid 19th century. Picture public domain courtesy of the Concord Museum, Concord, MA, USA.

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.

Today: Apomel (apomeli, apomelis, apomelliti, mellita apomel, Greek ἀπόμελι, etc.)

Sometimes I run across a mead name that I really wish would come back into common usage. Apomel, in its most common meaning as mead made from honeycombs is one.

While apomel literally means honey water, and sometimes has been used to mean a plain mead, it most often is used to indicate mead made from honeycombs (including the wax and potentially other components as well as honey). Unlike previous examples of mead names, this one has a relatively consistent meaning and use from its earliest appearances to the modern day.

One of the earliest appearances is in Dioscorides’ De materia medica of the 1st century CE where it is characterized as honey washed from honeycombs with warm water. The recipe is presented with other meads, making it clear fermentation is expected. This text was widely available through the Middle Ages.
One late 13th century medical encyclopedia, Simon of Genoa’s Clavis sanationis, says (translated from Latin) “The Greek apomelis is when honeycomb is washed in water. That water is called melita apomelis.” Later in his text he tells us that the mixture is not cooked (boiled).

Holinshed’s 1577 The Description and Chronicles of England opines:
“There is a kind of swish swash made also in Essex, and dyvers other places, wyth Hony and water, which the countrey wives putting some pepper & a little other spice among, call meade verye good in myne opinion for such as love to bee losse bodied, otherwise it differeth so much from the true Metheglin, as chalke doth from cheese. Truely it is nothing else but the washing of the combes, when the hony is wrong out, and one of the best things that I knowe belonging thereto is, that they spend but little labour and lesse cost in making of the same, and therefore no great losse if it were neuer occupyed.” (Book 3, Chapter 1)

This does not use the name apomel but is the same style of mead. This brings up the very important point that mead made from honeycombs will be highly variable. First in strength, whether the whole comb is used, containing all the original honey, or whether honey has been removed first, and the apomel only includes residues. But perhaps more importantly, the quality will depend on the quality of the combs themselves, and how much (if any) of the residues of the hive are carried with them.

That apomel was not always Holinshead’s pitiful brew is indicated in one more example recipe, this one from Johannes Wittich’s 1594 German Kurtzer Bericht. He says (translated by me) “Take a beautiful white honeycomb, which has inside beautiful transparent honey, put it in warm water, press it out with the hands and boil it with constant scumming, like a Meth.”

Today’s picture is a straw bee skep, similar to those that would have been used throughout the Middle Ages, this credit Internet Archive (from 1918)

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.

Today: bochet (with infinite spelling options. In fact, anyone who wants to truly understand the variability of medieval spelling need only look at the many ways bochet is spelled in Facebook posts).

Ask almost any mead maker what bochet is and they will answer it is a mead made partially or wholly with honey that has been heated and caramelized.

Your friendly neighborhood mead historian is here to tell you it’s not quite that simple. This definition for the word appears to have been well established by the 1950s’ but probably goes back no later than the late 19th century.

Between sometime in the early 17th century and the mid-1800’s (that time period could very well turn out to be broader on both ends) bochet was a French medicinal drink featuring ingredients such as cinnamon, rhubarb, sassafras, and sarsaparilla but no honey, not even a bit. The earliest I have on a quick search is a 1628 book by Daniel Morel giving a recipe for bochetum). This story of this transition from mead to not mead is not clear to me.
But before this, from at least the 14th century (probably earlier though) through at least the middle of the 16th century, bochet was – mead. Yes, just mead, a general term for the whole class of drinks.

The recipe from the 1393 Ménagier de Paris using caramelized as the sugar source remains unique among the thousands of historical mead recipes I have cataloged. The recipe is titled “bochet” and thus has lent the name to the entire class of meads, but the meaning of the word is “mead”, not “mead made with caramelized honey”. As a side note, I do have other historical recipes that use caramelized honey, but all of them use it as a relatively minor addition, to add color to the drink, rather than as the main source of fermentable sugars.

How do I know bochet is mead? The most powerful piece of evidence is Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ ambitious c.1240 encyclopedia of knowledge (which heavily relies on earlier such encyclopedias, some dating back over 1000 years). This De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the properties of things) contains two paragraphs (chapters) on mead. The original Latin says “Medo vel medus quasi melus dicitur. Et est potus confectus ex melle et aqua-optime confectus et decoctus.” Or, for those who don’t speak Latin “Medo or medus is like melus. And is a drink made from honey and well water mixed and boiled.” (This from the c.1275 manuscript held by The US Smithsonian Institute). When this wildly popular text was translated to French (Le livre des propriétés des choses), these names for mead, plain mead, are translated as bochet. See the illustration attached to this post from a 15th century manuscript BnF Français 22532, f.328r (Thank you Bibliothèque nationale de France). Other pieces of data support this conclusion.

You might ask, where does the French word bochet come from BEFORE that? Why Latin of course. The Latin bochero or bicarius means beekeeper or bee master, in Anglo-Saxon beoceorle. The bees tended by the bochero (Latin) make the honey from which bochet (French) is made in its turn.

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.

Today: cyser (ciser, seider, cisera, cedir, sider, sidre sidur, sither, and a host of other spellings)

Cyser is understood by most meadmakers today to mean a mead made with apples or apple juice/cider.

That definition represents a small fraction of the time the world has been in use. The definition of cyser specifically as a mead is probably less than a hundred years old. Let me explain.

Starting well over 5000 years ago with a language that probably never really existed called Proto-Semetic, there was a word that we would spell something like sikar. (diacritic marks are missing, I have not mastered making Facebook display them) Sikar had a general meaning of alcoholic drink or strong drink and with this meaning wandered into Hebrew and the Bible (as sekar), Greek (σίκερα, sikera), and Latin (sicera, sicerae). In Latin it develops a secondary definition as alcoholic cider fermented from apples (thank you Wiktionary entry for sicera and links from it for helping me summarize). The exact meaning of sicera over time and in different contexts remains a topic of debate. Its meaning may have included mead at some points as mead is certainly a ‘strong drink’.

Moving forward to the last thousand years, sicera in its many spellings gradually came to be specific to fermented apple cider (hard cider in the US, just cider most other places). This includes cidre in German and French, sidra in Spain, seidr in Welsh and cider in English. The specific spelling as cyser is a Middle English word. Outside of mead making cyser is still more likely to be understood as cider than as mead.

As for mead, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th centuries cyser was given a new meaning, almost certainly intentionally. The oldest use of this new meaning I have found for this post is by Robert Gayre. His 1948 Wassail! In Mazers of Mead: An Account of Mead, Metheglin, Sack and Other Ancient Liquors defines cyser as apple mead, the definition modern mead makers know. However, other similarly redefined words he used can be traced in use to earlier points (piment and melomel); this one might also have predated him. Gayre was also apparently the founder, probably in the 1940s of a Meadery known as Mead Makers Limited, The Mead House, Gulval, Cornwall, Great Britain. He was also generally considered to be a racist, and there is strong evidence that he claimed titles, degrees and rank he was not entitled to (Wikipedia, Robert Gayre, January, 2024).

Today’s picture is my apple tree, a Jonathan, whose pedigree goes back to the early 1800’s.

Over time, mead has been known by a multitude of names. I am going through some of these, summarizing historical and current information about how these names were used and what they mean/meant.
Today: chionomeli (chionomel, chionomelli)

It is rare to find a name for mead with so few alternate meanings and spellings over time. All references to chionomeli can be traced back to a single source, a 10th century compilation of agricultural lore made for the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII (ruled 913 to 959) called Geoponika (written in Greek).
Geoponika contains 20 books covering agriculture from sun and rain to sheep. The eighth book is on medicinal wines and includes descriptions and recipes for several types of mead. Chapter 28 is on hydromel. The instructions for hydromel are not attributed but are almost certainly derived from the 1st century CE author Columella, whose instructions for making aqua mulsa are much more detailed than the version in Geoponika. CORRECTION: Geoponika is actually a much better match to Pliny's mead instructions. Pliny and Columella are similar and both probably derived from a single, earlier and now lost source.
Geoponika then adds a note not found in Columella (or Pliny), or anywhere else. “Others mix pure snow with honey, pound it and store it. This is a medicine for the feverish; they call it chionomeli, ‘snow honey’” (this from Dalby’s 2011 English translation, p.180.) This instruction is almost certainly copied from an earlier text, but most of those texts are lost, and it seems likely the history of this form of mead won’t be easily pushed back further.
Geoponika was not a popular text in manuscript form. It was first published in 1548 in the Renaissance rush to recover, translate (to Latin), and publish old texts. It saw a number of editions in the 16th century and was published sporadically after that, including an English translation in 1805. The word chionomel appears in a number of 19th century dictionaries, but with no new information.
It becomes impossible to say whether making mead from snow was ever an active practice.
Practically, mead made from snow would be equivalent to mead made from rainwater, the key factor being lack of trace minerals. On the other hand, making a mead from snow could be a fun excuse to use this rare name.

My illustration for today is from a 1520-1530 Belgian book of hours, courtesy of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Oh ...

That feeling between joy and resignation when you realize you need to add a new section to the book.

One of my usual meandering paths this morning led me to brogat (brogak, brogac, brogwort, bragwort) in 16th century Scotland.
A malt drink distinct from ale or beer and apparently sweetened. Braggot anyone?

I guess I will need to spend some time tracking references, compiling information, and fitting this Scottish drink, into the history of that form of mead (unless of course it turns out to be something else, but I don't think so).

A joy to find new information, as there are a number of mysteries surrounding braggot, both early and later. Resignation to the confirmation that so many aspects of the history of mead remain to be understood, and that most of my efforts are in many respects preliminary. Then back to joy that I can continue to discover new things on a daily basis.

To all who read this Happy New Year! I wish everyone peace and joy in the coming year.

The picture is from a 1911 book of transcriptions of the 1556-1586 court books of the City of Inverness. A list of brewers selling ale, beer, and brogat outside of the allowed pricing structure.

Did you notice the book wasn't done in November?

Review, both mine and my external reviewers (to whom I owe great thanks for their time and thoughtful attention), brought up a few more issues of continuity and approach than were compatible with the time frame. Aiming for February now, January remains plausible.

To keep getting information out there, I've decided to start a long-considered series of posts here about names for mead.

Over the millennia, with multiple languages, ways to make it, creative spelling, and other factors, understanding what is meant by a specific name for mead can be difficult.

My intention is to address varied names for mead, placing them in a context which looks at their entire history, not just a snapshot. For example, the historically brand new BJCP rules adapted numerous terms into new meanings, these meanings are valid and current, but cause significant confusion when any level of history comes into play.

The question for today, therefore, is what terms you would like to see discussed? Always wondered what those Polish names really are? Why do I say bochet is historically just mead? What the heck is Chionomel?

Please comment with as many names as you would like.

Since we all like pictures, here's 3 gallons (almost) of Palladius's c.400 AD pomegranate mead burbling away on request for my daughter's wedding.