Raise a Glass to Sparkling Mead

Mead is sparking earnest enthusiasm among drinkers! 

Thanks to the likes of "Game of Thrones" and the surge in popularity of other fantasy series, mead, the ancient alcoholic beverage made from honey, is making a comeback. 

Meet Bulles de Ruche. Water, honey... and bubbles! That's the recipe for this brand-new drink that refreshes an age-old tipple dating back to bygone days.  What's different about this 2021 take on mead is the addition of a light fizz, as well as a lower alcohol content, at no more than 4.5°.

Created by Paul-Augustin Delattre, Beeche's Bulles de Ruche mead brand has chosen three types of honey to create versions of the drink with different aromatic profiles: lychee honey sourced in south-eastern Madagascar; and lavender honey harvested on the Valensole plateau in Provence, and lime honey gathered in the Forest of Halatte in the Oise region of France. 

What’s special about this honey wine is that it has a tremendous amount of versatility – like craft beers, you can make different styles with different flavors. You can add spices, fruits, vegetables, grains and/or hops. It’s its own distinct category, somewhere between beer and wine. You’d sip/drink/guzzle it like a wine, cider or beer. 

These substyles include braggot, which is mead mixed with beer or malt and hops; melomel, which is mead with added fruit; hydromel, which is watered-down melomel (popular in Spain and France); and Great Mead, which is mead intended to be aged. Like wine, it can be still or sparkling and range from crisp and dry to rich and sweet. 

In case you didn’t know, mead was one of the very first alcoholic beverages ever made, predating beer and wine – as far back as 3,000 BCE. It’s thought that mead was first created when rain dropped into a pot of honey, and that the first people to start drinking and making it were those of China’s Henan province. 

Mead then became a staple for the Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Vikings (to which it also has a strong bond in pop culture references), Poles, Russians, and Ethiopians, who have their own form of mead called tej. 

As Vogue points out, you can find mead shout-outs everywhere from the bible to Chaucer to Aristotle to Beowulf. 

Mead was associated with good health and vitality in timeworn cultures and called “the drink of the gods” in Greek mythology. Do those claims hold up today? Maybe. 

It’s believed that mead has some health benefits because of its star ingredient, honey. Healthline says that according to research, honey has strong antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. However, there’s not enough evidence yet to support that honey still has these magical vibes once it’s been fermented. 

The fermentation aspect may be a health plus of its own, though. Those helpful little living microorganisms called probiotics can exist in this naturally fermented beverage, but again, it’s unclear how effective or concentrated they are since other ingredients possibly used in a certain mead could affect or even kill the bacteria. 

Basically, the jury’s still out, but at worst, mead isn’t less healthy than beer and at best, it could have some positive healthy powers. 

Anyway, I’ll have to wait for Bulles de Ruche to land on our shores before I can have a quaff of it.