Let me tell you a little bit about mead.

"Here's a picture I took of one of my meads"

Nowadays craft beverages are very popular. And for very good reason. They are terrific. Craft beverages offer a wonderful variety of tastes, flavors, and sensations to us.

The thing about this modern day "movement" is that Mead is the original craft beverage. Mead makers were making flavored meads long before regular wines and other beverages were being brewed, distilled, or fermented. And by "long before" I mean a thousand years. Mead got there first. And for good reason.

How can you not use honey as a source for making a beverage? We all know how amazing honey is. It is truly a gift to us courtesy of the bees. And it is near perfection in its role as a crafted beverage because it can be simply honey, water and yeast. With that the honey flavor comes through. Yet, just like all the other mysteries of honey, if you add just about anything else to a fermenting batch of mead the honey will embrace it and it's flavor will come through. So, honey also is a great blank palette for other flavors.

And the variations are limitless. Just within the realm of plain honey mead there are so many variations depending on how you ferment it, what yeast you use, and even the particular batch and type of honey you use.

And of course, you are probably getting the idea that there are a million wonderful things you can add to mead including just about any kind of fruit or any kind of spice. It's been developed to the point where there are specific names for the mead depending on what you have added to it.

For example: If you add apples or some kind of apple derivative to mead you get a cyser. If you add rose hips to mead you get a rhodomel. If you add spices to a mead you get a metheglin. This list can get very long.

But somewhere in the past Mead fell to the wayside. This is because grapes came into popularity. And in all honesty grapes are a lot easier to cultivate than honey. And consequently grapes are much cheaper than honey. So, before you knew it grape wine had taken over the world and mead was almost forgotten.

But true to the magnificence of and magnanimous nature of mead it didn't feel slighted by its loss of glory to the grape. It embraced grapes too -Just like it has done with just about every other fruit or spice. If you add grapes to a mead you get something called a pyment :)