<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><span style="font-size:18pt;line-height:100%">A Taste of Honey</span> Is mead poised for a comeback? By Nicholas Day Posted Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008, at 7:02 AM ET Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Judging by the prominence of honey these days, you'd think there's a run on sugar. Local, flavored honeys are now in restaurant kitchens. Foodies are mail-ordering artisanal raw varieties. At my local farmers market in Connecticut, the area beekeeper shows up with a table's worth of options and a glassed-in buzzing hive. This resurgence is in spite of the recent colony collapse disorder, which decimated many beehives. But even more unexpected is the rise of honey for an ancient use: alcohol, in a drink known as mead. You might know mead from Beowulf—it's what the characters got soused on. Mead is so old-school that its advocates claim it as the world's first alcoholic beverage. (Their line of thinking goes like this: Rain-diluted honey attracted wild yeasts. The fermented liquid then attracted a human, who drank it and felt less unhappy.) But the recent interest in fermented honey has morphed it from an esoteric item that only a few bearded Dungeons & Dragons players indulged in to a small yet legitimate commercial enterprise. There are now more than 100 meaderies in the United States, like Rabbit's Foot Meadery and Mountain Meadows Mead. For the ambitious, there are DIY mead-making books, complete with archaic spellings (see The Compleat Meadmaker). Is mead, last popular around King Arthur's table, poised for a comeback? ....</div> http://www.slate.com/id/2184361/nav/ais/
It's interesting, and definitely worth a try, though I haven't cultivated a real taste for it (at least not yet).
I think it's different depending on different brewing methods, but in my admittedly limited experience it was almost sickly sweet.
