Is mead the new hipster drink?

Widely thought to be one of the oldest alcoholic beverages in the world, mead has made a comeback

What do you first notice when you pick up a pint-sized bottle of mead? It is usually dressed in a colourfully designed, hip label. It almost always has a quirky name, lending it a cool ring. Upon taking a sip, you can taste notes of tropical fruit, herbs and spices, along with an unmistakably sweet tinge of honey.

Regarded as one of the oldest alcoholic beverages known to human civilisation, mead—made from honey and water, with yeast added to accelerate fermentation—is now available in a variety of flavours.

So how long ago does mead date back to? The Greeks and Chinese consumed it as far back as 3000 BCE. The gods and warriors from Norse mythology, the Romans and the Welsh chugged it too. Closer home, mead finds mention in the Rigveda, with Sita believed to have consumed a variant made of grapes and honey. Moreover, the words “madeira” and “madhushala” both point to honey-fermented mead. Over time, however, the easier cultivation of barley and wheat for brewing beer pushed mead into a neglected corner.

Mead in India

Until 2017, there was no law formally set in place that would permit the fermentation of honey. The successful legalisation of making mead commercially in the state of Maharashtra was spearheaded by Yoginee Budhkar, who runs Cerana Meads along with her co-founder Ashwini Deore.

After innumerable trips to the Mantralaya for nine months, Budhkar landed a meeting with the excise minister who gave the go-ahead to manufacture mead in the state. The duo then invited Rohan Rehani and Nitin Vishwas, who went on to open Moonshine Meadery, India’s first meadery in Pune.

At the meeting, Rehani and Vishwas began the conversation around meads with small-batch releases, lending a niche approach to their business model for the beverage. Moreover, they began the conversation from scratch by using the hashtag #meadisnotbeer on their social media channels.

In February this year, Moonshine—which opened before Cerana Meads—completed four years. Since then, many new meaderies have reimagined the drink in an exciting format in order to woo younger audiences.

“In 2014, I was flipping through an article on London’s first meadery in 500 years in an in-flight magazine. I sent a picture to Rohan. We decided to brew a batch, which took two months to ferment. We got smashed due to consuming high levels of alcohol. Rohan vouched never to make mead again. I asked him to make one last batch. By then, we were obsessed,” Vishwas recalls.

Today, their mead finds mass appeal among 21-27-year-old drinkers, who, according to Vishwas, will not be seen dead drinking what their parents drank. “A few generations ago, when we reached legal drinking age, we had to start with beer, which, let’s be honest, we made ourselves to enjoy. With mead, we found an urgent need to be quirky. Our audience is looking for something new, fun and young to make it their own,” says Vishwas.

Around the same time, in Dahanu, founder of Hill Zill Wines, Priyanka Save, made Fruzzanté Spice Garden—cinnamon, ginger and chikoo mulled with honey to make a sparkling alcoholic beverage, instantly realising she was in mead territory. It piqued her interest in the drink. “I happened to drive towards Jawhar in Palghar district once, and at a roadside restaurant I overheard a tribal man talking about 800 kg honey he had sourced from a jungle. He told me about how they thoughtfully extract honey in the wild using traditional techniques,” shares Save, who ended up buying the entire lot. To prove its purity, the man took a small amount in a bowl and diluted it with water. Constantly swirling for a minute or two, when he let the liquid settle, it formed the hive. This was a practical visual of genetic coping—the concept that pure honey retains the shape of its comb.”

Currently, Save makes three variants of a premium dessert mead under the brand name Arkä that include honey, rose and jamun. The mead in her unit is made with spring water. “Honey comes from bees and doesn’t have enough nutrient content. Thus the spring water complements it and blends beautifully in a slow fermentation,” she explains.

While Budhkar and Deore’s foray into manufacturing meads began earlier than the other meaderies , their journey to launching Cerena Meads has been a long-winding one. Budhkar first heard about mead from her professor when she was doing her PhD in bio-technology in 2011. “I was going to the UK, and he asked me to try the mead made using heather flowers in Edinburgh. I couldn’t find it anywhere because I didn’t know the name of the brand that sold it. But, I came back curious, and read up on it,” says Budhkar, who got herself some store-bought honey and baker’s yeast and set out to brew a batch. By the time Budhkar completed her doctorate in 2013, she had made a fair amount of batches and was being encouraged by her friends and family to pursue it professionally.

In 2014, Budhkar and Deore dove into bee-keeping and honeys. “We studied various honeys made in India and tested how they would taste after the sugars are gone. We didn’t get too ahead,” shares Budhkar. She then flew to UC Davis in California to pursue an advanced course in mead-making from the who’s-who of the mead industry in the United States—Ken Schramm, Michael Fairbrother and Mike Faul, as well as new mead-makers like Frank Goldbeck. It is this training that improved the technical nuances of their meads.

By December 2019, Nashik-based Cerana Meads, named after the Indian bee variety in Nashik, was in business.“Innovation in mead has no limit. India is blessed with a diverse climate and geographical terrain. The variety in raw material of honey, fruits and spices makes it exciting. ”While a lot of people would think that since they are made from honey, meads would be very sweet, our focus is on making meads with a balance of sweetness and acidity,” says Budhkar.”

Mead is environment-friendly too, Budhkar points out. “Bees make honey from floral nectar and it is a value-add product. We source our honey from apiaries that follow ethical extraction methods using super chambers to collect only the surplus honey without bothering the bees,” she says. Furthermore, you can support the environment with your choice of drink. “It gives livelihood to beekeepers, bees pollinate the crops and give back to nature, we get to make mead and consumers get to enjoy it. Everyone is happy,” adds Budhkar. They are known for their pyments—pyments—a type of mead made using honey and grapes. Cerana meads uses Pinot noir and Chenin Blanc grapes and ferments them with multi-floral honey.— fermented with multi-floral honey. Their fruit Melomels are spiked with jamun and pomegranate, while their festive mead Yule spice is infused with winter spices aged with oak..

Pandemic strikes

The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit Moonshine Meadery and Cerana Meads hard. While the former ended up making sanitisers for the Pune Municipal Corporation just to keep occupied, Cerana’s production came to a halt, until the government allowed delivery of alcohol in Maharashtra during the latter half of 2020.

“The lockdown opened a new chapter [for us] once the state permitted delivery of alcohol. The longer supply chain that legalised home delivery was a fabulous move. While our revenues dropped, our retail revenues shot up,” explains Vishwas.

Post-pandemic players

The year 2021—the second year into the pandemic—saw young mead-makers in India taking an experimental route, a deviation from the rule books. At Origin, a mead brand which launched in Pune last October, 26-year-old Shaurya Malwa doesn’t like to categorise his meads. “Our mead is dry and off-dry, with sweetness from fruits and flowers. I make mead that I like to consume,” he says nonchalantly.

One of his latest introductions is a Salted Guava variant inspired by a lesser-known German- style beer called Goza. “The first mead I ever tried was my own batch, so my canvas was blank. Now, expert brewers brew my recipes at the meadery,” shares Malwa. The meads are available at The Canary and Nho Saigon—two restaurants in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex—run by Malwa and his partners Nalin Jain and Yagyarth Meiwal.

Last year, Anant Gupta and Vinayak Malhotra, both 26 year-olds, launched No Label for a younger consumer base. For now, they have one mead on sale—a semi-dry variant with tropical fruity notes, available in Mumbai and Pune. “Mead seems to resonate with our generation,” says Gupta. Their name ‘No Label’ is tied to the philosophy ‘Labels are for bottles, not people’.

With difficult times now possibly behind, the mead industry, however small, is pushing out a versatile mix. “We have had a difficult journey until this point but with things opening up again, we are hopeful. We are looking forward to mead-and-food pairing sessions, and using mead in cooking to take the mead story to the masses,” says Budhkar.

Vishwas hopes to see more meaderies in the next two-three years. “We need more people making mead. People in India are only just experimenting with trying mead and the awareness is not widespread. The game-changer will be when a big brand comes in and uses mead as a vehicle entry that will put this OG drink on the map of India again,” he concludes.

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