MEAD HISTORY [continued]
Westerners today usually associate mead with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Indeed, mead references in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare confirm that honey-based drinks were popular with publicans of the day. Still, mead had its beginning millennia before this period and any euro-centric historical account doesn't do justice to its global presence.

Mead is no less prone to the whims of social popularity than any other consumer product and this in part explains mead's rise and fall. But advances in agriculture have further marginalized the meadmaking craft. It is certainly far less laborious to grow domesticated crop fruit—such as grapes for wine—than it is to harvest honey for mead. What's more, honey can be a little more temperamental during fermentation, owing to its purity, than fermentable fruits that contain many nutrients beneficial to yeast.

Today's meadmakers are spending more time in the lab in an effort to improve on the recipes of their ancestors and usher the craft out of the Middle Ages. The industry is ripe for this endeavor, too, as the sciences related to it have come so far. Laboratory apparatus like the mass spectrometer and the gas chromatograph are now widely available and they make the chemical analysis of honey and mead relatively simple. Over the past few decades the wine and brewing industries have generated reams of scientific literature related to fermentation that is of great use to the meadmaker. Meadmakers have also begun to recognize the evolution of our tastes. What was passable drink in the time of Beowulf dos not necessarily please us today. Our lives are more sophisticated and so are our palettes.

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