A meadery tasting list can read like a foreign language. Melomel, metheglin, cyser, braggot, bochet, pyment.
There is one rule underneath all of it, and once you have it the whole list decodes: every one of them is mead. The name only tells you what went in alongside the honey.
Traditional
Honey, water, yeast. Nothing else.
Sometimes called a show mead, because with nothing to hide behind it shows exactly what the honey and the meadmaker can do. If you want to know what a meadery is actually capable of, this is the pour to judge them on.
It is also the one most likely to surprise you, because the flavour tracks the flowers the bees worked. Orange blossom, wildflower, buckwheat and clover honey make noticeably different drinks from the same recipe.
Melomel
Mead with fruit. The broadest family on most lists, and usually the friendliest place to start.
Berries, stone fruit, tropical fruit, anything. A blackberry melomel and a mango melomel have almost nothing in common except the honey underneath, so treat the fruit as the headline.
Two members of the family have their own names, which is where the list starts getting silly:
- Cyser is mead with apples or apple juice.
- Pyment is mead with grapes.
Cyser
Worth its own line, because it is the one people recognise without knowing the word.
Honey plus apple lands very close to cider, and a cyser is often the easiest pour to hand someone who says they do not like wine. It usually drinks lighter than a traditional, and meaderies frequently have one on tap rather than only in bottles.
If a tasting room has both a cyser and a traditional, trying them side by side tells you more about mead in two sips than any amount of reading.
Metheglin
Mead with spices or herbs. Cinnamon, vanilla, ginger, chai, lavender, hops, chilli, tea.
This is the category where meaderies get experimental, so it swings the widest in quality and in style. A vanilla metheglin can taste like dessert. A ginger one can be sharp and dry enough to drink with dinner. Ask what is in it before you commit to a full glass.
Braggot
Mead made with malt, so it borrows from beer as well as honey. It is the one style where “is this beer or wine” is a fair question rather than a mix-up, and it is covered properly in Is Mead Wine or Beer.
Braggot is uncommon. If you see one, it is usually because the meadery is next door to a brewery or came out of brewing originally.
The rarer names
You will run into these occasionally and they follow the same logic.
- Bochet, made with caramelised honey. Darker, with toffee and marshmallow character.
- Acerglyn, made with maple syrup.
- Capsicumel, made with chilli peppers.
- Rhodomel, made with rose.
- Hydromel, not a flavour at all. It means a lighter, lower alcohol mead, and it is what most meaderies mean when they say session mead.
The thing that matters more than any of these names
Sweetness, and it is a separate question from the style.
Any of the styles above can be made bone dry, off dry, semi sweet or dessert sweet. How sweet it ends up depends on how much of the honey the yeast was allowed to eat, not on whether fruit or spice went in.
That is why “I do not like sweet drinks” is not a reason to skip a meadery. It is a reason to say so at the bar, because almost every meadery makes something dry and will happily point you at it.
So when you read a tasting list, read it in two parts. The style name tells you what is in it. The sweetness note, usually printed right next to it, tells you whether you will actually enjoy it.
What to order first
If you have never had mead, a reasonable flight is a traditional, a cyser or fruit melomel, and whatever the meadery is proudest of. That gives you the baseline, the easy one, and the house’s best shot, and it usually costs less than two glasses.
Ask which one they would put in front of someone on their first visit. Every meadery has an answer to that question and it is almost always the right pour.
Where to try them
Find a meadery by state or work through the full A to Z list. Every listing carries the address, opening hours, phone number and a link to the meadery’s own site, which is where the current tasting list lives. Hours at small meaderies move around, so call ahead before driving out.
New to this entirely? What Is a Meadery covers the basics, and What to Expect on Your First Meadery Visit covers the rest of the afternoon.