MEAD (meed)
An
alcoholic beverage made from fermented honey and water Common
clues: Popular
drink in Valhalla; Honey product; Honey drink; “Beowulf”
quaff; Fermented honey drink; Medieval drink Crossword
puzzle frequency:
3 times a year Frequency
in English language:
16451 / 86800 News: Making
mead out of life Video: How
to home brew mead
Mead
is a fermented alcoholic beverage made of honey, water, and
yeast. Meadhing is the practice of brewing honey. Mead is also
colloquially known as "honey wine". A brewery that
deals specifically in mead is called either a meadery or a
mazery.
The
first known description of mead is in the hymns of the Rigveda,
one of the sacred books of the historical Vedic religion and
(later) Hinduism dated around 1700–1100 BC. During the
"Golden Age" of Ancient Greece, mead was said to be the
preferred drink.[2] Aristotle (384–322 BC) discussed mead
in his Meteorologica and elsewhere, while Pliny the Elder (AD
23–79) called mead militites in his Naturalis Historia and
differentiated wine sweetened with honey or "honey-wine"
from mead.
Around
AD 550, the Brythonic speaking bard Taliesin wrote the Kanu y med
or "Song of Mead." The legendary drinking, feasting and
boasting of warriors in the mead hall Heorot in the Anglo-Saxon
epic poem Beowulf is echoed in the mead hall Dyn Eidyn now modern
day Edinburgh in the epic poem Y Gododdin, both dated around AD
700. Mead is still drunk in the modern Celtic nations, Welsh for
mead is Medd, and Leanne Meala in Scottish Gaelic.
Mead
was the historical beverage par excellence and commonly brewed by
the Germanic tribes in Northern Europe. However, heavy taxation
and regulations on the ingredients of alcoholic beverages such as
the Reinheitsgebot or Purity Laws led to commercially made mead
becoming a more obscure beverage up until recently. Some
monasteries kept up the old traditions of mead-making as a
by-product of beekeeping, especially in areas where grapes could
not be grown.
In
many parts of Europe it was traditional to supply a newly married
couple with enough mead for a month, ensuring happiness and
fertility. From this practice we get honeymoon. However, this
etymology is not accepted by linguists.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Mead".
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