The Need for Mead.

Who the hell makes honey wine in Philly? You might be surprised.

Photos by Mark Stehle

Wine made from grapes can taste like many things: plum, jam, lime, chestnuts, vanilla, even asparagus. Strangely, what it rarely seems to taste like is actual grapes.

Mead, a wine derived from honey that dates back to 7,000 B.C., though, is the exact opposite. It tastes exactly — unbelievably — like honey. In a way, mead tastes more like honey than honey does, as if it were made by bees that themselves fed on honey, instead of the wildflowers or oranges or lavender the critters usually eat.

Leaning on the bar at the Kensington HQ of Philadelphia Brewing Co. (PBC), brewer Dean Browne and Fishtown denizen Sean Benjamin are passing out samples of their homemade meads to a few friends and colleagues. Their drinks range from a very sweet, no-frills, uncarbonated mead to a pumpkin mead flecked with spices like ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg.

Benjamin, a 38-year-old with shaggy hair, opens a bottle of his metheglin mead, seasoned with cloves, allspice, cinnamon and almonds. It's a nutty, pungent drink, and it's as sweet as rock candy. Pumpkin pie seems made for it. The mead's alcoholic content is a punchy 14.5 percent, which is perhaps why everyone's so chatty.

"Do you know where the word 'honeymoon' comes from?" asks the ginger-bearded Browne, a natural storyteller. Barely waiting for his guests to say "no," Browne, one of four brewers for PBC, explains that when Viking couples married, their families would furnish them with large amounts of honey wine and then leave them alone for an entire month — or moon cycle. "To encourage them to make a family," he says. "It's true."

It's a favorite etymology among mead brewers — one that's impossible to prove, but whose veracity is unimportant, really. Mead, a beverage with a history that goes back at least 9,000 years, is ripe for legends and tall tales.

Despite living in near obscurity compared to their home-beer-brewing brethren, Browne and Benjamin are part of what seems to be a growing group of locals who make their own mead. (Sadly, Census 2010 won't be tracking this.) But George Hummel, who owns the local brewing supplies store Home Sweet Homebrew at 2008 Sansom St., estimates that 70 percent to 80 percent of his customers have made mead at least once. And Christopher Clair, a mead maker who also judges local beer competitions, says that each year, more and more Philadelphians enter homemade meads in contests.

So why do so many people bother to cook up their own mead, which requires at least a year of toil? Quite simply, commercial mead is almost impossible to find in Pennsylvania. Additionally, if you do manage to unearth it, most agree that it isn't as quaffable as the homemade stuff. Hummel says Bunratty, the only locally available mead, is "terrible," and less a mead than a "white wine sweetened with honey."

"I don't like much commercial mead," he says.

Clair concurs. "I've tried first- and second-place meads at competitions," he says, "and compared to commercial stuff, it's much better."

It's unclear why many commercial meads are lacking. It might have something to do with the fact that there isn't much of a demand for the drink, and it can take several years to perfect.

Whatever the case, Browne, Benjamin, Clair and others are forced to make mead if they want to keep drinking it, which is fine by them. And for brewers like Browne, mead is a change from the norm — and a welcome challenge.

If you're interested in joining this faction of Renaissance Faire groupies and next-level beer brewers, keep a few things in mind. For a solid mead recipe, Benjamin recommends Pattie Vargas and Rich Gulling's book Making Wild Wines & Meads, and Ken Schramm's The Compleat Meadmaker. Also, meadmadecomplicated.org is a helpful resource, despite its name.

Next, pick your yeast. There is such a thing as mead yeast (it's available at Home Sweet Homebrew), but you don't need to buy it. You can opt for a white wine or Champagne yeast, which each cause the mead to ferment at different rates. There are also dry and liquid yeasts, but Benjamin and Browne agree that dry is optimal — just be sure to hydrate it by placing it in a sterile container of water for 20 minutes.

Though you can choose to make it out of only water and honey — which can be very tasty — adding spices, herbs and fruit dramatically changes your mead. ("I once even added marshmallows to mead," says Benjamin, "but take it from me, that's not a good idea." ) Add tea for an Ethiopian-inspired mead, or experiment with various flavors of honey, like orange blossom or dandelion strains. If you're throwing fruit into the mix, use Campden tablets, which are available online, to sanitize the mixture.

Finally, think long and hard about the most crucial ingredient in your mead: honey. Raw, local, fresh honey will always yield the best meads. You can purchase it at Greensgrow Farms and from several farmers markets throughout the city. Another reason to purchase local honey is that it will keep your eco-conscience relatively clear: Small-scale bee operations are thought to contribute less to the country's honeybee shortage than big-biz apiaries.

Plus, Browne insists that local honey will produce the most local mead, in the truest sense of the term. "Bees travel a mile from their hive to eat," he says. "So that means Greensgrow Farms bees may make honey out of spilled Juicy Juice on the street in Fishtown, or a bag of Fritos. Or even Arctic Splash! I love to think about that."

(holly.otterbein@citypaper.net)

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