AHC: Have Mead Survive!!!!

For centuries, nay millennia, mead was the go to drink for Europeans at least, but beer (it's age old adversary) and wine later edge it out as the most popular drink. How can we keep mead as the most popular? One way might be to have non-destructive bee-keeping (i.e. non-destructible hives) come into play earlier, although I have no idea how to do this :D
 
On an unrelated note, a few years ago they found the (petrified?) remains in the UK of 30,000 year old mead made from the petals of heather flowers. Talk about a mead that will put hair on your chest! Last I heard some microbrewery was trying to bottle it.:cool:
 
On an unrelated note, a few years ago they found the (petrified?) remains in the UK of 30,000 year old mead made from the petals of heather flowers. Talk about a mead that will put hair on your chest! Last I heard some microbrewery was trying to bottle it.:cool:

That sounds amazing :D Didn't they also find some Egyptian mead at some point? Or was that just honey?
 
In Russia there is a drink called medovukha that is basically a cheap and quickly made version of mead. While the original recipe was lost variants are still sold today.
 

GdwnsnHo

Banned
Technically Mead is a form of wine. At least as far as I've ever been informed.

And an easy way to make it predominant? Have William of Normandy fail his conquest of England. If either the Norse or Anglo Saxons are in charge, then Mead drinking will still be quite common, and not replaced by the more fashionable (and French) wine.

Butterflies permitting, an Anglo-Saxon Britain could establish itself as a major world power - if not the ultimate.

Even better, if you can have Harold Godwinson do the unthinkable, and recognise Harald Hardarada as the best ruler of Normandy, or at least convince him to invade with offers of backing - you could see a more Norse France, and perhaps more Mead drinking on the continent.

Hehehe, Norse France, now that sounds fun!
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
What you need is to avoid taxation on sugar and honey, and establish a level of quality like the French have for wine. A reason it went out of fashion was in part because it was expensive to produce commercially, and was awful because anyone could make it. Additionally, you want to avoid the creation of mechanized honey extraction, so have Major Francesco de Hruschka die or not see his son swinging honey around his head to avoid or delay the invention of centrifugal honey extractors, because they were in effect what killed Mead.
 
Technically Mead is a form of wine. At least as far as I've ever been informed.

And an easy way to make it predominant? Have William of Normandy fail his conquest of England. If either the Norse or Anglo Saxons are in charge, then Mead drinking will still be quite common, and not replaced by the more fashionable (and French) wine.

Butterflies permitting, an Anglo-Saxon Britain could establish itself as a major world power - if not the ultimate.

Even better, if you can have Harold Godwinson do the unthinkable, and recognise Harald Hardarada as the best ruler of Normandy, or at least convince him to invade with offers of backing - you could see a more Norse France, and perhaps more Mead drinking on the continent.

Hehehe, Norse France, now that sounds fun!

Awesome!

I have a liking for Anglo-Saxon culture, so that interests me very much. One subject in that TL would be the differences in the English language. I take it that the French influences on English are minimal, and that it is essentially a Germanic language.
 
Honey is too hard to come by for mead to be a serious contender compared to wine or beer. Sugar sources from fruit or grains are simply much, much easier to come by in greater amounts in agricultural societies.

That said, mead is still very popular in Ethiopia.
 
Awesome!

I have a liking for Anglo-Saxon culture, so that interests me very much. One subject in that TL would be the differences in the English language. I take it that the French influences on English are minimal, and that it is essentially a Germanic language.

Grammatically they're minimal, but we owe quite a lot of our vocabulary (as well as the way we spell even native words) to the French.
 
For mead to be more commonplace increase bee keeping. Have it become favored by royalty or otherwise known as the booze of choice for peasants or both. Give incentives and install a sense of pride amongst mead vintners. Get competitions going and advertise the hell about meads great taste and many benefits. All that will make it more commonplace.Will it replace beer or wine? No, but it'll probably be as common as cider which is another excellent beverage.
 
OP, mead and mead-making actually does survive in several European countries, including my own. You have several dedicated producers over here and in some of the neighbouring countries. Hell, you can often buy high-quality mead at various annual fairs and festivals. It's not exactly some lost ancient art that no one understands.

And no, I'm not Scandinavian. (The popcultural association of mead with only Vikings and Anglo-Saxons has always baffled me.)
 
I think that a key point may be avoiding the dissolution of the Monasteries- A year or so ago I bought a very nice bottle of mead on a visit to Lindisfarne which was working on the old monk's recipe, and it was a relatively common produce, which among many other things broke down with the end of the monastic infrastructure.
 
I think that a key point may be avoiding the dissolution of the Monasteries- A year or so ago I bought a very nice bottle of mead on a visit to Lindisfarne which was working on the old monk's recipe, and it was a relatively common produce, which among many other things broke down with the end of the monastic infrastructure.

Not sure i buy that one, as Monasteries was one of the primary importers of wine from southern europe displacing mead as the drink of choice among the elite via greater accessibility and the lure of foreign luxury goods.
 
Technically Mead is a form of wine. At least as far as I've ever been informed.

And an easy way to make it predominant? Have William of Normandy fail his conquest of England. If either the Norse or Anglo Saxons are in charge, then Mead drinking will still be quite common, and not replaced by the more fashionable (and French) wine.

Butterflies permitting, an Anglo-Saxon Britain could establish itself as a major world power - if not the ultimate.

Even better, if you can have Harold Godwinson do the unthinkable, and recognise Harald Hardarada as the best ruler of Normandy, or at least convince him to invade with offers of backing - you could see a more Norse France, and perhaps more Mead drinking on the continent.

Hehehe, Norse France, now that sounds fun!

Proper mead is distinct from wine, although you do get what are pretty much just mead flavoured wines (and aren't as good :p )

I'm less sure that a surviving Anglo-Saxon England would be enough, after all the Franks didn't manage to conquer all of the Germans, but mead is no longer a staple drink for them either. That said, if France is toppled (or at east her cultural supremacy among the nobility of Europe weakened) that could go a long way and I think would be enough (when coupled with a couple of other PODs related to honey and bees etc).

Honey is too hard to come by for mead to be a serious contender compared to wine or beer. Sugar sources from fruit or grains are simply much, much easier to come by in greater amounts in agricultural societies.

That said, mead is still very popular in Ethiopia.

Mead managed to be the go to drink for the Germans and Norse for years didn't it? Not to mention I believe it remains quite popular in Poland. I agree that it's probably not possible for it to survive as the most popular alcoholic drink in Northern Europe, but it could certainly be doing a lot better than it currently is.

For mead to be more commonplace increase bee keeping. Have it become favored by royalty or otherwise known as the booze of choice for peasants or both. Give incentives and install a sense of pride amongst mead vintners. Get competitions going and advertise the hell about meads great taste and many benefits. All that will make it more commonplace.Will it replace beer or wine? No, but it'll probably be as common as cider which is another excellent beverage.

Any ideas as to how to go about this? My thinking would be if you see a more Norse France, it'll mess up French cultural supremacy and make Germanic/Norse culture more popular. Therefore the nobles (and by extension a fair number of the peasants) will pick mead, which could take the place wine occupies in OTL.

OP, mead and mead-making actually does survive in several European countries, including my own. You have several dedicated producers over here and in some of the neighbouring countries. Hell, you can often buy high-quality mead at various annual fairs and festivals. It's not exactly some lost ancient art that no one understands.

And no, I'm not Scandinavian. (The popcultural association of mead with only Vikings and Anglo-Saxons has always baffled me.)

I've had mead quite a few times (it's my favourite alcoholic drink :D ) but it's a pain to get a hold of these days and it's certainly not anywhere near as popular as it used to be in Anglo-Saxon times.

I think that a key point may be avoiding the dissolution of the Monasteries- A year or so ago I bought a very nice bottle of mead on a visit to Lindisfarne which was working on the old monk's recipe, and it was a relatively common produce, which among many other things broke down with the end of the monastic infrastructure.

I'm inclined to agree with Sian on this one, they probably did more to promote wine than to help mead.
 
Mead was never a common drink, nowhere near as widespread as wine or beer. If it is to survive in Western Europe (it did in Poland, Russia and the Baltic), it will have to be as a status drink, something to mark certain occasions or to demonstrate refinement. IOTL it lost that position and by the 17th century had effectively become medicinal.

Quantity is not a big issue. The constraints of beekeeping mean that it will never be as readily available as beer or wine, but it needn't be. Champagne is in very limited supply, but that hasn't hurt its status or symbolism. And for all its relative rarity, honey was available enough in medieval Europe to make a trade good. The Hansa even exported it. If people had wanted to make mead, they could have made enough for every high-status family to drink it occasionally.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as to stop the Norman Conquest. Scandinavia and Northern Germany had long-standing, unconquered Germanic cultures, and they stopped drinking mead in large quantities, too. What might be required is stopping the dominance of French courtly culture and Salernitan medicine. Neither system had any space for mead or beer, so the high-status drink of choice became wine. Beer can survive that by dint of being the only option for everyday consumption in much of Europe. Mead is much more threatened, because people can easily choose not to drink it.

Or maybe the Romans can adopt mead as a specific ceremonial drink in late antiquity? Hard to see why, but the cultural cachet could establish it at the Carolingian court, and it'd be plain sailing from there.
 
For centuries, nay millennia, mead was the go to drink for Europeans at least, but beer (it's age old adversary) and wine later edge it out as the most popular drink. How can we keep mead as the most popular? One way might be to have non-destructive bee-keeping (i.e. non-destructible hives) come into play earlier, although I have no idea how to do this :D

I think part of the demise was improved trade (bringing in Wine for example) as well as the change in society

In Celtic and Saxon society the creation of Mead was the job of the Widows - this allowed them to earn a living as well as contribute to the clan/tribe.

As society and farming techniques change - Ale, Small beer became more common and wine imported in greater quantities.

Its easier (and therefore cheaper) to create these other drinks therefore mead production would change.

I think it would be hard to address this decline in Mead production - maybe if it became the drink of choice - an obvious POD would be Harold Victorious in 1066 and all that and Wine not becoming the drink of choice for the 'Ruling class'.

But then economy and trade etc would improve regardless of the outcome at Hastings and while not as soon I think Wine and Ales would still replace it!
 
For centuries, nay millennia, mead was the go to drink for Europeans at least, but beer (it's age old adversary) and wine later edge it out as the most popular drink. How can we keep mead as the most popular? One way might be to have non-destructive bee-keeping (i.e. non-destructible hives) come into play earlier, although I have no idea how to do this :D

I suspect that your problem is partly perception. Mead was the 'go to' drink, but I'd bet that more beer was drunk than mead - it was the expensive, classy drink (hence kings had mead halls). Grapes didn't grow well in England and Scandinavia, so wine was, at best, a foreign import.

Once wine making and grape growing spread widely, wine overtook mead as the fancy drink, because 1) honey's expensive when you chop up the beehive to get your honey, 2) Rome, and things southern became the mark of 'civilization', so wine outclassed mead.

If mead EVER was the 'most popular' drink, I'd love to see evidence.
 
The simplest way would probably be to get the French court to drink mead at least some of the time. (Maybe the Vikings have some when they go to swear fealty to Charles the Simple, he tries a bit and likes it, and gets the court kitchen to serve it up on a semi-regular basis.) That way you could have mead preserve its popularity without introducing all the butterflies that hobbling French cultural influence would necessitate.
 
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