Moniack Mead (£7.99, 75cl, 14.6%)

More than most Moniack is the mead I’ve drunk to the point I can recognise the taste.

From numerous bottles drunk while campaigning at Witchfest, to bottles bought in odd Delhi’s it seems surprisingly common for all it has travelled from the Castle at Inverness. The website reads thus:

Moniack Mead is made from honey and is a delicious well-balanced drink It is probably the oldest alcoholic drink in the world and has always been a wine for special occasions, especially during wedding celebrations, hence the name honeymoon. Nowadays we recommend you drink it as an aperitif. In Summer it may be chilled and in winter mulled.

And it’s a pleasant enough tipple, but perhaps it has grown a little routine.

Moniack is sweet but not too sweet, perhaps slightly too cloying but compared to the other common mead Lindisfarne it’s a blessing.

Still I’m confident it’s a Mead I’ll return to, and ideally I’ll do more than drive past the castle to visit the Meadery at some stage.

Witches Mead

So this blog has been bumbling along for a fair few months now, and I occasionally wonder why it started, and what it was that inspired my interest in Mead beyond the ennui of existence? So here’s an incident that perhaps contributed.

For the last couple of years I’ve been an occasional exhibitor at Witchfest international, which needless to say is held in the delights of Croydon town. I’m not quite sure how I started, something to do with Friends of the Earth campaigning at the Eastbourne Lammas fair, and an idea that pagans might be more receptive towards environmental issues.

Environmental campaigning aside, Pagans seemed to be more inclined towards the drinking of Mead, in the same slightly irrational way that re-enactors are. To this end the bar at Fairfield hall, serves Moniack Mead for Witchfest, and it’s a our favourite, economical way of staying slightly tiddly behind the Greenpeace stall.

The last couple of years there’s been an eccentric German Scot guy there selling his own mead which is kind of cool. I think he’s German but ridiculously proud of his Scots heritage in the way normally only North Americans touch.

Previously a friend had brought back a Catch the Bear fortified mead, which at the time tasted unpleasantly lethal. A return taste was much more pleasant, but not sufficient to buy any more, and the slogan ‘Catch the Bear-it works / Barenfang tasty honey liquor’ didn’t sway me, although it’s a cool name Barenfang.

Instead the choice of a sweet aged mead (3 years+) and a demi-sec mead provided irresistible. His publicity material continues:

Aengus MacLeod Met: Mead Delicious Honey Wine
Our delicious Mead has aged carefully for 3 years in oak barrels, former sherry caskets. That aging process makes the amber coloured honey wine sherry-flavoured and assures you will keep your head clear even on the next morning.

Selling for years on CoA Witchfest international and medieval markets in Germany we are well known for out top class Mead.

Our Mead tastes best with 10C to 19 C. Warmed up to 70C it is a delicious hot drink.

My beloved Lovis calls our mead “Sunshine in the Glass”

I’m also intrigued by the idea that he sells Mead by the can, although my feeling is he means that stone bottles, which you get with Dutch gin / Jenever.

Needless to say he also sells a range of drinking horns, well you would wouldn’t you. Although very tempted they kind of looked like they’d just fallen off the cow, and I’m afraid the taste of horn might corrupt my mead.

So onto the drinking of German mead.....

The Meads of Dorset

What a strange weekend, and a bimbling odyssey across the coastal belt of Dorset, not so much in search of Mead but happenstance conspiring to put it within my grasp on multiple occasions.

From the wee town of Wareham and a delightful tipple in the local pub, the Kings Arms, to a deli in Corfe Castle selling for some reason the Scottish Mead Moniack. I mean why Scottish mead in Dorset?

Even the local National Trust shop was selling mead, a relabelled version of the Cornish friar’s vintner’s mead. Such an excess of diversity leads to indecision, and at £16 for a 500ml bottle common sense suggested that a national trust label doesn’t add that much to the flavour.

Finally in the tourist ghetto of Lulworth Cove a country wine shop devoted to English wines and of course meads. Despite being an independent retailer the shop seemed almost exclusively devoted to the Lyme Bay ranges of both wines and meads, with the suggestion that perhaps that they occasionally stocked the awesome Lurgashall.

Still with free tasting and five varieties in stock, as an advocate of Mead drinking I think they do fine work, and their brochure hints of details that may deserve a return trip.

• Special Mead (honey only) £8.95


• Christmas Mead (Honey & Brandy) £11.50


• Traditional Mead (Grape & Honey) £8.95


• Millennium Mead (Whiskey) £11.50


• West Country Mead £8.95

So what is it that makes Dorset the heart of the Mead country? Do Dorset folk still maintain medieval tastes? or do retired folk settling in cute chocolate box cottages acquire a sweet taste in their latter years?

Or is mead simply part and parcel of the tourist trail, a hint of Olde England, a memento to take home for the mantelpiece or to slowly decay in the drinks cupboard until Christmas?

Still the first mead on the trail, the find in the pub suggests that Dorset folk do drink mead and perhaps a look at Dorset Camra, or the local beer festival may combine various musings.

George Gales Mead

Another new experience and perhaps an intriguing beginning.

The mead itself was from Gales country wine range, and wasn’t anything special. It looks like they're produced/distributed by Fullers and I’d seen a bottle in the brewery shop next to Harveys brewery on the way to the Mead (and cider) Mecca that is middle farm. I’d been in enough of a hurry not to bother going in.

What was interesting was that it was on sale in a pub, which is something I’d been looking out for as I have an idea of a direction this rambling quest for mead could go.

The taste of the mead was an uninspiring sweet honey like drink. An ordinary mead, by anyone’s standard, that would have pleased me 6 months ago but now is nothing to my jaded taste buds. The usual bitter after taste was in evidence, perhaps more sweet than most and all together not a bad drink.

The landlady suggested she quite liked a tipple, every once in a while, but I wonder if Mead could be popular in pubs if it wasn’t quite so sweet. It’s hard to imagine people drinking it by the pint, whereas in days long gone that must have been exactly what happened.

Given the massive revival of cider that has followed in the wake of Bulmers producing Magners and then Bulmers to be served over ice, I wonder if something similar could plausibly happen with Mead.

And/or as a sister organisation to CAMRA, APPLE exists for the promotion of real cider drinking. Is there scope for a subset of CAMRA devoted to the drinking of Mead? Am I alone in this madness or could I persuade others to join me? Could we start with an annual Mead award, and then move onto the promotion of Mead drinking in pubs?

A wee while ago I joined CAMRA and they have some sort of internal forums, so perhaps when this blog has matured more I’ll open the subject on one of those forums and see where the conversation leads.