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.