The ancient fermented honey beverage has had a serious update.

Think of mead and what comes up? Merry maids, bold knights and twanging lutes? It seemed like this evocatively old drink would never find widespread appreciation in modern times beyond medieval cosplay conventions. But thanks to a swarm of dedicated disruptors, that’s changing. Instead of the often sickly-sweet liquid of yore, which was sometimes just cheap wine mixed with cheap honey, innovators are making drier, refined meads that use ethically sourced, single-origin honey. Along with brand design befitting craft beer cans and experimentation with infusions and ageing, the category is a hive of activity.

All booze involves the fermentation of sugar by yeast. In beer the sugar comes from grain, in wine it’s grapes and in mead it’s honey. Pure mead contains only three ingredients, the other being water. It’s believed to be the oldest alcoholic drink and dates back to 7,000 BC. Over millennia it’s been quaffed by Ancient Greeks, Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. In his Canterbury Tales, Mr Geoffrey Chaucer describes Absolon wooing Alisoun with the stuff.

Making it relevant, or cool, even, in the 21st century was always going to be a challenge. Moving production from the countryside to the inner city was a good start, and so was making it with contemporary appeal. After seeing first hand the mead revival in the US – pushed along by brewers such as Maine Mead Works or Redstone Meadery in Boulder, Colorado – Mr Tom Gosnell  founded Gosnells of London in Walthamstow in 2013, but soon had to move to a bigger space in Peckham.

“The perception of mead then wasn’t great,” he says. “If people had tried it, it was generally not of the best quality.” Mr Gosnell was keen to uncouple from the tunics-and-tankards stuff. “For us, it’s all about telling an amazing story, of thousands of bees visiting each flower to create honey, which we use to make a delicious drink,” he says. “People are surprised when we speak about the terroir of honey and how everything from climate to the location of hives to the flowers available affects its flavours.” Thanks to the bees, Mr Gosnell’s mead is complex, gently effervescent and subtly fruity with a clean finish. As mead’s status grows, Mr Gosnell is creating different expressions, raising the alcohol by volume (ABV) percentage and creating limited vintages using urban honey.

It’s an approach adopted by other new-wave mead-makers. In Brooklyn, the actor Mr Dylan Sprouse manifested an unlikely love of mead by launching the All-Wise Meadery in 2017, and behind the bang-on-trend triangle logo on his labels, he has a 12 per cent ABV variety with rose petals and an oak-aged 11 per cent number. The fact a wine-size bottle sells for $30 suggests the market for this new mead is sophisticated.

As well as being revitalising summer sippers, the new meads are involved enough to take their place on the table, too. “Our standard mead is crisp and refreshing,” says Mr Gosnell. “It’s perfect as an aperitif, but I really like the way it holds up to spicy food and cuts through fattier dishes such as pork belly.”

There is a growing appetite for local, sustainable drinks with genuine backstories that are made thoughtfully by passionate people, and mead fits the bill. It helps that it involves everyone’s favourite endangered insect, the bee. No wonder there’s a buzz about it.

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