In the Land of Mead and Honey

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2020 issue of Zymurgy Magazine

By Scott Kurtz

By Scott Kurtz

Mead. It’s theoretically the oldest alcohol known to humankind, and one of the first mentioned in written history throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. As a drink preferred by philosophers, chieftains, pharaohs, and kings and queens of old, there’s a sense of irony that the one continent with the shortest written history with it, North America, now has the most BJCP Mead judges. BJCP Master judge Omer Basha of the Homebrewers Guild of Be’er Sheva in Israel felt that needed to change.

“It’s been two years since we introduced the Beer Judge Certification Program into the country,” said Omer. “One of the main effects of having local trained and certified beer judges was a great leap in the level of beers entered into competitions. Two years after the first BJCP-sanctioned competition, we started accepting cider and mead entries and realized there was a great gap from beer in both the level of the entries and judging.”

A NEED FOR MEAD

While beer and mead are judged under specific BJCP guidelines, and judges look for some of the same flaws they do in beer, there are fewer style categories for mead, but much more room left for an extremely broad choice in the ingredients. Let’s take a quick step back and look at one of the differences between beer and mead: the base ingredients. To start, a beer brewer, if he or she chooses to brew a beer style such as an Irish stout, has to stick to a specific range and quantity of barley, hops, adjunct malts, and yeast to create a beer that matches up with the BJCP guidelines…