by William Cobbs

Created on: June 20, 2008   Last Updated: November 07, 2008

MEAD was and is the first alcoholic drink to be MANUFACTURED by humans. We can of course only trace it to written history and the earliest reference we have in writing is in Sumerian from a writer named Bogolph, who apparently lived about the time of the development of writing and reading, 6,100 BC.

Bodolph claimed that MEAD was first made by the Gods and that it was sacred, thus we should make and drink it with great reverence. He also gave an extensive history of MEAD, happenings because of it, and excellent recipes for making it.

Starting at the beginning, BEES make honey. We think that when man was barely able to be upright and certainly had no written and probably very little if any spoken labguage, he found HONEY, wild in the world's many then fine flowering areas, unruined by cities or any development of civilization.

Our man and woman were stung by the worker bees when they attempted to rob honey, and soon learned ways to get the bees out of the way, usually carrying a smoking faggot and smoking up the wild hives, then extracting the honey onto giant leaves.
It was their first sweet, and still is our preferred sweet.
Our first human finally got to the point that he had a crude pot to keep his honey in, and he also used the pot for water. An accident happened. He left th honey in the bottom with the water, and was gone on a food hunt for several days. Returning, he gulped down the now-fermented mixture, and was soon seized in the rapture that we regard now as 'drunkenness'..our friend was the first of billions and billions of mead inebriates!

Down through the ages, other forms of liquor and beer were formed , but due to the need for BEES to make honey to make mead, mead became the liquor of the upper and more belligerent classes.

MEAD even had an established differential of 'levels of excellence'; in the early first century, the Bees of Hybla became the standard for the best MEAD, as it was believed that the Honey of Hybla belonged to Odin or Freda or other Gods with different names but top status.

We come to BEOWULF, the first really English poem, though its original English would be hard for the ordinary English speaker to understand:
"Thwaet! In gerfranoum in geargadum..."

But mead appears in the frolicing that Grendel and his Mother upset by eating the people and drinking the mead!

Down through the years from Beowulf, mead has become ritualistic, and lost favor for sales to bibbers, mostly because of the high price and value of honey.

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