Mead wine and honey beer: two paths of honey into the glass

Why honey was added to wine

Good grape wine needs sugar. A lot of sugar. Only then will the must ferment through and reach a decent strength. But in cool regions or in a cold year the berries come out sour and watery — not at all what you want for a proper drink. The solution was simple: sweeten the must with honey.

We have already covered drinking mead separately — including stavlenny mead (honey aged with berry juice). Wines too: in our reviews there are a little more of them than you can shake a stick at. This piece is about honey wine and its relative, honey beer.

Honey wine

The technology is straightforward. Grapes are crushed and pressed. The must goes one way, the pomace (the pressed skins and solids) the other. Whether to ferment them together or the juice alone is up to the winemaker.

Honey is added right away to the sour must from sugar-poor berries. On its own, honey ferments slowly — insanely slowly. To get a good result, stavlenny mead used to be buried in the ground for 15–20 years, or even longer. But berry juice speeds the process up: the yeast works harder and fermentation goes faster.

The fermented grape-and-honey mixture is filtered, pasteurized, corked — and off it goes. You can add hops or the juice of other berries, but then it is hopped mead rather than honey wine. Tasty, but a different story.

Honey wine does not keep long — a couple of months at most. There is no point chasing an aged rarity: drink it fresh.

Honey beer — bragget

Honey beer, or bragget, is quite another matter. The name comes from Celtic words: “brag” — a sprout, a shoot, and “got” — honeycomb. It speaks directly of the composition: plant grain + a product of bees.

It is one of the oldest fermented drinks. The first mentions of malted barley with honey are in Sumerian texts from the 19th century BC. Bragget was drunk by the Celts, Picts, Egyptians and Greeks. In medieval Europe it gave way to ale and gruit, but after the Renaissance it came back — especially in Ireland and Wales.

Classically, bragget is roughly 50/50 honey and malt by weight of ingredients. That proportion gives the drink honey sweetness and aroma while keeping the beer’s bitterness and body.

How to brew bragget

The process is close to ordinary beer, but with some nuances:

1. Mashing. Pour water at 65–67 °C over the malt and hold for an hour. Sparge at 76 °C to collect the maximum of sugars.
2. Boiling. Boil the wort for ~60 minutes. Hops to taste, 20–25 IBU as a starting point. Add the honey after turning off the heat — otherwise the aromatic compounds will evaporate.
3. Cooling. Fast, very fast. At home, put the pot in a bathtub of ice water. Slow cooling = pathogens = spoiled beer instead of bragget.
4. Fermentation. Ale yeast tolerant of high alcohol (Saison, Wyeast 1335, Mangrove Jack’s Mead M05). Temperature 18–20 °C. A week at minimum.
5. Carbonation. Bottle it with a teaspoon of honey in each bottle. Let it sit for a week — and it is ready.

Again: honey beer is a young drink. It does not keep long, so drink it fresh.

What they have in common

Both honey wine and honey beer are a way to save the harvest. Sour berries, scanty malt — honey makes up for the lack of sugar and gives the drink its strength. Both drinks historically appeared in regions where the pure product (wine or beer) turned out weak or unpalatable.

And both are not for aging. Honey wine and bragget live briefly: months, not years. These are drinks of the moment, not of the collection.

Bottom line

Honey wine is grapes that got a helping hand. Honey beer is grain that got enriched. Both drinks are older than most modern alcohol traditions, both are living through a craft renaissance, and both ask for one thing: drink them fresh, don’t put it off.

If you get around to a home experiment — start with bragget. The process is simpler than it seems, and the result is worth the honey spent.