After countless bottles of mead, Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor, owner of Kookoolan world Meadery released the preeminent book on Mead Appreciation. Mead has come a long way from its reputation as a dusty medieval curiosity. It’s come out of the shadows into the hands of chefs, sommeliers, and craft beverage nerds who want something both ancient and innovative in their glass. Enter Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor’s The Art of Mead Tasting and Food Pairing.

This isn’t just another brewing manual or historical deep dive. It’s a comprehensive mead appreciation book that treats mead with the same respect and culinary curiosity usually reserved for wine. Whether you’re sipping your first melomel or curating a cellar of traditional varietals, this book is both a reference guide and an invitation to explore.

Mead has hit a stride in the craft beverage world, but resources are still rare. The Art of Mead Tasting and Food Pairing is the book that bridges the gap—equal parts educational, inspirational, and drool-worthy. It helps home meadmakers understand their own creations better, gives professionals fresh ideas for serving, and invites casual drinkers to explore mead with the same excitement they bring to wine or beer.

It’s no exaggeration to say this book belongs on every mead enthusiast’s shelf—or better yet, on their kitchen counter, with a bottle of mead open and something sizzling on the stove.

What’s Inside the Book?

Across 432 pages, Chrissie dives into the many styles, from honey-only traditional mead to fruit-forward melomels, spiced metheglins, and modern session meads—and shows you how to taste, pour, and most importantly, pair them with food.

Here’s a quick taste of what’s inside:

• 44 food recipes + 10 desserts paired with mead

• 14 mead cocktail recipes (including some from Meadist!)

• 60 sidebars highlighting meads, meaderies, meadmakers, and pairing tricks

• Guides on pairing mead with cheeses, snacks, vinegars, and even honey spirits

• A global perspective, exploring how mead developed alongside regional food traditions

With full-color photography, a ribbon bookmark, and coffee-table-worthy design, this is a book you’ll actually want to leave out where people can see it.

A Labor of Love (and Lots of Mead)

The depth of this book comes from Chrissie’s decades of passion for all things mead. In her own words:

Writing this book took some twenty years of hobby mead-drinking, meadmaking, and pairings; three years of running a mead-only bottle shop; five years of judging at Mazer Cup, four years of serious writing and cooking and tasting and photographing, and opening some 600 bottles of mead contributed by meaderies from all over the world! I spent the first ten years of my adulthood on a quest for my first sip of mead, and could not even have imagined how much mead I would have access to over the past four or five years! Bringing this book to fruition has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever finished!

That kind of dedication makes the book book feel more like an honest love letter to mead than just a reference guide.

Mead has finally hit a stride in the craft beverage world, but resources that take it seriously are still rare. The Art of Mead Tasting and Food Pairing is the book that bridges the gap. It helps home mead makers understand their own creations better, gives professionals fresh ideas for serving, and invites casual drinkers to explore mead with the same excitement they bring to wine or beer.

 

 

Find The Art of Mead and Food Pairing on Amazon

The world’s first mead tasting and appreciation book, all the history of mead drink, not a mead making book, but finally a mead drinking book!

Italian plums, also known as prune plums, are available from late summer into early fall. I happened across them when Apple picking and thought they would make for an interesting addition for a seasonal melomel. This recipe pairs the subtly sweet depth of the Italian plums with a spicy kick from fresh ginger, creating a nice balance of flavors that’s intriguing yet approachable.

Whether you’re picking from a local orchard or finding them at a farmers’ market, this mead rewards a little patience with a layered, aromatic result. Enjoy this Italian Plum Ginger Melomel chilled slightly. Great seasonal sipper for around a bonfire with friends as the weather cools or sharing around a holiday table with family (Italian, or otherwise). This mead will quickly become a fall favorite.

Tasting Notes & Tips

Be patient with clearing and aging. Extended aging will reward you with smoother, more integrated flavors and a clear appearance. Once mature, you’ll have an aromatic melomel with a slightly sweet finish that balances the natural tartness of the fruit and spicy ginger finish.

Ingredients (for a 5 gal batch)

• Approx 5 gal water
• 12 lb Honey (Wildflower or Orange Blossom)
• 1 packet Lalvin 71B‑1122 Yeast 
• 30 lb fresh or frozen Italian plums, pitted & lightly puréed
• 5 Tsp Yeast nutrient
• Pectic enzyme (to clarify fruit haze)
• 200 g fresh ginger, sliced or grated

Directions

1. Pit and lightly purée the plums to enhance juice extraction. Avoid blending too finely. Coarse purée or mashing is ideal to retain clarity and color.
2. Combine honey and warmed filtered water in the sanitized fermentation bucket, stirring thoroughly until honey is fully dissolved.
3. Add the plum purée into a sanitized mesh bag and submerge in the must. This allows easy removal later and minimizes sediment.
4. Rehydrate the yeast  and add into the must once temperature cools to around 68-72°F.
5. Mix in half the yeast nutrient (2.5tsp) at yeast pitch and the remainder divided into increments over the first few days of active fermentation.
6. Set to ferment in primary bucket, gently agitating every couple of days for the first week to manage fruit cap and promote flavor extraction.
7. After primary fermentation slows around 10-14 days, rack into a sanitized glass carboy.
8. Prepare ginger tincture by simmering the grated ginger in 1 liter of water for 30 minutes. Allow to cool, strain, and add to secondary.
9. Allow the mead to age in secondary for 3-6 months, racking occasionally as sediment forms.
10. Add pectic enzyme, about 2.5 teaspoons, to help break down fruit pectin and ensure clarity.
11.  When clear and stable, Bottle your melomel and let it age for an additional 3-6 months to enhance complexity and depth.
12. Serve chilled, and enjoy!

Last time we talked about the importance of research and what I learned by talking to some people. In this post we’re going to talk about what I did with that Info.

 

Permutations

Once you have the research it’s time to come up with ideas. It’s important to brainstorm and to get as many out there as you can. At this stage there’s no such thing as a bad idea because every single one has at least something about it that can be valuable even if it’s just showing you what not to do.

At this stage I’m gonna remind you guys what I wanted to keep in mind:

• Mead growth is tied to food trends and the craft beverage industry
• Many new consumers are actively looking for something different
• New consumers need to understand what mead is

With that information, I knew that I wanted whatever I created to help educate new consumers as well as getting them to socialize through mead. So after I did all of my brainstorming I cut myself down to three ideas.

 

Web

The idea here was to create a website for the mead world that could act as a central hub for everyone. Consumers and makers alike. It would combine ideas of multiple other platforms  such as Reddit, Instructables and many great blogs already in existence, allowing for a place where one could share their thoughts with others, discover new recipes, learn to be a maker, as well as keeping the community updated on the going-ons around them.

The amazing thing about forums is the community that forms around them. When you get people together and have them build something, it isn’t just that thing thats getting built but connections between them as well. By having an open forum, you create a space for an exchange of ideas, thoughts and questions that can bring people closer. There would be sections dedicated to teaching newbies how to make their own while giving them a bit more support than a book.

Vending

An earlier focus of mine had been on specifically at home makers but also is very closely tied to current and growing food trends. People are caring more and more about where their food and beverages come from and you can find them purchasing their produce and such from farmers markets  and other locally focused businesses. This pairs extremely well with mead’s ability to be hyper local and offers a place where one could learn more about the subject. To aid in this, vendor’s would use the stand to help them introduce new consumers as well as help them educate these budding newbies on the products. 

 

Packaging

One of the questions I asked myself during my brainstorming sessions was “where could people encounter information on mead?” You saw two of my answers above but my favorite was also, in my eyes, the simplest: right at the source. Packaging is often used simply to catch the eye of the consumer and draw them in, but when handled correctly it can be so much more. It can also be offered as a teaching aid, to help people better understand what the product is and what it can offer.

 

This is the idea that I ended up continuing with and in the next article we’ll talk about the iterative process.

As of August 2017 I became a proud graduate out of the Industrial design program at Wentworth Institute of Technology. What is that? Is that where you design huge machines for factories? Not really but you’re sorta close. The “industrial” part comes from the industrial revolution back when things started getting mass produced. Another term for it could be product design or human centered design or story telling or many many other things depending on what you personally would want to do with it. We help and enrich other’s lives through the objects and interactions experienced regularly.

Anyways, my story picks up at the beginning of my second to last semester and we start brainstorming ideas on what our thesis could be about. My main contenders were rock climbing, meal-prepping, and mead. While my knowledge point on mead was relatively low at the time, a friend had gotten me started on making my own so my interest was running real hot. Anyways, as the semester pushed on, we weeded out meal-prepping and eventually rock climbing as well.

What does this have to do with mead?

Once I had settled on the topic of mead, My next objective was to figure out what I wanted to do. I started out with the broad goal of helping expand the community, but I needed to narrow it down. First I had to talk to people already in the community and see what they feel about the subject and read between the lines. Which, I gotta say before continuing, contacting the community was amazingly easy. I started off with the mead subreddit and got amazing feedback that helped push me into other directions as well, so thanks for helping me get started! From this I was hoping to find out some of the bigger ideas that brought people into the community already:

Hyper Local

Mead has the ability to utilize all local ingredients, from the honey and the water all the way to the fruits and other spices you may want to add later. This can also lead to sense of community and local pride if focused on deeply enough.

Benefits the Ecosystem

Honey Bees account for 80% of the world’s pollination and have now become an endangered species. Drinking and making mead promotes honey sales and apiaries which can help the bees!

Gluten Free

The main ingredients of mead contain 0 wheat, barely or rye therefore lack gluten and allows it to be a beverage that can be enjoyed by all. Speaking off…

There’s One for Everyone

With as large a variety as mead has, varying from dry to sweet, still to sparkling and carbonated, there is a mead out there for all taste profiles.

Who else did I talk to?

I then contacted people who I considered to have a professional stake in mead to conduct interviews and learn about their feelings. I reached out to that old boss of mine who got me into mead before anyone else. Not only was he an interesting guy with a lot of good insights, he also helped me get into contact with all the other people I got to talk to. Here’s some highlights of who I talked to and some key info I picked up from them:

So, after talking to some experts and learning about the current mead climate I wanted to keep a few important take-aways in mind:

• Mead growth is tied to food trends and the craft beverage industry
• Many new consumers are actively looking for something different
• New consumers need to understand what mead is

Next post we’ll dive deeper into what I did with this info!

 

Special thanks for this post goes to:

Vicky Rowe

Billy Beltz

Allen Jones

Paul Reiss

If you too want to contribute to the Meadist/Mead maker/Mead Drinker community – get in touch on the contribute page.

As a designer, I’m a sucker for things that use design-thinking to improve upon a process or product that has been around for so long, people just put up with it, because ‘if it ain’t broke…’

Well, an Italian company called Beeing saw the traditional bee hive and thought it needed fixing, so they’ve introduced the B-box on indigogo as a ‘The game-changer for backyard or balcony beekeeping.’

Founded by a third-generation bee keeper, Beeing is a youthful company seeking to simplify the process of beekeeping to encourage a new generation to start harvesting. They believe that this can, in the long run, help sustain and increase the overall bee population.

The B-box is a beekeeping system designed for homes and urban environments, that makes harvesting honey and helping the bee population easy for anyone. One of the biggest changes to the traditional hive design is the ‘Bee Chimney’ which elevates the entrance/exit for the bees 7ft off the ground. No more need for the full body space suit!

The B-box also introduces a patent pending honey harvesting system that separates small portions of hive from the rest – mitigating stress to the have and over-harvesting.

With 80% of the world’s food supply needing assistance from these great pollinators, as well as declining bee populations due to environmental threats, it’s great to see innovative ideas helping spur conversation and action.

You can get our own B-box by visiting IndieGoGo. or learn more about beeing on their site: https://beeing.it

Hey Meadist readers!

My name is Casey and it’s been about 2 years since I started drinking mead.
…Wow, it feels really good to get that off of my chest.

As a new contributer for The Meadist, I’ll be posting some articles over the next couple of weeks giving you guys some of my background as well as reviews and updates, all of that good stuff. With this article I’ll give you the beginning of the beginning.

As I said my interest in mead started about two years ago when a former boss of mine you may know, the original meadist, brought a wide selection into the office. Like many fantasy readers I had heard of the stuff before but the genre doesn’t always offer the most enticing descriptions (looking at you Neil). Though I cant remember specifically which mead i was given, i remember the dark purple in the glass topped with a light, pink head. The smell of blueberries and light floral notes which lead to what started as a sweet taste but had some acidity to balance it. At that point I was hooked. (Editors note: Casey’s gateway mead was Superstition’s Marion)

My journey has progressed in many ways since then. I’ve been working on not only expanding my tastes but have started a number of projects including attempting to make my own mead as well as basing my senior thesis around the subject. My next couple articles are going to address the latter, give you guys a quick rundown of my education as well as how i spent two semesters on mead!

Also I Hope you all enjoyed a photo of my dog Willow, who has recently started accompanying me on this wonderful road.

If you too want to contribute to the Meadist/Mead maker/Mead Drinker community – get in touch on the contribute page.

The Rhapsody is a blackberry draft mead from Meridian Hive Meadery out of Austin Texas. They were founded in 2012 and more recently have undergone a rebranding. Their new look is sooo much better than their old identity. But more on that later.

I was sent a handful of products from the good folks from Texas, both draft style and traditional mead, so there will be more Meridian Hive reviews coming down the line. Because it was the only one I got two of, the first one I tried was the Rhapsody. Here’s what they have to say about it,

Rhapsody takes center stage to showcase The Hive’s techniques to deliver intense fruit flavor while maintaining a smooth and subtle sweetness. Our customers have spoken loudly and launched this mead to the top of our range. Wholesome blackberries, orange blossom honey and just the right amount of carbonation combine to make Rhapsody an amazingly refreshing draft mead.

The Mead Review

I feel as though canned beverages are meant to be consumed from the can, but for the sake of review and photography, I pour mine in a tulip glass. It pours a beautiful ruby color, with ample carbonation. The bubbles clear quickly, leaving a nice translucency. A great, enticing appearance, glad this blog forced me to pour it out of the can!

The aroma is sweet berry and honey, with a slight amount of funkiness. There is a surprising amount of grape notes as well. Upon first taste, I am very intrigued. It definitely has a distinct flavor. It starts with handfuls of berry, but then gives way to a lot of sweetness and artificial grape-like flavors. After a few more sips, it becomes a bit too sweet. It’s saving grace however is the carbonation. The bubbles lighten up the mouthfeel, saving it from drinking too much like cough syrup. It’s labeled as a semi-sweet mead, but it’s drinking sweeter than that for me. This could be a nice summer sipper if everything is toned down a few notches – I’ll see if using it as a mixer will do just that.

The Label Design / Branding Review

I’ll start broad on this post and then dig further into individual elements on future posts.

The new Merdian Meadery branding is a great leap forward for not only their company, but the mead industry in general. Shedding the old treasure map, scroll, banner, pirate, middle-ages, whatever else was going on (there was a lot) for the clean, modern aesthetic they have now helps get rid of the Renaissance Fair stigma mead so often gets. It’s especially smart for the draft mead, a style that can capture a broader audience.

While the new identity is pretty nice, I feel like it needed a few more rounds of iteration to make it really sing. The colors are good, but the patterning on the website and traditional mead labels feels disjointed. One thing that is bothering me is the thick bubbly lines and rounded corners of the icon. The roundedness of the bee icon and stripes sort of fight with the less rounded star and “Meridian Hive” type. I assume its a bee, though cutting off the bottom portion to accommodate the star makes it look like it has legs. Now that I see the legs, it’s looking like an alien to me, with antennas and wearing a bra or v-neck t-shirt. I wonder what would happen if the star was flipped around so the top point becomes a stinger?

I apologize, I’m realizing i’m probably starting to sound like an asshole here with these comments. The 6.5% rhapsody (and gin drink i made with it) must be getting to me. It is a solid rebrand, infinitely better than the old identity and sure to draw attention on the shelf. I particularly love “Mead in Austin.”

Many more Meridian Hive Meads to try. Stay posted!