Why the World’s Oldest Drink Is on the Rise Again

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Photographed by Tim Walker, Vogue, January 2017

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11 a.m. on a Wednesday doesn’t exactly scream “time to drink,” but customers are already clamoring outside the door at All Wise Meadery in Williamsburg. A shaggy mop of blonde hair pops out the door. “Sorry, we’re closed guys!” he says. “But come back later, okay?”

Their eyes grow wide, and despite the disappointment, they smile. They’ve got half of what they came here for: a glimpse at Dylan Sprouse.

Well, “mazer” Sprouse is more like it. A few months ago, the former Disney Channel star and his two friends opened All Wise in the same complex as the William Vale Hotel. It’s gotten a lot of press—in part because of who Sprouse is, but also because, uh, mead? That drink from centuries ago?

You’d think it might be strange to see the former The Suite Life of Zack & Cody star milling around vats and tinkering with bottles. But he’s so at ease, you suddenly can’t imagine him anywhere else in the world.

Sprouse started making mead when he was teenager, in part because his face was too recognizable to sneak in anywhere. “Like any other 16-year-old, I wanted to drink with my friends. We couldn‘t go to 7/11 and get some older person to buy it, so I decided that we may as well make it,” he says. Why mead? “Because it‘s a lot easier than beer.”

So he set up shop in his parent’s garage. His first batch had too much sugar, and he admits it was “gross, disgusting.” But Sprouse was hooked—both on making the beverage, and on learning its history. He can rattle off its Scandinavian ties, feudal laws on honey, and the effects of the Roman Empire. Sure, he had a few more misses, like a batch of garlic mead he affectionately refers to as “Stinky Boi” (he still defends that “poured over chicken, it’s fucking delicious”). Eventually, though, he perfected his own recipe, and now, his own brand.

As he grew older, Sprouse says he became a more selective actor. Which was good, because he was only taking jobs that he wanted. But he was also bored. So he thought, why not do this mead thing full time? With the guidance of famed New York restaurateur Andrew Carmellini, he opened All Wise in partnership with his two friends, Doug Brochu and Matt Kwan. Now he’s found himself the famous face of the budding mead movement.

Pouring mead at All Wise in Williamsburg.Photo: Katie June Burton / Courtesy of All-Wise Mead

You’d be forgiven if you didn‘t know what exactly mead was. When I got my hands on a bottle, I didn‘t even know how to even drink it. “Do you serve mead chilled, room temperature, or warm?” I asked my co-workers. They all shrugged.

Mead, often called honey wine, doesn’t have an exact definition or recipe. “You’ll find this is a pretty hotly debated item,” says Fred Minnick, author of Mead: The Libations, Legends, and Lore of History's Oldest Drink. But all meads have three key ingredients: honey, water, and yeast. “I really gravitate toward the notion that mead come from at least 51 percent honey. If it’s less than that, honey is a flavoring to the alcohol and not the base,” Minnick adds. From there, fruits, spices—and in Sprouse’s case, garlic—can be mixed in. Mead can be light, rich, sweet, dry, or savory.

And suddenly, it’s everywhere. In New York alone, there’s Enlightenment Wines, also in Brooklyn, which opened in 2009, and its partner restaurant, Honey’s, which opened in 2016. Up in the Hudson Valley, Salt Point Meadery opened in 2017. The American Mead Makers Association (AMMA) says there are now 500 meaderies in the United States, with a new one opening every three days on average.

“I think mead is making a comeback because of the rise of the craft beverage industry. You’ve seen breweries, distillers, and cider houses opening up all over the country. Mead is an untapped product that has potential growth,” Douglass Miller, a lecturer at Cornell University’s Hotel School, tells Vogue.

Many other alcohols like gin, mezcal, and beer have seen a renaissance thanks to a new focus on the culinarily diverse and dynamic. But with mead, there’s one key difference: while other spirits have swung in and out of favor over the decades, mead hasn’t been popular in the Western world for . . . literally hundreds of years.

Once upon a time, it was everywhere. Mead is thought to be the oldest of alcohols, with origins that can be traced back to China’s Henan province in the seventh millennium B.C. (It’s thought that the first batch of mead was created when rain fell into a pot of honey.) Virtually every ancient culture drank it at one point: the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, the Russians, the Polish, the Ethiopians (tej, a type of honey wine, is still the national drink in Ethiopia). There are references to it in the Bible, in Chaucer, in Aristotle, in Beowulf. It’s responsible for the term “honeymoon”: served in excess at weddings, newlyweds used to drink it a moon (so, a month) after their wedding ceremony, in hopes that a child would be born 9 months later.

Why did it fall out of favor? There were some new tax laws, as well as an increased availability of West Indian sugar in the 17th century that made honey harder and less necessary to obtain. But it was also the rise of other alcohols—namely beer and wine—that really did it in.

“Mead seems to fall when spirits became more widely available, so we’re looking at a time between the 1700s and 1800s. Mead is hard to make, especially in the 1700s when you lacked the equipment to obtain honey,” says Minnick. “Let’s remember bees protect their hives, and they’ll sting the crap out of you if you’re not smoking them out and wearing the proper clothing. If people could enjoy intoxicants from non-stinging bases, I’m sure they were all over it.”

Like farming in general, honey-making has since modernized, making distribution to meaderies easier. And as curious consumers look for new drinks to try, it seems mead will offer an endlessly varied option. But will it have staying power? “The challenge the mead industry will have, is getting their products in the hands of a consumer in an already crowded market.” says Miller. After all, there are ten times more breweries in the U.S. than meaderies. Still, 100 more mead businesses are in the works, the AMMA reports.

While mazers may never reach as many people as vintners or brewers, they seem poised to carve a lasting niche for the many flavors of their brew—well, except perhaps for Stinky Boi.