WHAT IS MEAD?

"A fermented beverage made of water and honey, malt, and yeast "

Mead is an alcoholic beverage made by simply fermenting honey and water with yeast. Because of its similarities to wine, it is commonly known as "Honey Wine". Mead is typically sweeter than your typical wine, however commonly contains the same amount of alcohol percentage. 

To add extra flavor, various ingredients can be added to the batch. The most common types are traditional mead (just honey), melomels (mixed with fruit), and metheglin (spiced mead). Pictured here is a cherry melomel, my very first batch I ever brewed.

"Mead is widely thought to be one of the oldest alcoholic beverages, with evidence for the consumption of a fermented beverage made of honey, rice, and fruit dating to the 7th millennium BCE in China. Alcoholic drinks made from honey were common among the ancients of Scandinavia, Gaul, Teutonic Europe, and Greece and in the Middle Ages, particularly in northern countries where grapevines do not flourish; the hydromel of the Greeks and Romans was probably like the mead drunk by the Celts and Anglo-Saxons, although the Roman mulsum, or mulse, was not mead but wine sweetened with honey. In Celtic and Anglo-Saxon literature, such as the writings of Taliesin and in the Mabinogion and Beowulf, mead is the drink of kings and thanes." -Britannica