How does Veeky Forums feel about mead, compared to other alcoholic drinks like wine?

How does Veeky Forums feel about mead, compared to other alcoholic drinks like wine?

i like mead a lot, very vinegary in some ways and weirdly sweet.

I like drier meads, but they're harder to find and pretty expensive

Liquid slop of shit my dude.

I would describe its taste more like if you took hard grain acohols like whiskey, took out the burning sensation you get when you drink them, but kept that same type of sweetness.

It's alright as a novelty but it gets old quick. Next to wine mead is pretty much gimped from the get go. With wine (at least grape wine) you have an inherently complex raw material - the grape. Different grape varietals have different physical characteristics (thin skin, thick skin, whatever). You can modify the harvest date, or the amount of sun or water or whatever, and that changes the sugar levels or acidity, the ratio of seed to pulp and so on. You can de-stem, or crush whole clusters. You can use a different part of the runoff from the crush, you can leave it on the skins for more or less time. That gives you different levels of skin tannins, seed tannins, stem tannins, various solids. All that before you even start fermentation.

Whereas with mead what do you have? You have honey, ok great. Sure, there's buckwheat honey or clover honey or orange blossom or whatever, and those have different tastes, for sure, like how a chardonnay grape tastes different from a cabernet sauvignon.

But beyond that you have to do basically everything with adulterants. The bees did all the work. There's something to be said for that, but on a fundamental level you're going to have fewer options.

There's a reason nobody really cares about mead other than LARPers and renfaire types. It's ok, but it's pretty boring in the end.

I dunno, user, I'm pretty sure that you can fuck with honey to an absurd degree, just like you can make infinite subtly different varieties of cheese by changing all different manner of tiny things. I think you're underselling the honey process here just because you know more about grapes.

I fucking love a GOOD mead but they are rare, I have never seen one in a store. Earle Estates in the ny finger lakes is fantastic

Of course you can fuck with the honey, you can add herbs and shit, just like with wine you can ferment on the lees or you can use oak staves or use steel barrels or whatever.

But anything you can do to honey you can also do to grape juice, all that stuff happens after the crush.

When it comes to the creation of the honey, sure you can feed the bees different stuff, but that's about it. You're never going to get mouth-puckering tannins out of mead without using adulterants, so serving mead with fatty meats for instance is pretty much not gonna work. The bees do a pretty good job of pulling the sugars out of the flower, but what you end up with is a rather insipid raw material, compared to whole clusters of fruit that you can do a lot of wild stuff with.

But there's a lot to be said for magic tricks in the fermentation process, I wonder for instance why we don't see bottle fermented meads for instance, that might be kinda cool.

Only had it a couple times. Everytime it was too sweet and so heavy. Like drinking a cup of tea with way too much honey in it or something.

>putting sweeteners in tea
disgusting

>When it comes to the creation of the honey, sure you can feed the bees different stuff, but that's about it
Yeah but this is where I think you undersell the process, by not giving due credit to the sheer amount of variety possible by mixing flowers and colonies and hive temperatures and seasons and whatever the fuck else must be important for beekeeping that I don't know about.

Also, since you seem to know your shit, why is it that you only really see fermented apples (cider) and grapes (wine) sold "mainstream?" Do other fruits taste like shit when you ferment their juices?

>How does Veeky Forums feel about mead, compared to other alcoholic drinks like wine?
I love ren faires, and wine festivals both. I travel more than I'm home. I have tried a lot of mead from home brewers to different country festivals. I don't love it, don't hate it. I'm at the point where I'll never buy it myself, having tried enough I know I won't be in the mood. I might enjoy it if the mood is right and it's served to me and I wish to be polite.
I feel like mead is a legacy item, almost a novelty for role playing now, kind of a overseasoned, usually, thick syrupy thing that had it's day, but at this point it's not balanced right for modern tastes. The brewer seems to add too many flavors that compete with each other or any food pairing you could possibly do, and even a dry version is just toooo sweet. If there was no alternative, that is. But, there is! I'd shoot someone to have a delicious tokaji aszu, or wachau's Bailoni, lychee wine, orange muscat dessert wine like a Essencia, or an amazing heather honey whisky from a small irish abbey or something like a drambuie or a benedictine. In short, there are plenty of fortified spirits with 15 herbs and secret flavors, as well as fruit wines with floral and aromatic notes enough that I don't think I'd seek out mead on purpose given alternatives, even Jack Daniels honey.

I would guess it's the result of where industrialization happened first - namely, western europe. This allowed a sophisticated modern industry to develop with all the accoutrements (including branding, market segmentation, transport/logistics, etc), and the momentum carried it from there. I see no reason why this couldn't have happened in a pineapple-eating area or a grapefruit-growing area, but it didn't, so there is no sophistication around turning those fruits into something alcoholic. Not that you can't find alcohol from those products, but it's local, and not widely appreciated. Whereas you can find cider from asturias or wine from burgundy pretty much anywhere on earth that isn't a total shit hole.

Pineapple wine sounds pretty fun

>and even a dry version is just toooo sweet.
I think that's a big problem, people hear that it's made with honey and they think it needs to be sweet like honey.

>You're never going to get mouth-puckering tannins out of mead without using adulterants, so serving mead with fatty meats for instance is pretty much not gonna work.
>mouthpuckering
No one would want that anyway, but you can get tannins from grapes, hell even osk leaves and those aren't adulterants.
> insipid raw material, compared to whole clusters of fruit that you can do a lot of wild stuff with.
This is insanity talking. Have you ever tasted orange bloosoom, almond flower, clover and wildfloewr honey side-by-side? If you csn't taste the difference, you need to layoof the HFCS, boy.
>I wonder for instance why we don't see bottle fermented meads for instance, that might be kinda cool.
Wtf? What part of West Jeebusville, AR do you live in?

>ut you can get tannins from grapes, hell even osk leaves and those aren't adulterants.
Grapes are not honey, what do you think an adulterant is?
>Have you ever tasted orange bloosoom, almond flower, clover and wildfloewr honey side-by-side?
Yes, that's why I said they're different. Are you drunk?
>Wtf? What part of West Jeebusville, AR do you live in?
New York County, downstate NY

it's tastes like shit.

Someone gave a bottle of it to me and my wife for our honeymoon. We didn't finish the bottle. Never again.

>Grapes are not honey, what do you think an adulterant is?
You know nothing about the variants of mead called melomels and surprise, surprise still a mead.
>Have you ever tasted orange bloosoom, almond flower, clover and wildfloewr honey side-by-side?
Yes, that's why I said they're different. Are you drunk?
You didn't say they were different you said they were insipid and indistingishable
>New York County, downstate NY
Thanks for proving flyover is a state of mind and not geographic.

>melomels
Yes, it is a mead, just like wine with resin thrown in like in Greece is still wine. But it's still an adulterant. Why are you having trouble with this?
>You didn't say they were different you said they were insipid and indistingishable
They can both be true
>Thanks for proving flyover is a state of mind and not geographic.
No U