Far from being a drink that only exists in history books, mead is enjoying a renaissance in London and beyond.

By Molly Codyre

I'm standing in an archway under a railway line in Peckham, surrounded by tanks, pipes and cans of mead.

From time to time, the train rumbles past us, briefly muffling snatches of our conversation.

"I love orange blossom honey," says Tom Gosnell, before fellow head brewer Will Grublenik follows suit: "I discovered a honey from Finsbury Park that had notes of dehydrated mango, cooked apricot and stone fruit, and was very acidic," he explains.

"He was so far removed from what you'd expect from a honey".

In case it's not obvious, this arch happens to be home to Gosnells, a mead brewery based in the south-east suburbs of London, whose aim is to shake up and modernise the mead industry.

And 'modernise' is the key word here.

You've probably heard of mead, along with the Bible, medieval fantasy, historical paganism and the Druids.

You may have seen it in a museum shop.

It's likely that on all these occasions, mead was sidelined, considered a drink that had remained in the past for good reason.

But this afternoon, and in the weeks since my trip to Gosnells, I've discovered that a new generation of mead makers are hoping to prove you wrong.

In simple terms, mead is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey and water, usually with the addition of yeast.

It is not (although some mead manufacturers in the UK will try to convince you of this) a honey-flavoured wine, nor is it some kind of syrupy liqueur.

It is an entity in its own right: honey and water.

Of course, it's never that simple, and mead makers are constantly experimenting with this basic product, adding flavourings, carbonating it and adjusting the sugar and alcohol content.

If you've been to New York recently, you might have a better idea of where modern mead can go. Enlightenment Wines, in Brooklyn, opened its doors in 2009 and has built a reputation for its wine-like meads.

So much so that the team opened a mead bar, Honeys, in 2016.

According to the American Mead Makers Association, there will be 450 meaderies in the United States by 2020, and another 50 breweries and wineries will be producing at least one mead-based product.

This figure is up on 2003, when there were only 60.

In the world of mead, there's always something unexpected to challenge the drink's reputation.

In one case, it's a mead brewery run by former child star Dylan Sprouse, one half of the twins from The Suite Life of Zack & Cody series.

Both Gosnell and Grubelnik point out that the boom in popularity in the US is due to the fact that the country's wine and beer industries are a world away from those in the UK, as well as a greater appreciation of local honey varieties.

"People who didn't take part in the craft beer revolution felt excluded and didn't really want to turn to cider or wine," explains Mr Grubelnik.

"So they've found something weird and interesting, something they can make their own and call their own.

Christopher Mullin, founder of The Rookey meadery in Scotland, seconds this link between the craft beer industry and the growth in popularity and visibility of mead.

"I also have the modern phenomenon of craft beer to thank," he tells me.

"I think the last 20 years of more interesting beers has made customers more open to new alcoholic drinks.

- I haven't found any mead that matches the definition of "honey, water and yeast".

In the UK, the sector has not progressed as far as it has in the US, with ongoing issues around mislabelled mead products that are actually made with flavoured wines, and the drink's link to paganism (more on this later), which can prevent new customers from seeing mead as a modern drink, rather than a gimmick. But one brewery in particular is interested in this link.

Gordon Baron, a self-described druid who founded the Lancashire Mead Company, started making his own mead in 2009 for two reasons: to use in rituals with other druids and to satisfy his own demand for purist mead.

I couldn't find a commercially available mead that lived up to the definition of 'honey, water and yeast'," explains Gordon Baron.

I would see the words 'fortified honey wine' or 'honey wine', where it was a fermentation of glucose or fructose syrup with a small percentage of honey added to give flavour.

This is common practice in the mead industry, and is echoed by many of the producers I speak to.

I'm particularly intrigued by the roots of the Lancashire Mead Company, which draws on the traditional pagan connection of mead.

While many modern meaderies do away with these ties, Baron has taken them up again.

In fact, that's what prompted him to set up his own meadery. "To be honest, the story is a bit contradictory," Baron tells me.

"As pagans and druids had a respect for nature, it is thought that mead was linked to their beliefs.

Most modern forms of paganism are nothing more than conjecture, as there is no written record of their practices.

Druidry was an oral tradition, and if anything was written down, it was eliminated or incorporated by the Christian monks", he explains.

Mead was the drink of legend, of our ancestors, of those we remember with great esteem.

So it became the drink of pagan rituals".

It's undeniable that for many people, making mead a modern drink means moving away from pagan associations.

We're trying to shake off the reputation of being a 'castle gift shop'," Gosnell tells me.

"It's the kind of thing you take home as a novelty.

But there's more to the history of mead than paganism, Vikings and Game of Thrones, and you have to embrace it to fully understand the complexity of the product.

"The biggest challenge is that the history of mead is much richer than the current products," Paul Sullivan, sales and marketing manager at Lyme Bay Winery in Devon, tells me.

"Most countries have a mead culture and different mead names in each of these markets.

Mead-making at Lyme Bay began as a natural evolution of the products they were already making: cider and wine.

"We started fermenting apples to make traditional ciders, then fruit wines, so mead was a natural next step," Sullivan tells me, although he admits that "the story of mead and how it's made still has a long way to go before it reaches the general public".

Mullin expands on the drink's rich heritage. "I studied Gaelic at university.

As well as learning modern Gaelic, we studied the language from its first written form in the seventh century and the cultural context of Celtic languages throughout Europe, going back to the first millennium BC," he explains.

Mead has appeared on several occasions, in texts such as "Y Gododdin", the oldest extant Scottish poem, "Beowulf" (an old English epic poem) and in Norse myths, which make constant reference to mead.

I'd tried a few commercial meads, but they were nothing like what was described in those old texts, so I decided to make my own".

Mullin started brewing mead in a few carboys in his university residence, and by his fourth year he already had 56 gallons in his room.

For Mullin, the story of mead is "the beginning, the middle and the end" of everything he does.

"I have developed my drinks based on descriptions of mead from the Iron Age and early medieval period in Scotland and throughout Northern Europe.

He goes on to explain how archaeological discoveries contribute directly to our understanding of how mead is made.

For example, discoveries made at the 3,000-year-old Ashgrove site in Fife show that the honey used in mead came from bees that had pollinated lime trees.

These trees were not grown in Scotland at the time, which suggests that the honey used for mead was imported from mainland Europe even then.

For Mullin, the pagan contingent still represents a large part of his clientele.

"I spend much of the year in Viking clothing," he says, "and I work in my replica of a tent found in the Oseberg ship burial.

I'm also starting to be invited to take part in more pagan events.

As a practising pagan, Mullin speaks of his pride in playing a central role, but also of the fact that mixing business and religion requires a certain tact.

"I have to make sure that I respect people's deepest convictions, and I try to reflect them in what I do.

It's fascinating to see the breadth and diversity of what's on offer, and the extent to which the history of mead is either rejected or embraced by the various meaderies, even as they try to attract a wider customer base.

While Lyme Bay's meads also contain a certain element of pagan connection, they are also looking for a modernised carbonated version - a key element of Gosnell's offering and one that the team believes is the way forward for many mead drinkers.

"In 2019, we looked at our audience, did some research and discovered that our consumer was essentially a cider drinker," Gosnell tells me.

"It's like an easy change: it's sweet, it's a session drink, it's easy to live with, it's good in the sun.

That's what we've been focusing on recently. It was really the launch of the cans that changed our category and made us feel much more modern".

This does not mean, however, that the classic interpretation of mead - sweeter, with a honeyed profile, an ideal replacement for dessert wines or digestifs - has no place in modern mead consumption.

At Evelyn's Table, a Michelin-starred restaurant in central London, wine director Honey Spencer (in a stroke of nominative determinism) serves a mead as part of the pairing with the restaurant's tasting menu.

This is a Gosnells mead, produced as part of the brewery's small-batch collection, where the finished product tastes more like a dessert wine than a carbonated cider.

"Working in a restaurant like Evelyn's Table means a focus on local, UK-grown ingredients, and we're always thinking about how best to reflect that in our drinks programme," Spencer explains to me.

"The pairing with mead was the brainchild of Aidan, our restaurant manager, who likes to think outside the box.

The use of mead in the Evelyn's pairing is a great way to allow our customers not only to discover a new range of flavours, but also to move away from high alcohol levels, and therefore have a change of pace."

As far as the product itself is concerned, she speaks of the subtleties of mead as a representation of the honey from which it is made, in much the same way as wine tells a story not only about the grapes from which it is made, but also about the soil in which they are grown and the climate in which they live.

"Honey itself is a vehicle for flavour and, I suppose, terroir," explains Spencer.

"If a bee concentrates its pollination efforts on a particular plant, you can smell it in the final mead, which we find really exciting.

And it offers an excellent balance between sweet, sour and salty, which is rare in the drinks world".

Evelyn's Table is not the only New School establishment serving mead in London.

Peckham bar Funkidory has been serving mead for some time, and recently collaborated with Gosnells on a mead that the team formulated specifically for a cocktail they called the Kaserat Meadtini.

"It's served over ice with orange zest, with tonic water or in a vodka martini with vodka, Koseret mead and orange bitters," explains Sergio Leanza, one of the bar's owners.

"This dry mead is very similar to a dry sherry, which is why we like to serve it and play with it in the same way".

Elsewhere at Funkidory, Sergio Leanza uses Gosnells sparkling mead in the Southside Fizz, with gin, lemon juice, sugar syrup and sage, in a refreshing take on the classic Tom Collins.

Modern mead shows a healthy indifference to the way things have always been done

For a sector - and a product - built around such an essentially simple concept, the possibilities and stories that mead can inspire are endless.

Almost all the producers I spoke to have a different vision of what modern mead could be, but they all agree on one thing: mead is only mead if it's made from honey.

"The mead revival began in the 1960s, but most of what was available was heavy, thick and gooey, and most producers abandoned honey-only fermentations in their early days in favour of using sugar, at least in part as a ferment," Mullin explains to me.

He says that the new wave of mead producers in the UK "has given British mead a much-needed boost, with new ideas, new passion and a healthy indifference to the way things have always been done".

For Gosnells, this rejection of tradition is, in many ways, as much a part of its identity as Gordon Baron's acceptance of its history for the Lancashire Mead Company - but respect for craftsmanship is at the heart of both businesses.

Gosnell himself has lobbied the UK government hard in an attempt to obtain legislation and duty relief for mead. "I lobbied for mead to be defined in the same way as cider," he explains.

"Cider must have a minimum juice content to be considered cider.

Mead therefore requires a minimum honey content to be classified as mead.

This would eliminate all those who don't use honey and help regulate the product.

For a drink whose history predates modern civilisation, it may seem counter-intuitive to reject its history.

But for modern mead, the key to success in this fledgling industry is to strike the right balance between looking to the future and paying homage to the past.

Whether it's sipping The Rookery's mead as a digestif or cracking open a can of Gosnells on a hot summer's day, mead is fast becoming the ritual of choice - for Lancashire pagans to Peckham hipsters, and everyone in between.