Mead Marketing

[Matrix4b]

I have found that with wine, sweetness/dryness rating that is put on it is rather subjective, but I don't really drink much wine.

I think that the inherent problem is that Mead is considered one beverage, not a style. It has come into being that Beer has many styles: Pilsner, Bock, Lagger(sp), Guiness(style), ale, and just plain beer. From that comes many different tastes and many different viewpoints on what one likes in beer. The same can be said of wine, various different styles and grapes and regions, all the way from blush and ice wine to merlot and zinfindel. But Mead doesn't have those descriptions in viewpoint of the mainstream market. Yes, it's getting to be more popular and you usually can find one or two mead companies in a given Large Liquor store. But it lacks the description or designation other than just "mead".

The most popluar mead types that I have seen are:
Melomel- Fruit mead or fruit and spice.
Metheglin- Spiced mead or mead with a spice including vanilla.
Cyser- Mead made with base of applejuice rather than water
Braggot- Mead with grains and sometimes hops.
Bochet- Burnt honey or carmelized honey mead.
Pyment- Mead with grapes
Rhomdel- Mead with flowers such as roses or dandylions.
Capicel- Mead with Peppers

The sweetness levels that I have seen used in terms:
Sack- Very sweet, syrup like
Desert wine Sweet- Still sweet but less than Sack
Medium-Sweet- Close to a medium sweetness but with a bit leaning on the sweet side.
Medium- Full on middle of the road sweetness.
Dry- Dry like champaign or a dry wine.

Also, one final designation that I have found was carbonation:
Still- no carbonation
Sparkling- Some to medium carbonation
Champaign- Full 2 atmospheres or more of carbonation just like champaign and usually by neccessity Dry.

Now I haven't been to a professional competition and talked to the judges but many brewers use these terms to help define their mead and I gather that the styles go even further and may be codified further but usually there is no need. Certianly a que can be given from the judging table on the different catagories in the competion and the judges "score card".

But there you have it. Now to just get this definition codex into the common use and out there like the varous definitions of Wine, Beer, and even Scotch, Rum and Vodka have broken away from the single drink defintion stamp of being one beverage. Sort of like there are many different types of soda and not just "coke". Some like rootbeer, mountain dew, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, and the list goes on.

Here is the problem that as an industry and as the industry grows the defintions need to be used and on the label so that we can break mead out of the mold, both in fiction and in reality. Heck even in some fantasy books and other fictional writings and TV/Movies they have mead as ONE beverage definition.

Sorry for the rant.

Matrix

 

[anir dendroica]

"Mead" encompasses a much wider range of flavor variety than either beer or wine, even after considering the many styles of beer and wine.

There is at least as much flavor difference between honey varieties as there is between white grape varieties. To a refined mead palate, an orange blossom traditional is about as different from a buckwheat traditional as a Riesling is from a chardonnay. There is a fellow, Doug Remington, out here in Oregon on a one-man campaign to define "mead" as traditional mead only, excluding melomels, metheglyns, etc. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I do think it might be a good thing for the development of the mead industry to have a purity standard of sorts, like the Reinheitsgebot for beer or the various vintage guidelines for wine, to clearly define mead as a beverage of honey, water, and yeast.

That's not to say that melomels and metheglyns are less worthy, but rather that they are creative permutations of the more narrowly defined mead.

 

[mannye]

Gotta tell ya... a lot of the problem is the super ancient names. Yes. most of us on this board actually think that those names are awesome, but let's face it, we are brewing nerds.

Marketing and PR is about least common denominator thinking. You think Slime-heads would be as popular as they are today if they hadn't changed their name to Orange Roughy? How about the toothfish? You wouldn't be all over that, but everyone likes Chilean Sea Bass right?

Same with mead. Some marketing genius needs to come up with something new to call this magical nectar that when done right takes us to heaven!

 

[Medsen Fey]

The sweetness levels that I have seen used in terms:
Sack- Very sweet, syrup like

Sack is a term to describe alcohol strength (generally above 14%) and they can be dry.

Hydromel is the term for low ABV meads.



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