Mead "pyment". Mulled mead is a popular drink at Christmas time, where mead is flavored with spices (and sometimes various fruits) and warmed, traditionally by having a hot poker plunged into it. Some meads retain some measure of the sweetness of the original honey, and some may even be considered as dessert wines. Drier meads are also available, and some producers offer sparkling meads. There are faux-meads, which are actually wines with honey added after fermentation as a sweetener and flavoring. Historically, meads were fermented with wild yeasts and bacteria (as noted in the recipe quoted above) residing on the skins
Mead in Poland Polish poet praised the "nutritious and healthy" mead of Ruthenia (then part of Poland, now in western Ukraine) as a "nectar" worthy of Olympian gods, as opposed to wine. Notwithstanding the popular notion that mead used to be the everyday drink in Poland, it has always been a luxury good, reserved for special occasions, such as weddings, and available only to the affluent, while beer was the daily thirst quencher of the common people. Mead was valuable enough to be deemed a suitable gift for monasteries and dignitaries. The oldest known recipe for mead was recorded in 1567 by the