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 60 CE. There is a poem attributed to the Brythonic-speaking bard Taliesin, who lived around 550 CE, called the "" or "Song of Mead". The legendary drinking, feasting and boasting of warriors in the mead hall is echoed in the mead hall "Din Eidyn" (modern day Edinburgh) as depicted in the poem "Y Gododdin", attributed to the poet Aneirin who would have been a contemporary of Taliesin. In the Old English epic poem "Beowulf", the Danish warriors drank mead. In both Insular Celtic and Germanic cultures mead was the primary heroic drink in poetry. Later, taxation and regulations governing the