ODE TO MEAD

Long before we grew grapes for wine, or even pinched a few bread grains to make simple beers for that matter, people were still getting tipsy. Mead, the delicious alcoholic drink fermented from the sugars in honey, may have been our first tipple and was certainly held in high regard by our earliest civilisations. There is solid archeological evidence of mead imbibing in Europe dating back 9,000 years, or so, and some researchers would be happy to push that discovery back to 20,000 BCE.

Anthropologists now suggest that African Bush Tribes, long known to have collected honey as a necessary food source, may have inadvertently discovered mead, quite accidentally, when stores became wet and fermented.

As an aside, on these islands, traces of pottery shards associated with the widespread European Beaker Culture (and attributed to mead drinking), have been found in Scotland and carbon dated back at least 3,000 years