Abstract
The historical evidence of mead production from ancient times to the present is described in this chapter. Mead is considered by many to be the oldest alcoholic beverage. It is evident that several cultures around the globe were producing mead spontaneously at the same time without knowing of each other. Etymological research shows that mead is such an ancient beverage and that the linguistic root for mead, medhu, is the same in all Indo-European languages, where it comprises a wide range of meanings, which include honey, sweet, intoxicating, drunk and drunkenness. The earliest archaeological evidence for the production of mead dates to around 7000 bc. Remnants of alcoholic beverages were found in 9000-year-old pottery jars in the Neolithic village of Jiahu, in Henan province, Northern China. Archaeological data reveals that the beverage consisted of wild grapes, honey and rice, so-called wine–mead–sake, which is the oldest record of any alcohol-containing beverage. Later, mead was produced in ancient Egypt, Greece, the Roman Empire and medieval Europe.
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Vidrih, R., Hribar, J. (2016). Mead: The Oldest Alcoholic Beverage. In: Kristbergsson, K., Oliveira, J. (eds) Traditional Foods. Integrating Food Science and Engineering Knowledge Into the Food Chain, vol 10. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7648-2_26
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