Coffee Find out about other alcohol-containing beverages. Click here . Mead is almost certainly the oldest alcoholic beverage known to man and likely discovered before the wheel was invented. As long as there have been bees and honey there has been mead.
Mead occurs naturally when honey is mixed with water and yeast.
A chance occurrence of mead was likely produced during the Stone Age when honey became wet from rain and wild yeast in the air settled into the mixture. Mead's popularity has waxed and waned and is currently on the rise throughout the world. The history of mead has roots in royalty, religion, sex, and violence throughout the ages of time and cultures of the world. There are tales of Norsemen toasting one another with mead drunk from skulls of their slain enemies. According to Nordic mythology, the Norse gods lived wild lives of reckless abandon often given to lechery.