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Welcome to HoneySide!

Mead is an alcoholic beverage created by fermenting honey and water with yeast as the fermenting agent. It is an incredibly old style of preparing drinks for consumption that was romanticized for centuries. It was the chosen drink of Beowulf as he sat in the hall of King Hrothgar. It was a common beverage in the city of Tenochtitlan, the pinnacle of Aztec power in Mexico, and it was the predominate drink in the Old World until the 1700s when sugar made its way across the ocean and then found its ways into beer, amplifying its taste and crowning itself as king of the brews.

Cooking for me is a more than just a hobby; it is a fascinating transfer of ideas, cultures, history, and personality. It is one of the reasons why I study archaeology, as it is a method to understand how people interact with each other, even though those people are long gone, and you are but a person and their trowel, analyzing their remains. Throughout history, food brought people together and what better way to gather people together like a good meal with good company. Today that has transformed into a family dinner, or better yet, a holiday dinner Passover or Easter which both are this weekend.

And when an intrepid culture somewhere in the world (leading evidence points to the Jiahu Culture in Northeastern China) started to purposefully make the first alcoholic beverages, during the Neolithic, by combining rice, water, grapes, honey, and a shopping list of other ingredients, and mixing it with yeasts, it opened up new variety with culinary traditions. There are even some theories out in the world of academia that purport that dinosaurs actually ate half-fermented mega fruits during the Cretaceous Period, and got a buzz from some Dino-Mash.

In our modern day, we have an industry that is valued to be well over the billions of dollars, as well as cultural and historic value that is priceless to people. However, one does not need to be at Anheuser-Busch or working at Stags’ Leap to be able to make a great beverage.