Mead is honey fermented with water and yeast — but once you start adding fruit, spices, grain, or caramelized honey, each variation gets its own name. These mead varieties and styles almost all describe what went into the must alongside the honey, so once you learn the pattern you can read any mead label and know roughly what’s in the glass.
Mead varieties and styles at a glance
The main mead varieties are named for what joins the honey in the must, then finished by strength and sweetness:
- Traditional — honey, water, yeast only
- Melomel — mead with fruit (including cyser with apple, pyment with grape)
- Metheglin — mead with spices or herbs
- Braggot — mead brewed with malt/grain
- Bochet — mead from caramelised honey
- Session vs sack — the strength-and-sweetness axis applied on top of any style
Each of these mead styles is broken down in full below.
How mead types are classified
There are two independent questions that define any mead. The first is what was added to the honey — nothing (traditional), fruit (melomel), spice (metheglin), grain (braggot), and so on. The second is how strong and how sweet it finished — a light session mead versus a strong, sweet sack mead.
These two axes stack. A mead can be a sweet, strong cyser or a dry, light metheglin. So think of the named styles below as the base recipe, and strength and sweetness (covered near the end) as the finish applied on top.
Traditional mead
Traditional mead — sometimes called a “show mead” when made to showcase a single honey — contains only honey, water, and yeast, plus nutrients to keep the yeast healthy. Nothing else. It is the reference point for every other style and the best way to taste what a particular honey actually brings.
Because there’s nowhere to hide, traditional mead rewards good honey and clean fermentation. Orange blossom, clover, wildflower, and buckwheat honeys each produce a distinctly different mead from the same process.
Melomel: fruit meads
A melomel is any mead made with fruit. The fruit adds sugar, acid, colour, and aroma, and generally makes the mead more approachable and quicker to enjoy young. Two fruit meads are common enough to have earned their own names:
For apple, start with the cyser recipe; for berries and stone fruit, see fruit mead recipes.
Cyser: the mead and cider hybrid. Cyser ferments honey in apple juice instead of water, so it sits between hard cider and mead. The classic ratio is about 2 lb (900 g) of honey per US gallon of preservative-free juice, a starting gravity around 1.090–1.100 and roughly 12–13% ABV if it ferments dry; 1 lb per gallon gives a lighter, cider-like 9–10%. Lalvin 71B is the usual yeast because it softens the apple’s malic acid, and EC-1118 suits a bone-dry or sparkling cyser. The cyser recipe has the full one-gallon method, and the mead recipe calculator scales the honey and juice to any batch size.
Fruit changes what the yeast has to handle; see the best yeast for fruit mead.
Metheglin: spiced & herbal meads
A metheglin is a mead flavoured with spices or herbs — cinnamon, clove, ginger, vanilla, chamomile, hops, citrus peel, tea, and countless combinations. The name comes from the Welsh meddyglyn, “medicinal liquor,” reflecting its old use as a herbal tonic.
Spices are potent, so metheglins are usually built with a light hand and tasted often during aging. A traditional mead base plus a warm baking-spice blend is one of the most reliable crowd-pleasers a new meadmaker can produce.
Related calculator
Mead Recipe Calculator
Enter batch size, target ABV, sweetness, and yeast to get a full mead recipe — honey, water, OG/FG, nutrients, and yeast amounts.
Braggot: mead meets beer
A braggot is fermented from a blend of honey and malted grain, placing it squarely between mead and beer. It is often hopped. Depending on the ratio it can taste like a honey-rich strong ale or like a mead with a bready, malty backbone.
Braggot is the oldest documented “hybrid” style and remains popular with brewers who want to bring beer techniques — mashing, hopping — into meadmaking. Competition guidelines simply ask that both the honey and the malt character be clearly noticeable.
Free Mead Brewing Playbook (printable PDF)
A printable PDF companion for the mead calculators and guides.
Bochet: caramelized honey mead
A bochet is made by cooking the honey before fermentation until it caramelizes. Heating drives Maillard and caramelization reactions that develop toffee, marshmallow, chocolate, dark-caramel, and even faintly smoky notes — flavours raw honey simply doesn’t have.
The result is rich and dessert-like even when fermented fully dry. Caramelizing honey is hot, sticky, and prone to boiling over, so it’s a style to attempt carefully, but the depth of flavour is unlike any other mead.
Other named mead styles
Beyond the big categories, many meads are named for one signature ingredient. These are worth recognising on a label:
Because these categories combine freely, a single mead can carry several names at once — a spiced apple mead is a cyser and a metheglin.
By strength and sweetness
Independent of ingredients, meads are grouped by alcohol strength, which is driven by how much honey you pitch and how much your yeast can ferment:
They’re also grouped by sweetness — the residual honey sugar left when fermentation stops. A dry mead finishes near a final gravity of 0.995–1.010, a semi-sweet mead sits around 1.010–1.025, and a sweet mead retains 1.025 or more. You control this with honey quantity, yeast tolerance, and whether you stabilise and backsweeten.
For the ABV range of each strength, see how strong is mead.
Still vs sparkling
Finally, any mead can be finished still (no carbonation, like a wine) or sparkling (carbonated, like a cider or Champagne). Sparkling meads are either bottle-conditioned with priming sugar or force-carbonated, and they show off lighter, fruit-forward styles particularly well.
Strength, sweetness, and carbonation are all finishing choices layered on top of the base style — which is why “types of mead” is less a fixed list and more a set of building blocks you combine.
