What Does New Zealand Honey Do to the Taste of Mead?

Mead is made by fermenting honey and water with yeast. That makes the honey more than simply a source of sugar: it is the raw ingredient that can give a mead much of its flavour and character.

New Zealand has honeys produced from plants found nowhere else in the world, including mānuka, kānuka, kamini and pohutokawa, alongside distinctive native bush and forest honeys. Fermenting these honeys gives us fascinating way of exploring the flavours of the New Zealand landscape.

Does mead actually taste like the honey it was made from?

Yes – significantly so.

Fermentation changes honey. Yeast consumes much of its sugar and produces alcohol. Removing the sweetness reveals and intensifies the flavours of the flora.

This is one of the things we find most interesting about making mead at Undisturbed. We're not making an alcoholic drink that tastes like honey, rather we're exploring the flavours of Aotearoa - and are discovering the honey varieties that are distinctive make amazing meads that are receiving high praise by the industry.

What does mānuka honey taste like in mead?

Mānuka honey is particularly interesting because it has a powerful character before it ever reaches a fermenter.

It can be earthy, herbal and slightly medicinal, with darker caramel-like notes depending on the honey. Those characteristics make it quite different from lighter floral honeys.

When we ferment mānuka honey, some of that distinctive character survives fermentation, but without the same overwhelming sweetness.

The result is be a rich, complex mead that we tend to treat more like a port or dessert wine than a conventional beer or cider. Our Mānuka Mead is 13% ABV, while we've also explored mānuka at considerably higher strength in our Special Reserve.

For us, mānuka isn't simply a premium ingredient. It's interesting because it gives us flavours that are difficult to reproduce with anything else.

And what about kānuka?

Kānuka is related to mānuka, but the honey can express itself quite differently.

In our experience it can produce a softer, more delicate mead. Our Kānuka Mead has become a good example of how fermentation can reveal characteristics in honey that aren't immediately obvious when tasting it straight from the jar.

It's one reason we don't think of honey as just "honey".

In much the same way that different grape varieties produce very different wines, the botanical source of honey can make an enormous difference to mead.

Can mead express where it comes from?

We think this is where New Zealand mead can be a beverage with global relevance. Wine has spent centuries developing the idea that place matters. Grape variety, soil, climate and geography all contribute to what ends up in the bottle.

Mead has a different relationship with place. Bees forage across a landscape and collect nectar from the plants flowering around them. The resulting honey carries characteristics of that botanical environment. Fermenting it gives us an opportunity to explore those characteristics in another form.

That doesn't mean every mead needs to be made from expensive monofloral honey. Different honeys are useful for different purposes, and ingredients such as fruit can become an important part of the finished drink too.

But when we make a mead specifically to showcase a honey, the question we're increasingly interested in is: What does this part of Aotearoa taste like once it's fermented?

Why New Zealand mead could be different

New Zealand doesn't need to reproduce European or American mead. We have our own ingredients.

Mānuka, kānuka and other New Zealand honeys give local meadmakers a palette of flavours connected directly to this country. There is still a huge amount to learn about how different honeys behave during fermentation, how their flavours change with age, and which characteristics survive into the finished mead.

That's part of what makes the category exciting.

At Undisturbed, we're continuing to experiment with different honeys, fermentation methods and styles – including some rather unusual honey we've managed to get our hands on.

We'll share what we learn.