Sack Mead (Strong Sweet Mead)

Sack mead is the strong, sweet top tier of the mead family — a high-gravity honey wine built from far more honey than water and fermented to a rich, dessert-weight sweetness and a high alcohol strength. Where a session hydromel is deliberately dilute and a standard mead sits at wine strength, a sack mead is loaded with honey at the start so that even after the yeast has worked, plenty of honey sweetness remains and the alcohol climbs to the top of what wine yeast can reach — roughly 14 to 18 percent and sometimes more. The word "sack" is borrowed from the old English name for strong sweet fortified wines like sherry, and it names not a flavour additive but a strength-and-sweetness class: a mead made big. Deep gold to rich amber, viscous and luminous in the glass, a sack mead smells and tastes of dense floral honey, beeswax, dried fruit and a warming, almost liqueur-like glow, finishing long, lush and lingeringly sweet. Poured in small measures like a dessert wine and prized for its ability to age for years in the bottle, it is the honey wine at its most concentrated and celebratory.

Sweet16% ABV

Deep gold to rich amber, viscous and luminous in the glass, a sack mead is the strong, sweet top tier of mead: a dense floral-honey lift over beeswax, dried fruit and orchard fruit, full and syrupy in body with an almost liqueur-like warmth from its high alcohol at roughly 14 to 18 percent. It finishes long, lush and lingeringly sweet, tasting almost like a fortified wine though nothing is fortified — all the strength is fermentation. Poured in small dessert-wine measures and served chilled or at cellar temperature, it is prized for concentration and for the years it will age, at home beside sharp blue and hard aged cheeses, foie gras, and fruit, nut and caramel desserts where a lighter mead would vanish.

Sweet16% ABV