The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo He spits out “mead of poetry,” which turned anyone who drank it into a poet. This 18th-century illustration depicts Norse god Odin as an eagle. This article is a selection from the September/October 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine Subscribe Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99 “Every single human civilization has had some permutation of mead.” “The first time a beehive got flooded by rainwater, there was naturally occurring mead,” Greg Heller-LaBelle, president of the American Mead Makers Association, told me. As with many of history’s great innovations, it probably came about by accident. Researchers in China have found evidence of the beverage inside 9,000-year-old jars, according to Fred Minnick, author of Mead: The Libations, Legends and Lore of History’s Oldest Drink. Mead is believed to be the world’s oldest alcoholic refreshment, possibly predating the advent of beer and wine-not by centuries but by three or four millennia. “I’m saying that very conservatively, by volume,” Exhaustion and pride come through in equal measure: Since Charm City’s founding nine years ago, he tells me, it has become one of the nation’s top four or five producers of mead, the ancient libation made from mixing honey with water and yeast. He’s got a 3-year-old daughter and another who’s 6 months old, and there’s something paternal in the way he talks about his business, too. ![]() The man who emerges to greet me is Charm City co-founder James Boicourt, a solidly built, bearded, ballcap-wearing 40-year-old whose tired eyes peg him as either a small business owner, the father of young children or both. James Boicourt, co-founder of Charm City Meadworks, applies his knowledge as a master beekeeper to create flavorful beverages. A low shelf holds an inviting selection of board games-one boundary of the “taproom,” really just a small section of the site set aside for the mead makers to do their work. Off to the side, a tattooed woman with a nose ring is using a forklift to stack pallets. A person-size teddy bear in a yellow-and-black bee-striped T-shirt, sunglasses and a fedora slumps in a chair, looking like it’s sleeping off last night’s revels. Inside, a painting of a giant bee hovering above three hives with barroom-style tap handles plugged into them lends an element of whimsy to what is otherwise a fluorescent-lit, industrial space. Out front is a welcoming plot of grass, picnic tables arranged beneath a tarpaulin and a bench orienting visitors with the slogan “BALTIMORE: The City That Meads,” a sly reference to a 1988 citywide campaign to fight illiteracy. ![]() But when I find my way to Baltimore’s Charm City Meadworks on a Tuesday in May, it is the sober hour of 1 p.m. It’s almost certainly five o’clock somewhere.
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