How Gosnells helped make mead both fashionable and sessionable

Mead is fashionable again. Better than that, it’s commercial and very nearly mainstream, and a large part of the credit for that – at least in Britain – goes to Tim Gosnell and his meadery Gosnells of London. 

He’s had several goes at creating a retail space of his own. There was the room above a restaurant in Peckham, there was the ‘mead garden’ of tables, benches and recycled wood dividers and planters set up on the concrete outside his industrial estate meadery – it was quite cute, actually, in a modern craft-biergarten kind of way. 

And now there is the first mead bar on the famed Bermondsey Beer Mile, taking over the 72 Enid Street arch, between Moor Beer and Cloudwater. It’s a simple set-up – tables, chairs and benches fill the deep archway plus some space on the roadside, then there’s a bar at the back with storage behind.  

The commercialisation of mead has been helped by the fact that, while what’s on the bar here is recognisably similar, Gosnells core range is not the sweet, almost liqueur-like honey wine meads sold in tourist shops and medieval markets, whose strength can be in the high teens or even the low 20s. Some of these honey wines were actually sweet grape wine flavoured with honey.

Inside the Enid St arch

Session meads

Instead, Gosnells is mostly session or ‘short mead’, a light version weighing in at 5% ABV or less*. As well as making it more approachable in a market where ready-mixed cocktails and hard seltzers are typically 4% or 5%, it also makes it more cost-effective to produce. Honey is normally the only sugar source for fermentation here and it’s not a cheap ingredient, so a 15% mead is a lot more expensive to make than a 4% one. In addition, a 15% or 18% mead can take a lot longer to ferment and finish. 

Of course, while the production process is very similar to beer, minus the mashing and boiling, it does have to change a bit, as I learned when chatting in the mead garden a few months back with Gosnells head brewer Will Grubelnik. “We pasteurise it to stop the fermentation early,” he explained. That’s because if they didn’t stop the fermentation early, the yeast could simply eat all the sugar leaving a bone-dry liquid. 

Control over the fermentation as well as the type of honey and any other ingredients used also helps bring out flavour, despite the lower ABV. “Honey is almost 99% sugar and water, with a very little protein and some other flavour compounds,” Will added. 

Head brewer Will at the old 'mead-garden'

“Stopping early allows you to collect some mid-fermentation products. Even though we’re 100% honey we’re able to show people a huge range of flavour profiles so there’s something to appeal to everyone, even if they’re scared of mead or don’t like honey!”  

For example, Gosnells has produced a dry-hopped mead – not bitter but light and dry with a hoppy crispness, a mead brewed with Belgian Saison yeast, and several fruited, flowered or spiced meads, traditionally known as melomels and metheglins. There’s even a lightly soured mead, to ride the recent trend for sour drinks, and a series of postcode meads made with – and expressing the character of – honey from that specific area. 

Bringing out the honey's individual character

“With mead you can be as free as you want or as concise as you want,” Will says. “For example, I might want to focus on the honey and how that changes over time. With the postcode mead I want to educate people, so I take a hive each from East and West London and from Hereford and the Kentish coast. I ferment the four honeys the same way to show first how the taste varies, and second, that urban honey is not ‘dirty’!”

He also produces some specials at wine-strength, which as I mentioned take a lot more honey. Where he uses perhaps 85kg or 90kg of honey per 1000 litres for the regular meads, these take 370kg per 1000. (By comparison, my homebrew meads used between 2kg and 3kg per 10 litres, depending how dry I wanted them.)  

Mead is sometimes claimed to be the world’s oldest alcoholic drink. That may or may not be true – wine has a long history, and very early beer-like drinks seem to have combined several sugar sources, including honey alongside fruit and grains – but it’s undeniable that mead carries a certain mystique. The Mead of Poetry in Norse mythology, for example, or the mead of the ancient Greek Golden Age. 

And some of Will’s superb specials would definitely fit well in that legendary category! For example, at the meadery I was lucky enough to sample a smooth and warming 13% mead matured in a plum sake barrel, and a rich and toasty Bouchet mead made with 50% caramelised honey.  

Sadly, you are unlikely to find those two at the Bermondsey bar – they were very limited runs. But there are eight taps of other draught meads, which when I visited included one at wine strength and another constructed to taste like a Mojito. It certainly all makes for a refreshing change from beer. 

*Session meads are still very much in the historical tradition, where we also find short mead and local honey-based but session-strength specialities such as Estonian Mõdu, Finnish Sima and Russian Medovukha. Again, it reminds us that honey has always been a fairly expensive commodity, so a 5% mead would have been half the price of a 10% one. 

Tracking down modern mead in south London

Now there’s something you don’t see every day: mead on tap. And not just that, there’s even frozen mead cocktails and seasonal meads made with specific honeys. Welcome to Gosnells at the Coal Rooms, upstairs in old railway station buildings at Peckham Rye, which officially opened just a week ago.

Peckham, as in “Only Fools and Horses”, “Desmond’s” and Rose Tyler’s council estate home? Yup, that’s the one. While the station is now surrounded by grime and graffiti, it must once have been pretty grand. The area seems to be recovering some of that too, judging from how busy the upmarket restaurant on the ground floor was, even on a Monday evening.

Peckham Rye station

It’s also where Gosnells brewery is – about two minutes from the station, said Tom Gosnell. He added that there is a small taproom there, but it’s on an industrial estate, so the town centre made a lot more sense for their ‘proper’ brewery tap. And a nice mellow set-up it is too, with a relaxed gastro feel to it, excellent bar food from the restaurant kitchen downstairs, and of course mead on tap.

Gosnells London Mead is medium-sweet to my taste, light-bodied with distinct but not cloying honey notes. If it’s chilled, an unusual aroma of orange juice emerges too. It is also quite light in alcohol terms, at ‘just’ 5.5%, making it a Hydromel in meadmaking parlance. By comparison, most commercial and home-made meads will be honeywines upwards of 12%, with popular sweet fake-meads such as Lindisfarne and Bunratty weighing in at almost 15% (they’re fake because they’re actually grape wines with added honey).

Gosnells Mead

Tom told me that, like other commercial meadmakers I’ve met, he fell in love with the drink in the US, where artisan meaderies have been a thing for at least 20 years. “The US was the first time I’d had really good commercial mead,” he said. “There’s something like 500 meaderies there now.”

He said he came up with his recipe about four and a half years ago. It has a kilo of honey per five litres of water, and a Pilsner lager yeast – by comparison, mine has around twice the proportion of honey and a wine yeast – and that they stop the fermentation and pasteurise to get the desired flavour and strength.

Although the regular brew was called London Mead*, the locative referred to where it’s made, not the ingredients – it’s actually made with Spanish orange blossom honey (hence the aroma). It’s the same problem I’ve heard before – there just isn’t enough locally-produced honey. Gosnells can get sufficient local honey to make monthly single-origin specials, however, such as the 8% ABV Biggin Hill mead that we also sampled, which was made using honey from Kentish beekeeper “Dave from Biggin Hill”. This was rather drier than the draught mead, and had an intriguing almost beer-like malty character.

Tom Gosnell

“It shows two extremes of what you can achieve with mead,” Tom explained. “It’s all about doing something different with the honey you’ve got – you taste the honey and adjust the process...” He added that they – he has a head brewer now, rather than making it all himself – also do specials with adjuncts, meaning extra flavourings such as hibiscus or hops. Indeed, one of the others we tasted was their intriguingly tangy Citra Sea Mead, which is flavoured with lemon peel, tarragon, Citra hops and a dash of sea salt.

Add in the mead cocktails list and the ability to pour it simply cool or completely chilled, and it’s a surprisingly broad palette of flavours. As Tom declared at the official opening, “There’s a lot you can do with mead, it’s going to be a very exciting year this year!”


*I say it ‘was’ called London Mead because it went through a rebranding last year. It’s now simply called Gosnells, and is sold in 75cl bottles instead of 330ml. The aim was to move away from the usual association of mead with beer – for example, major beer-lovers websites such as Ratebeer and Untappd also list both meads and ciders – and towards the wine market instead. I can’t help thinking that would make more sense for a 12% honeywine mead than a 5.5% hydromel, but there you go. 

West Cork's new meadery offers a modern take on an ancient tradition

If your idea of Irish mead is that rich and smooth, but tooth-crackingly sweet Bunratty stuff, you could be in for not one but two pleasant surprises. The first, Kinsale Atlantic Dry, is a light, crisp and flavoursome honey-wine – dry, yet still a little soft on the palate.

The second, Wild Red Mead, is a gorgeous red Melomel (fruited mead) which while still distinctly honey-toned, also carries the berry notes of rich red wines. When we met at last month's Irish drinks event at the London embassy, its creator Denis Dempsey (left) explained that where the Dry is fermented with 300kg of honey per batch, the Red replaces just 40kg of the honey with an astonishing 400kg of Irish blackcurrants and cherries – hence those lovely fruity Cabernet notes.

"Even sweet blackcurrants are only 14% sugar," he said, as we compared notes on mead-making. With my own redcurrant Melomel, I found that the dryness from swapping half a pound of honey for a pound of fruit (so 2:1 rather than 10:1, on my far smaller batches) accentuated the tangy currant flavours, but he's aiming for a richer, rounder result – and he hits that target most excellently.

Although his meads are made in Kinsale in West Cork – "an amazing foodie place," as Denis put it – and the fruit is Irish, the honey is Spanish because Ireland simply doesn't produce enough to be cost-effective. The mead retails at €22 (around £20) a bottle as it is.

The amazing thing, given how very good the meads are, is that he and his wife Kate only set up Kinsale Mead Co last year. Denis said their research included visiting a number of meaderies in the US – there are dozens of them there, making a huge variety of drinks. They also did test brews and tried different yeasts (they mostly use a white wine yeast now) before launching in Ireland last September.

We talked a little more about mead-making techniques, before Denis added a piece of advice for mead consumption: "It works well in cocktails, too," he said. Now there's an intriguing thought!