Mead styles, explained
Mead is fermented honey and water, and everything else is a variation on that base. Add fruit and you get a melomel, add apple juice or cider and you get a cyser, add grape juice or grapes and you get a pyment. The style name tells you what was fermented alongside the honey.
Traditional mead versus melomel, cyser and pyment
Traditional mead is just honey, water and yeast, fermented with nothing else added, and it's the style everything else in this list branches from. Melomel adds fruit during fermentation, which can mean anything from berries to stone fruit, and shifts both the color and flavor away from straight honey character.
Cyser starts from apple juice or fresh-pressed cider instead of plain water, giving it an orchard note alongside the honey. Pyment does the same with grape juice or whole grapes, landing somewhere between a mead and a wine. All three are still mead by definition, just built on a different base liquid.
What metheglin adds
Metheglin is mead brewed with spices or herbs added during or after fermentation, things like cinnamon, ginger or chai-style blends show up often. The spice can be subtle background warmth or the dominant flavor, depending on how much was used and when it went in.
Because metheglin covers such a wide range of possible spice and herb additions, two meaderies' versions of it can taste completely different from one another. Asking what's in a particular metheglin before you order is a reasonable way to know what you're actually getting in the glass.
Still, sparkling and session strength
Still mead has no carbonation and is closer in feel to a table wine, while sparkling mead is carbonated, either through bottle conditioning or forced carbonation, and drinks more like a sparkling wine or cider. Both start from the same fermentation process. The difference comes down to what happens after.
Session mead is brewed to a lower alcohol content than a standard mead, making it lighter and easier to drink through a flight or a full glass. It's a useful style to ask for if you're pacing yourself through several tastings in one visit.
Dry through sweet, and why the label matters
Mead's sweetness comes from how much of the honey's natural sugar the yeast converts before fermentation stops, so a dry mead has little residual sugar left and a sweet mead has more. Semi-sweet sits in between, and the difference can be significant even within meads of the same style.
Because sweetness varies so widely, the label or tasting menu description matters more than the style name alone. Two cysers, for example, can range from crisp and dry to noticeably sweet, so it's worth reading the description rather than assuming from the category.
Questions worth asking at the tasting bar
Asking what honey varietal was used, whether anything was added during fermentation, and where the mead falls on the dry to sweet scale will tell you more than the style name by itself. Staff pouring flights are usually glad to walk through what's in each glass.
It's also worth asking whether a mead is still or sparkling and what its approximate strength is, since both affect how it drinks alongside food or across a longer tasting. These are ordinary questions any tasting room should be able to answer on the spot.
Browse the directory of meaderies. Each listing shows its verification status and the date it was last checked, so you can see how current the information is before you reach out.