How Mead, the Drink of the Vikings, Came to Dominate Untappd Rankings

At first glance, Untappd’s list of highest-rated breweries looks kind of weird: Currently, three of the top five producers in the U.S. aren’t breweries at all. Instead, Pips Meadery (#2), Schramm’s Mead (#3), and Brewlihan (#5) are all meaderies — producers that ferment honey, rather than grain, to create updated versions of mead, the preferred pour of Renaissance fairs and shows about Vikings.

It’s not just a weird fluke at the far end of the scale. Further down Untappd’s top-ranked list are even more meaderies, with a total of seven in the Top 20 and a full bakers’ dozen in the Top 50, at least when the list is set to feature “all brewery types,” including mead and cider makers, as well as breweries of various sizes.

When you pencil things out, the numbers don’t seem to make sense. Untappd currently lists over 24,000 breweries of all kinds in the U.S., including 647 meaderies and 1,997 cideries. Based on those ratios, roughly one meadery and about four cideries should make it into the Top 50. Instead, that list contains 13 meaderies, while no cider producers make the cut.

At Standard Meadery in the Chicago suburbs, owner Adam Lynch acknowledges that, yes, something’s up with how mead is ranked. His five-year-old meadery is currently #11 on Untappd, with an average ranking of 4.403 at press time, putting it well ahead of wildly admired cult breweries like The Alchemist (4.323), Tree House (4.322), and The Answer (4.306).

Sometimes, brewers aren’t thrilled about that.

“Oh yeah, they’re all mad about the ratings that mead has,” he says. “I definitely think the mead rankings are skewed.”

That might be true, though it’s likely more accurate to say that a few factors are working in mead’s favor. Some producers also appear to be working the system, ending up with higher rankings as a result.

Backed by the Numbers

If mead rankings are skewed, as Lynch suggests, that doesn’t mean they’re incorrect or flawed. Pips and Schramm’s both have plenty of user ratings to back up their rankings, with over 83,000 and 152,000 user reviews across 237 and 154 different meads, respectively. In other words, the Untappd formulas aren’t broken. The high ratings are coming from users.

It’s also worth clarifying that these high-ranking makers are all modern craft meaderies, not “ye olde”-style producers, and the beverages they’re releasing are about as far removed from the meads of the Vikings as a barrel-aged pastry stout is from a traditional Abbey Ale. Technically, most of the new-style craft meaderies focus on melomel, a blend of honey and fruit akin to an intense fruit wine.

“If you take the best cherries in the world and put them with some really good honey and ferment them cleanly, it’s probably going to taste pretty good.”

A craft mead pioneer, Ken Schramm started seeing high ratings for his melomels back on RateBeer, the now-defunct site that was essentially the Untappd of the early 2000s.

“We were the highest-rated meadery on RateBeer and had been in the Top 100 breweries in the country for basically the whole time we were open,” he says. “If you’re asking me why that is…” He pauses for a quiet laugh. “We’re good.”

Good they might be, but there’s slightly more to it. When Lynch says that mead ratings are skewed, he means modern mead pushes all the right buttons.

“I think it’s because mead delivers such a big flavor profile,” he says. “It’s a big wow factor and people tend to rate it better than a lager or a regular IPA. They’re caught by surprise with just how big the flavor really is.”

The numbers back that up: the average melomel mead on Untappd has a rating of 4.316, making it the site’s highest-rated style, according to recent data. By contrast, the top-rated Mexican lager — one of the most popular beer styles in America — comes in at just 4.01, meaning the average for the entire category lands much lower. Without taking anything away from the quality of their products, mead makers seem to have the wind at their backs in terms of Untappd users’ taste preferences.

And of course, mead makers — and Mother Nature — get to work their own magic. Because mead and melomel don’t involve grain, the process is slightly simpler than brewing beer. Instead of quality malt or trendy new hops, the importance lies in selecting the best honey and fruit, and letting those ingredients express themselves.

“If it’s boozy, if it’s sweet, if it’s complex — those flavors are the ones that command the highest ratings on the platform.”

With his location near Detroit, Schramm has access to Michigan’s famous cherry crop. Over the years he’s made melomels with some 15 varieties, ultimately concluding that one “just blew them all away” — the celebrated Schaerbeek cherry, hailed by Slow Food for its important role in the best Kriek lambic beers.

“I don’t want to sound crazy, but it’s a little bit ‘paint by numbers,’” Schramm says. “If you take the best cherries in the world and put them with some really good honey and ferment them cleanly, it’s probably going to taste pretty good.”

A New Wave of Mead

Schramm’s may have been earning raves for decades, but what’s new is the wave of craft meaderies that have followed in recent years — and, in some cases, their approach to doing business.

For many craft meaderies, that means building community, often through membership clubs offering early access to new releases or limited bottlings. Before John Hoolihan launched Brewlihan in mid-2022, the former schoolteacher ran giveaways and built his brand using social media and newsletters, collecting about 500 email addresses before he opened. (Lynch says he had even more — around 1,500 — before Standard Meadery opened.) He also studied other clubs at breweries and meaderies, trying to figure out what worked.

“If I have a mead that I taste and I say, ‘OK, this is not going to score 4.48 on average,’ I’m not going to release it, because I know it will bring down my rating.”

“People want high-quality communication,” he says. “They want their opinions to be heard, and they really want something that feels exclusive-slash-inclusive. They want to be part of something bigger, but they also want access to something that not every person walking in off the street can do.”

For Hoolihan, that meant giving club members early access to his mead, plus the chance to hang out on site and take part in private events for about six months before his taproom opened to the public.

“It was like our fans were a part of the process from day one, which led to them taking a vested interest, not only in the brand, but also the product,” he says.

Psychology — particularly around scarcity and price — also plays a role. If most people hesitate to give high ratings to common beverages, the inverse also holds true.

“It was much easier to get high ratings before we opened commercially,” he says. “You had this allure of scarcity.”

Relatively high prices — a 375-milliliter bottle of Schramm’s 12.5 percent ABV Cask Aged Black Agnes costs $60 — can also influence how drinkers evaluate what they’re tasting, as researchers have repeatedly shown with wine. Beyond that, many melomels are tagged with the most popular taste descriptors on Untappd, according to Kyle Roderick, the site’s chief product officer.

“‘Sweet’ and ‘boozy’ — those tags are the ones that dominate mead,” he says. “They always score highly. If it’s boozy, if it’s sweet, if it’s complex — those flavors are the ones that command the highest ratings on the platform.”

Inspired by U.S. Craft

While craft mead originated in the U.S., modern drinking culture is global. Check-ins for mead have remained relatively flat in the U.S., Roderick notes, but those numbers show growth in Canada, Russia, and elsewhere.

In Norway, Untappd’s top-rated brewery is Marlobobo, a five-year-old meadery owned by former homebrewer Marius Loktu.

“It was the U.S. mead scene that got me going, to be honest,” he says. “The meaderies that I was most inspired by were probably Superstition and Schramm’s, and then of course Pips and Standard Meadery as well.” Given Norway’s high costs, using local honey and fruit is a challenge, he says, though cloudberry and lingonberry melomels certainly stand out at tastings.

That’s even more true in a country like Poland, where Furious Meads reigns over Untappd’s list of top-rated breweries. In Eastern Europe, traditional meads remain popular, Furious owner Sonny Van Assche says, but new-style, fruit-forward craft mead is something else. Since Furious operates as a hobby meadery, mostly selling to family and friends, Van Assche has options that most businesses don’t.

“I have an advantage in that I don’t need to make money from it,” he says. “If I have a mead that I taste and I say, ‘OK, this is not going to score 4.48 on average,’ I’m not going to release it, because I know it will bring down my rating.”

While the strong, intense nature of modern craft mead has its benefits, there are also downsides — especially when it comes to filling seats and covering rent.

“One of the things I realized is, as a business owner, I can’t just offer high-ABV dessert sweet mead, because that only hits a sliver of your consumer market,” Hoolihan says. When his tasting room opened, he created a special line, “Serum,” at about beer strength. Those drinks are popular with taproom visitors, but they don’t quite get the same ratings as full-strength mead. “What I’ve noticed is that higher-alcohol offerings on Untappd track with higher ratings,” he says.

One final factor in craft mead’s success could be its residual sugar, which aligns with where our collective taste appears to be headed. The IPA Bitterness Wars are long over, Roderick notes, and today’s palates are more attuned to sweetness.

For Schramm, focusing on sugar in mead is like a fine-dining chef choosing to highlight salt or acidity — it’s one of the five basic tastes, a fundamental way we understand what we’re eating and drinking. There’s no trick, other than the fact that humans love it.

When beer writer Randy Mosher first tried Schramm’s raspberry-cherry-blackcurrant melomel, The Heart of Darkness, Schramm recalls, he said it might be the best thing he’d ever tasted. Untappd users seem to agree, giving it an average rating of 4.72.

“I mean, if he’s saying that, and the people on Untappd are saying that, the reason is because it tastes really good,” he says.

The article How Mead, the Drink of the Vikings, Came to Dominate Untappd Rankings appeared first on VinePair.