Honey has been an essential ingredient for sweetening our foods for millennia, and for nearly the same amount of time, it’s been used to create some rather delicious boozy concoctions.

With renewed interest in beekeeping for ecological reasons, more and more Irish producers are crafting honey-based beverages.

One of them is Kate Dempsey, who with her husband Denis established Kinsale Mead in 2016. Their premises is Ireland’s first meadery in hundreds of years, but they are following in our ancestors’ footsteps.