Lynam Up | How Game of Thrones is making mead hip to drink again

There have been a few surprises in changing drinking fashions lately, but the sudden trendiness of mead in London's hipper bars is certainly among the oddest.

Mead - an alcoholic drink made from fermented honey and water - has been around for millennia, and features prominently in the Norse sagas and in much early English literature.

Until recently, however, while anyone familiar with those tales would have known what mead was, few would have felt inclined to taste it. Its consumption was associated with Druids in England's West Country, and you couldn't get much less hip than that.

Then along came Game of Thrones. The vast popularity of the medieval fantasy TV series - which I haven't watched, but in which apparently quite a lot of mead is consumed - gave the drink the kind of exposure money can't buy. Possibly its new fans have made a connection with the abundance of gratuitous sex for which the series is known, and are hoping that a glass or two of mead will lead to interesting opportunities.

They may even be on to something. Mead is a traditional wedding drink, and one explanation for the origin of the term "honeymoon" - though not the only one - is newlywed couples were supposedly given a supply of it intended to last one lunar month. Mead is supposed to have aphrodisiac powers.

Although mead is associated with countries historically subject to strong Norse or Teutonic influences, it can be - and something like it probably has been - made just about anywhere bees, and therefore honey, can be found.