There is one ancient beer style that survives today but few breweries will attempt. It is a little mysterious, often misunderstood, and can be difficult to brew. It is a slightly sweet, slightly strong brown beer called a braggot<\/em>, and more breweries should embrace this complex historical style.<\/p>\n Braggot<\/a> recipes date back to Medieval Europe, and were especially favored in Wales and Ireland. Technically, it is a beer brewed with a significant amount of honey (often a 50\/50 ingredient blend, with some variation), which places it in a hybrid category that straddles the line with traditional meads. Unlike a lot of modern honey ales, the honey for a braggot is not a late blended addition but part of the fermentable base, which can give rise to some difficulties in brewing.<\/p>\n Meads have not yet been featured in this space (the beverage could fill a dedicated blog<\/a> of its own) but are among the oldest of fermented beverages produced by human civilization. The reader should be familiar with enough brewing theory to recognize the process: yeast consumes sugar to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. A true mead will use honey instead of fruit or malt as the sugars for the yeast to consume, with such beverages classified by the source of sugars. Beer uses grain; wine uses grapes; cider uses apples; and likewise, meads are made from honey.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen three passionate Texas businesses team up, you know you\u2019ve got a winning hand\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The style of braggot<\/a> is most definitely a beer, made with the traditional malt and hops but also including a sizeable amount of honey in the recipe. Modern honey can be found with a wide selection of flavors based on the local flora the bees producing it were exposed to, lending elements of flowers, fruit or wild herbs to the sticky amber. A braggot can also be brewed with a variety of spices or even with fruit additions to compliment the particular honey strain used. This lends a broad categorization to the range of possible braggots, with almost as many substyles and specialties as there are total craft beer styles today.<\/p>\n However, one North Texas brewery not only brewed up a braggot but also recently won an award for it. Four Bullets Brewery<\/a> of Richardson took home a medal at the 2026 Texas Craft Brewers Cup<\/a> in Austin just weeks ago, an all-Texas competition sponsored by the Texas Craft Brewers Guild<\/a>. Their entry was a collaboration with Fox & Raven Meadery<\/a> of Carrollton and Fort Worth\u2019s TexMalt<\/a>, and their traditional braggot \u201cSweeten the Pot\u201d took home a gold in the Fruit and Field Beer category<\/p>\n\n
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