 The big questions about mead tend to be concerned with it being a home made drink. And this should bring up questions.
There are stories of people drinking home made moonshine and going blind. And this is a possibility with home made moonshine. But that is a distilled spirit which is a whole different type of liquor. Distilling drinks at home is also illegal.
And mead is not distilled. It is a fermented beverage.
There are significant differences. Distilling is process that increases the content of alcohol in the beverage by a significant amount. Think about distilling as whiskey and fermenting as beer or wine.
And during the distilling process there are dangerous by-products that can be introduced into the drink. It takes technical knowledge to distill spirits.
It's possible for these dangerous by-products to make you sick or to even possibly cause blindness.
But.. with mead making this is all a moot point. We only ferment the beverage. There is no concentration of alcohol or creation of dangerous by-products.
Mead is a wine and you can treat it the same way as any grape wine.
Drink it in moderation!
Home fermenting Mead does have some risk!
When making mead or any type of wine you do run the risk of a batch being invaded or infected by an unwanted bacteria. And this can make you sick. But, a few basic rules of cleanliness all but eradicates this risk.
Let me explain
When you make mead you start it out with some yeast, some honey, and some water! This recipe is called the "Must". And with lots of honey and water it can easily be a breeding ground for bacteria.
But the yeast eats up the sugars in that honey very very fast. When you put a tablespoon of yeast in there you are putting millions of yeast cells in there! And this yeast takes over the whole batch very quickly. Not allowing any bacteria to take hold. Which is great.
And another thing you do is meticulously sanitize everything, all the equipment including bowls and spoons. Then you have very little, or no bacteria that gets in the batch.
And while the batch is fermenting it is in a closed and sealed container which doesn't allow any bacteria to get in there while the ferment is going on.
So, mead can make you sick, in a typical alcohol sense, which is a good possibility if you drink too much. It can potentially make you sick with some kind of an unwanted bacteria that takes over the batch.
But some basic sanitization, and the fast reaction of unnwated yeast makes this an extremely small chance of happening.
Will's advice for home made meads
 You can trust store bought meads. No need to give it even a second thought. It is just like grape wine. There are federal and state standards for mead. It's good and it's perfectly safe.
For home made meads there are a couple of things I can suggest.
First off you should give it a good look. Are there thin black strands floating around in it? Those would be bacterial strains. Throw the batch out. Secondly you should give it a smell. If the batch is bad it will smell awful -absolutely rancid! If it smells like beer, alcohol or yeasty then it's most likely good.
Finally, if you fermented it yourself and it got off to a good bubbling start within the first 48 hours and continued to ferment quite nicely for a couple of weeks then the batch is probably superb and trouble free. All that fermented was the wanted yeast and it denied anything outside influence from contaminating the batch.
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