As a bee-keeper, of course Beorn would brew a fine mead.  It’s a word found in northwestern Europe from Irish to Old English to Gothic since the earliest written records.  It is etymologically very different from this kind of mead.

• 07.096 with their wooden drinking-bowls filled with mead.
• 07.116 and drunk at least a quart of mead –

“mead, n.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 13 May 2015.