So youāve never made mead before, or youāre curious what it is.
Mead is an ancient drink, with three basic components: water, yeast, and honey. In the grand scheme of things, mead is more closely related to wine than things like beer, cider, or hard alcohol.
Some fancier names for some fancier things. All variations below take the three simple ingredients and twists them(some slightly, others more so).
Traditional - water, honey, yeast. The bog standard, itās a classic. Itās also delicious.
Metheglin - water, honey, yeast, herbs. This might be a weird Welsh word bastardization from which the word medicine derives. I havenāt bothered to dig deeper, but I like the story.
Melomel - water, honey, yeast, fruit. This is another very popular variety of mead. Fruit additions bring with them their own fun things, and can possibly contaminate a brew. Some like to add them in primary, some in secondary.
Pyment - water, honey, yeast, grape juice. Or maybe no water at all. This is what happens when wine and mead have a baby.
Braggot - water, honey, yeast, wort (the fermentable sugars made in beer making). I have not made this variation personally, so I will defer to othersā knowledge.
Acerglyn - water, honey, yeast, maple syrup. Some of the honey is removed, and replaced with maple syrup.
Bochet - water, caramelized honey, yeast. This is accomplished by heating the honey and boiling it. This does change some of the sugars into unfermentable ones.
Capsicumel - water, honey, yeast, chili(s). I really like this one because itās just kind of a weird flavor to me. Spicy drink!
Cyser - water, honey, yeast, apple juice. This replaces some or all of the water for apple juice. Like if a cider and a mead had a baby.
This isnāt an exhaustive list, just getting a party started. In fact, you can mix and match and make a crazy sounding thing like a cyser bochet. Ultimately, itās up to you to decide what you want to brew. Speaking of.
Honey Varietals
Thereās so many varietals of honey itās truly bananas.
Thereās clover, wildflower, orange blossom, mesquite, blueberry, raspberry. The list is truly spectacular. For the bulk of my recipes I use orange blossom honey. Itās a very pleasant flavor, and the only traditional mead Iāve really enjoyed.
Making Mead
A comfy list of things with which to brew mead: 1-2 fermenting carboy (or one carboy and a pitcher, whatever will hold a gallon (4L)of water, and can be sanitized). A bung An airlock Honey Water Yeast(I use Lalvin 71b for most things). Yeast nutrient (GoFerm, Fermaid O, Fermaid K) Sanitizer Racking wand Hydrometer - if possible have a second, they are fragile. Graduated cylinder for the hydrometer. Some kind of pipette / wine thief. Corks Hand held cork press Bottles - five one liter bottles for a one gallon recipe, just in case.
The process: Always sanitize everything, as per your sanitizerās rules.
Honey in fermenter.
Water in fermenter, shake it all up. This accomplishes a few things. It puts the honey in suspension so the yeast can eat it, and puts some oxygen into the mix so the yeast can do their part.
Take a measurement. Nearly fill your cylinder using your wine thief, and (CAREFULLY) set in your hydrometer. It should read around 1.100 if youāre going along with the recipe at the bottom.
Pitch the yeast in (thereās a cool thing called GoFerm, follow those packet instructions if you went that route).
Bung in carboy, sanitizer in airlock, airlock in bung, carboy in a dark space. This is called primary fermentation.
Wait, measure every 5-7 days. Sanitize your thief and cylinder and hydrometer, steal, fill, measure.
If youāre using yeast nutrient, add it at each 1/3 of sugar consumption.
Fermentation is complete when your hydrometer reads 1.000 or lower. This means that the fermentable sugars have all been consumed by the yeast. It takes roughly two weeks to reach this stage, but thereās a buttload of variables in your environment.
You should see a pile of blech at the bottom of the carboy. The fancy name for this is lees (pronounced like lease).
This is the step that got me in trouble. You need to sanitize a second vessel (can be a carboy, bucket, or jug, depending on the size youāre brewing). Use the racking wand to transfer the mead (called racking) to the second vessel to get it off the lees.
Repeat step 5. This is secondary fermentation.
Now the long haul. Wait. The longer you wait, the better it gets. The flavors all kind of melt together. I find that after about 6 months things stop tasting āhot,ā then you move on to bottling.
Thereās a thing about clear mead being best. I donāt particularly care, or use any fining agents to make it clear. Most meads clear with time unless theyāre super fruit laden.
Most racking wands come with a bottling attachment. Sanitize bottles, use the bottling wand to put the mead in the bottles, and cork away.
Note: this will be an unsweet mead if you bottle it at this point.
Backsweetening:
This is a slightly unfun area. You have a problem. Youāve racked your mead, youāve taken it off the lees. Itās clear, itās ready for bottling. But it needs to be sweeter.
Thereās still some yeast in there, and adding more sugar might just make them wake back up and kick us back to primary fermentation.
In a sealed vessel, this can be a pressure bomb.
So, we need to make sure that: the yeast are truly dead and gone, or they cannot eat the sugars weāre back sweetening with.
Ways to stop the yeast: Potassium Sorbate. This stops the yeast from dividing.
Campden Tablets. These are sulfites that prevent acetic acid (vinegar) or wild yeast that can spoil the wine.
I use both in conjunction because, well, bottle bombs are scary. I can add links but the two from brewer supply company have instructions on them.
A filter. Thereās a fancy weird micron filter thing that I havenāt personally messed with, but Iāve heard that it may be able to filter out the yeast? Iām not entirely sure, Iāll leave it for someone elseās knowledge.
Figuring out how much honey to add requires some math. Thereās dry mead from 0.099 to 1.006 Medium goes from 1.006 to 1.015 Sweet goes from 1.0015 to 1.020 And dessert is anything higher than that.
Now for the math! Honey is 35 pts/lb/gal. So if your mead is 1.000 and you would like it to be 1.011, you need to get how many points you need. So 1.011 - 1.000 You need 11 gravity points. Divide 11 by 35 That gets you 0.31 pounds per gallon of water. So, if itās a five gallon batch, youād need to add 1.5 pounds of honey after stabilizing.
So, stabilize as per directions (most also want a 24 hour delay for efficacy). Add the requisite amount of honey. Gently mix, and bottle / leave to age some more.
The bare minimum setup:
1 gallon of spring water in its own container 3 pounds of honey Bread yeast A glove
The container that the water comes in should be sanitized from its own manufacturing, just make sure itās a new container with the seal intact.
Pour out some of the spring water (enough to fit all the honey in). Shake the crap out of it. Poke a hole in the gloveās tip to let the CO2 escape and pray nothing creeps in. There are other ideas for home made airlocks, Iād trust a blow off tube more than this. This is just the absolute minimum to get a brew going. Wait for awhile, carefully pour it off the lees after about a month (youāre not measuring to see when fermentation is complete). Cap the container instead of glove it. Wait some more time (still about six months). Pour it into a glass, and enjoy.
First Mead:
~1 gallon of water. 3 pounds of orange blossom honey Yeast of choice
Other bits, bobs, and explainers:
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Why yeast nutrient? Honey is kinda naturally anti-microbial growth, and we want to have microbial growth. The yeast nutrient helps our little bugs eat all the sugar. Iāve heard from various people that they can tell when the yeast had a hard time.
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Whatās with adding the nutrient in bits, canāt you just do it all at once?
You can add it all in at once, Iāve done it, the problem with that is theyāll use it all up, blow up their population, and then go back to struggle bus to ferment the rest of it.
- How do you keep track of all this stuff?
To be honest, I have a Google sheet of brews going currently and brews that are completed. I can add an image of it in future.
Iāll add more answers as people have questions. This is a general guide, and Iām just a hobbyist.
Edit: some bits are janky, Iāll fix it in a bit when Iām at my actual computer.
Iām no expert, been doing it as a hobby for about five years now, but from my own experience Iāll make a few notes:
- Be prepared to wait for your mead to age out, especially if you go high ABV and pure honey with no additions. If you want fast turnaround do sweet, low ABV meads or make beer instead.
- Time forgives all sins. If your mead tastes like ass, simply wait long enough and itāll probably taste great. Sometimes that time frame is 2 or 3 years, but itāll (probably) get there eventually. Rack into a new vessel every once in a while as long as youāre seeing sediment collect at the bottom.
- Adding nutrients, especially adding it in steps during primary, makes a huge difference. As in, being able to drink your mead in 4 months rather than a year+. Iāve found the easiest way to do it is with Fermaid O and the TOSNA Calculator. There are more complex nutrient calculators out there if you want to get deeper into the math.
- Iāve also started adding O2 during primary fermentation, although I started it around the same time I started using yeast nutrient so I canāt really tell you how much of an impact it makes.
- Iāve personally found that doing one gallon batches just isnāt worth it, for all that I see it commonly online. Unless youāre doing low ABV mead, itās going to take time to age out into something nice. At which point if itās good, youāll be disappointed you didnāt do a larger batch. It takes more setup equipment and 5+ gallon glass carboys are pricey, but if you have a local homebrew store getting a basic fermentation bucket (often found in beer homebrew kits) is very worth it. That also goes with getting actual airlocks which are cheap enough that I think itās worth picking up to take less risks with your mead
- See if you can get your honey locally, and if theyāll cut you a deal on buying in bulk. If you canāt, webstaurantstore.com has surprisingly reasonable prices for delivering 5 gallon buckets of honey.
- Making your wine sweeter is a good way to make it taste good faster without having to age as long, but do give dry meads a try! Theyāre very nice!
- I have filtered mead (using basic plate filters and gravity), and it improved the taste and clarity more than I was expecting. No idea how successful it was at stabilizing it because I didnāt backsweeten afterwards. From my research, if you want 100% guaranteed stabilization from filtering youāre looking at some pretty expensive equipment and filters. By the same token the science behind chemical stabilization as talked about in the OP is not as cut and dry as I was hoping, so I donāt know that there are good guarantees anywhere for this.
- Edit: Do research first if you want to attempt a bochet. Boiling honey expands to 3x the original volume, and superhot molten sugar is one of the most dangerous things you can have splattering around in your kitchen!
this shakes out as quality content but you had me, then lost me at
Wait, measure every 5-7 days. Sanitize your thief and cylinder and hydrometer, steal, fill, measure.
Thatās fair. You donāt have to do that. I know for my first like ten or fifteen brews I didnāt open it once I started primary.
why post such a detailed dissertation but not explain your terms?
I can define stuff better this evening when I fix the list. I just saw the comment asking for something akin to this and figured Iād give it a go.
Again, I was impressed by your post. I see you defined a ton of terms. some of the words used further down are not known to an average local from kentucky like myself. I did not mean to offend you.
No worries at all, and no offense taken. The feedback is what makes it better!
After a college mead making experience that turned out terrible, I recently had a go at making Tāej . I havenāt the slightest clue if a regular mead drinker would say it tastes perfect, tastes like ass, or is somewhere in between, but I enjoy it!
I didnāt rack it, just went from the main fermentation carboy to bottles after letting it crash by pouring and stopping before too much sediment came out. I havenāt back-sweetened it but itās still somewhat sweet and feels a hair like champagne, so Iām a bit afraid itās going to slowly keep on fermenting in the fridge and carbonate a bit, but Iāll burp the bottles every once in a while so I can keep an eye on it.
Moral of the rambling story: Iām usually the kind of person that goes all out trying to do something the āright wayā, and this looks like an excellent guide/summary of how to do that, but my laziness often wins out. In this case at least, Iāve found success doing the bare minimum. I am a bit curious to see how different it would taste following a more rigorous recipe :-)
Thanks for the post! Iāll probably reference this when my current supply runs out or explodes in the fridge!
Thatās one of the things I really enjoy about this as a hobby. You can kinda go crazy and do all sorts of stuff, or you can be incredibly and painstakingly meticulous. This was made forever ago, as well, and they didnāt have all the cool stuff we have now.
Iāve had life interfere with my brewing season this year, so Iām missing out on all my blorp blorping airlocks. But Iāve got s couple of carboys aging.
I might make a braggot in fall, we shall see. Iāve not made one of those before. I usually make a pumpkin spice beer around that time, maybe Iāll faff it into something weird.