Note: This article is written with the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the equipment required to make beer at home. If not, visit Getting Started in Homebrewing.
Traditional mead is nothing more than honey, water and yeast. Any honey variety can be used to make mead, but varietal honey -that which is produced from a single blossom- is considered best. Honey blends work just fine –they just aren’t as distinctive in character. Light honey is considered better than dark because it’s more neutral; dark honeys can be rather aggressive tasting and they may contain higher levels of sulfur (see more about honey below).
A good honey-to-water ratio is 2.5 to 3 lbs. honey to 1 gallon of water. In other words, a 5-gallon batch of mead should contain between 12 and 15 lbs. of honey. This will give your mead a fairly high starting gravity and, depending on the yeast you use, an alcohol content on par with quality wines (10-12% alcohol by volume)
When you’ve procured the honey of your choice, simply pour and stir it into two gallons of boiling water then turn off the heat immediately so you don’t boil of the honey’s aromatics. This quick-boil method also guards your mead against any resident bacterias in unprocessed or unpasteurized honey. Once the honey/water mixture has cooled, pour it into a sanitized fermentation vessel and top up with water until the entire solution reaches the 5-gallon level. Finally, pitch, or add, the yeast to the mixture.
Your yeast choice should be based on your preference for sweet mead or dry mead. If sweet mead is your preference, a good yeast choice is Wyeast sweet mead liquid yeast. If you like semi-sweet mead, a good choice is a wine yeast such as Red Star Cote des Blanc. If you prefer your mead dry, a generic champagne yeast is best.
Allow your mead to ferment for about two to three weeks, or until you can count a minute between bubbles in the airlock. At that point in time, rack, or transfer the mead to the secondary fermenter (carboy). A typical secondary mead fermentation lasts for several months, usually three to six months (again, depending on the original gravity and the style desired). Bottle the mead after it has clarified.
All About Honey
Honey, of course, is produced by bees. After nectar is collected from flowers by the energetic honeybee, it is partially digested and regurgitated in the form of honey.
Honey is highly fermentable because it is mostly sugar. The quantities of natural sugars in honey vary from one variety to the next but it is known that all honeys contain a mixture of fructose, glucose and sucrose.
It is estimated that there are over a thousand different kinds of honey, each of different color and flavor. Most commercially produced honeys are blends of various types, which makes them rather homogenous. Lighter honeys such as clover, alfalfa and wildflower are good for mead making because their flavor contribution is rather mild. On the other hand, dark honeys such as buckwheat, can be rather aggressive and even harsh tasting. For meads with additional complexity, pure varietal -or “single-source” honey- are highly prized. Varietal honeys are defined as those that are derived primarily from a single blossom, such as Fireweed or Tupelo. One varietal honey that makes consistently tasty mead is orange blossom honey.
Finally, there are many more styles of mead that you can make at home; here is just a simple overview of those styles:
- Braggot is mead with flavoring derived from malted grain; in other words, braggot is part beer.
- Cyser is mead to which apple juice is added (cyser would thus emulate a high octane cider)
- Hippocras is a spiced pyment (a mead made with grape juice and spices)
- Melomel (also called Mulsum) is mead to which fruit juices -other than apple or grape- are added.
- Metheglin is mead to which herbs and spices are added.
- Morat is mead to which mulberries are added.
- Pyment (also called Clarre) is mead to which grape juice is added.
