How To Make Mead

MakeMead.Net is a resource for the mead brewing enthusiast. Find mead recipes,yeast recomendations,and other resources to improve your home made mead.

Mead Making Tips - American Homebrewers Association. Making mead is as simple as combining honey, yeast and water in a carboy, but making mead mead that begs you to have another glass can be quite a challenge. Depending on your goals and techniques as a meadmaker, there are various methods and processes that can be adopted to aid in improving quality when making mead. The following list compiles a few ways to take control of certain aspects of the mead making process in attempts of producing a higher quality final product.

Try your hand at one or all of the suggestions and see if you can bring your meads to the next level! Quality Ingredients. Mead can only be as great as the ingredients that make up the must (unfermented mead). Ideally, all ingredients would come from your backyard garden, beehive and natural well.

This allows for ingredients like fruits, vegetables, and herbs to be used at the ideal point of ripeness as well as the knowledge of what pesticides and other chemicals were used during cultivation. For most meadmakers, having such amenities in your backyard may not be realistic, but that doesn’t mean fine quality ingredients cannot be acquired with some careful sleuthing. When seeking honey try to purchase from a local source, if possible. Small, community beekeepers typically produce quality honey that has not undergone a heavy filtration process (if any at all) and is not treated with any sort of heat. This is important because it will allow the honey to maintain the rich flavors and aromas found in its raw form. Similarly, it is ideal to find ingredients, such as fruits, in their raw forms from local farmers who have knowledge about the product.

Talk to your local orchard or berry farm about optimum points of ripeness, how the fruit is treated during cultivation, and any other concerns that may affect its use when making mead. All of this considered, raw honey and perfectly ripened produce may not be available to folks, especially during specific points of the year, and meadmakers must make the best of what they have available.

Great mead can still be made with fruit concentrates or honey that has been heat- treated and filtered, but it may not be as rich and flavorful as the same mead made with fresh fruit and raw honey. Put some effort into hunting down the best ingredients you have available, and you will likely experience a higher quality mead. No- Boil Pasteurization Methods. A “hot” area for debate in the mead making community is whether or not to treat the honey with some sort of heat as a means of pasteurization because of the risk of contaminants from wild yeast and bacteria. Recently, it has become widely accepted to try and avoid any sort of heat treatment of honey, either before or after purchasing, because it is said to drive off flavors and aromas that are favorable when making mead.

For this reason, it is becoming more and more popular to forgo any sort of heating when preparing the honey. In many mead recipes and mead making books, it calls for the honey to be boiled in a gallon or two of water for 1. Some still prefer to treat with lower levels of heat, while others use methods that avoid heat all together, but for many the boil method has become somewhat of the “way of the past.”The following methods can be used in lieu of boiling when treating honey for making mead: Low- heat pasteurization: With the same preparation as you would take if planning to boil honey, a low- heat pasteurization can be utilized that does not bring the honey- water mixture to a full boil. For this method, bring the honey- water mixture to 1. F (6. 6°C) and hold for 5 minutes, or to 1. F (6. 0°C) and hold for 2.

Mead, also known as honey wine, is one of the simplest wines you can make. All it takes are three ingredients — honey, water and yeast. Making mead is easy, and we'll show you how. Follow these mead making steps and you'll have your own honey wine in no time! Winemaker's Academy is dedicated to showing people how to make wine. Whether you're new to wine making or already have some experience this site can learn to make a. Interested in making mead? Here are some mead making tips to help improve your process, including staggered nutrient additions.

· How to Make Mead. When you mix water and honey and ferment it with yeast, you get mead, an alcoholic drink often referred to as "honey wine". There are. · Home-brewers have embraced mead, or honey wine, the drink of choice for many ancient cultures. If you want to whip up a batch of your own, follow these steps. Learn how to make mead at home including the equipment needed, the required ingredients, plus a sample recipe and instructions for how to brew mead with honey. Everything about mead making, tutorials, videos, articles and more covering everything from fermenting to bottling.

The lower heat method for 2. Sulfite: Potassium metabisulfite, also referred to as “meta” or “sulfite,” is a chemical additive that can be used to sanitize must without the need for heat. Pepperoni Crescent Rolls here. Sulfite is popularly used by homebrewers, cider- and meadmakers in the form of Campden tablets. Generally speaking, 1 tablet per gallon of traditional mead should be used for pasteurization while up to 2 tablets per gallon of mead containing ingredients like fruit is advised. Note: Sulfite can bleach out the color of some fruits, which may be undesirable.

There is also some concern that sulfites may cause reactions with asthmatics. No- Heat, No- Sulfite: Recent data and experience from notable meadmakers has developed a third option for preparing honey must, which is doing nothing at all. Simply clean and sanitize every piece of equipment thoroughly, mix the ingredients in your carboy, pitch the yeast, aerate and let it go. No form of sanitizing the must is used in this mead making technique. It is believed that the wild yeast and bacteria in the honey will not be able to put up a fight against the amount of yeast being intentionally pitched, and thus are not a concern. If wanting to avoid any heat pasteurization as well as chemical additives, this is the method to pursue, but exceptional cleaning and sanitation is essential to success.

Staggered Nutrient Additions. As you may have gathered from the mead making tutorial or other mead related literature, yeast nutrient and energizer is crucial in providing yeast with the environment and available micronutrients needed for healthy and clean fermentation. Older mead recipes may not call for nutrient or energizer at all, more recent recipes call for nutrients and energizer to be added when preparing the must, but most recently a technique known as staggered nutrient additions (SNA) is hailed as an exceptional means of adding the micronutrients yeast require in the most efficient way. Staggered nutrient additions is the process of supplying the must with a full dose of nutrients over the course of multiple days.

This is a method that is widely accepted by notable home and commercial meadmakers alike, though each has their own measurements and schedule. The result is significantly faster and cleaner mead fermentation. Generally speaking, you want to take the total amount of nutrients required and divide it up into three or four equal parts that will be added on the day the yeast is pitched and every other day after that. On the days in between the nutrient additions, the mead is degassed either with vigorous stirring, twirling the fermenter or using a wine degasser.

How to Make Mead: 8 Steps (with Pictures)1. Gather and sanitize all the items listed in the "Things You'll Need" below. Anything that will touch the mead- in- the- making should be sanitized first.

The environment you are creating to encourage fermentation can also encourage the growth of any microorganisms left behind from inadequate sanitation. You can use a weak bleach solution (remember to rinse well) but it is better to use a sanitizing solution that can be found at any beer or wine- making store (and online). Mix approximately 3. L) distilled water. DO NOT HEAT OR BOIL. There is no need to do this with an FDA regulated honey and clean drinking water. Boiling used to be done to drive off germs and bacteria in the water; honey is naturally anti- bacterial.

This mixture, by the way, is called "must". Adding fruits or spices to the must will drastically change the flavour, and just about anything can go with a mead.

It's really fun to experiment with flavours as a home- brewer! How to Liquify Honey. How to Verify the Purity of Honey. Rehydrate your chosen yeast per the manufacturer's directions then add it to your must.

Put in a large container with plenty of room for fermentation to occur. Leek And Feta Quiche. If there isn't enough space, a vigorous ferment can escape and cause a mess.

You'll want to prevent air from getting into the container, but carbon dioxide needs to be able to escape. One way to do this is to poke a few holes in a balloon and then stretch it over the mouth of the bottle. Secure it by putting a rubber band or tape around it. This, however, is not a very good way to seal your mead as you can not add nutrients or aerate very well with the balloon in place, requiring the balloon to be replaced several times. The best method is to purchase an airlock from a local brew store or online as they are reusable, sanitizable, and won't disintegrate over time. Put in a quiet place at an optimal temperature range for your chosen yeast. This information should be published by the manufacturer.

If you have a hydrometer and know the starting gravity of your must, you can determine the sugar breaks of your fermentation. To determine your three sugar breaks, take your original gravity, determine what your final gravity should be based on the ABV tolerance of your yeast, then break that total number into thirds. Aerate (introduce oxygen) at least once daily during the first sugar break, the more times a the better. There are a few different ways to know when the mead is done fermenting: [2]The most accurate way to know is to measure the specific gravity with a hydrometer when you first mix it, then measure it every two weeks. The chosen yeast has a published ABV tolerance, and the hydrometer reading can be used to determine what the final gravity of the mead should be. When the mead reaches this gravity, wait a minimum of 4- 6 months before bottling to ensure all CO2 that was in suspension in the mead has degassed.

If the mead has not properly degassed and too much CO2 for the rating of the type of bottle the mead is bottled in is transferred, there is a risk of bottle explosion with temperature swings. Wait at least 8 weeks.

The amount of time it takes for the mead to ferment will depend on a variety of factors, but 8 weeks should be enough time for most scenarios. If you're using an airlock, wait until 3 weeks after it stops bubbling.

Once the fermentation has completed, transfer your mead to a container with little to no headspace for aging. The less surface area that oxygen can get to, the better. Siphoning is the best way to go so that you leave as much sediment behind as possible. The longer you wait, the better your mead will be, an average wait time is 8 months to a year for a home brewer. Transfer the mead into bottles, seal, and store in a cool dark place.

Your mead is now drinkable, but it is even better when aged even longer.