Daniel's Mead Making Hobby Page

Site Map

Mead Drinking, Woodcut, circa 1600

The traditional way to make mead

The most basic way to make mead is to dissolve honey in water. The resulting liquid is called must. Place the must in a low oxygen environment and wait for the natural yeasts to do their magic. This will probably not work very well. Natural yeasts aren't that reliable (also, the "low oxygen" environment part is a bit trickier than it sounds).

I don't know of any mead maker who does it that way. Some may add bread yeast, but most add brewers yeast. You can also add a bit of old stock, but again, I've not heard of anyone who does that either.

The simple honey-water-yeast formula is all you need to make mead, but that's a bit boring. Usually stuff is added to make more exotic fair, such as spices or fruit. See Types of Mead.

A magnified image of a yeast cell.

The magic of yeast

Yeast by the way is how all drinking alcohol is made. Yeast is a single celled fungus. It requires oxygen to survive. Typically it gets it from the air, same as us, but it a low oxygen environment, it can convert sugars into oxygen to serve its needs. A byproduct of this process is alcohol, the drinkable kind that is, the kind known as ethanol. To find out more on my opinions of various types of yeast click here.

Carboys

Essential Mead Making Equipment

Once you've got a must ready, you need to get a hold of that "low oxygen environment". Pretty much any sanitary, sealable container will do, but there's a catch. Another byproduct of fermentation, other than alcohol, is carbon dioxide. You're container needs someway to allow this CO2 to escape, otherwise the pressure will build and bad things will happen, e.g. kaboom! What you need is an airlock, a device that allows the CO2 out but won't allow any air to come back in. You can make one yourself, by running a tube from your container into a bowl of water, but it's much easier to get one from a home brew store. The same is true for you fermentation vessel (I prefer glass carboys so I can monitor the progress of my mead)

A three piece cylender airlock

The Importance of Sanitation in Mead Making

A word on sanitation. It is very important that you keep you mead making equipment (including your hands) germ free. Bacteria can ruin your batch by infecting it. The result can range from a nasty vinegar taste to downright lethal poison. The poison is unlikely as the alcohol produced by the yeast will eventually kill off the bacteria. But still, it really sucks to waste 30 bucks or more in honey on a bad tasting mead. In fact the airlock also comes in handy here as it keeps out the microscopic badies in addition to oxygen.

Mead Making, An Exercise In Patience

One other rather important ingredient is patience. Depending on your formula, the quickest mead takes at least two weeks. Many take six months or more. While fermentation is pretty exciting to watch, waiting for the mead to clear can be agonizing. The primary fermentation usually takes a few days to two weeks. During that time you get to see lots of bubbling. After that, though, it gets downright boring. You can wait a very long time before you are ready to bottle. Usually I like to wait until my mead has cleared to bottle. Even after bottling, you probably need to let the mead age to bring out the correct balance of flavors.