Make Mead part 3

Mead Label sample, front and back

By now you'll have read parts one and two, and I hope started a batch of your own mead. If not, maybe you're collecting tools and ingredients, and will begin soon? The sooner you begin, the sooner you can have that well-stocked mead-cellar you've always dreamed about...

I've heard meaders describe many ways of dealing with the end of fermentation, settling, bottling, etc. A lot of those ways will work, so don't worry if you hear conflicting advice. I'm just going to describe how I do it, a method worked out for small-batch brewing through over a hundred batches during the last twenty-five years.

When you add fruit, spices, leaves, or any other solids to your mead, you have the option of removing what's left of the solids partway through the process, or leaving it all in until you pour it off. Some people add flavorings, particularly extracts and spices, after the fermentation is all finished. What I like to do is take out most of the solids, pretty much anything that's still floating, after three or four weeks. Then I close it back up, bubbler and all, and wait, without opening it again, until it's completely finished bubbling, usually at least another three or four weeks. This varies a lot, so don't worry if it's slower, as long as it's bubbling.

Bottled and ready for corks, Photo by Honey

When it's all done, it's usually cloudy with a couple of inches of sediment, made up mostly of dead yeast cells. I use a siphon hose, and carefully transfer the liquid into glass jugs, one-gallon wine bottles or something similar. I loosen the lids momentarily every day after that until there is no hiss from pressure-release, then I leave them alone in a cool, dark room to settle out. Depending on your recipe, this can take a
couple of weeks or a couple of months. Fair warning, some meads never really settle out. You can get additives to help with this, but I prefer to drink it as is, on the rare occasions that this happens.

Simple corker. Photo by Honey.

When you are ready to bottle your mead, line up enough wine bottles, use a funnel, and fill each bottle to the base of the neck, tipping the jug carefully so as not to stir up the sediment. fill bottles carefully until you start to pour sediment along with the mead, then set that jug aside and move on to the next. When all of the jugs are empty except for a bit of cloudy mead with sediment, pour them all together into one jug, and save it. It's not waste, honest! I'll come back to that.

Standard wine bottles take a "#8" cork, but a #9 will fit, just much more tightly. Of all the cork-setters out there, I prefer the simplest, which is hand-held, a plastic plunger through a guide that you just balance on top of the bottle, which is best braced on the floor between your shins. Soak the corks in warm water for at least five minutes, and they will work better.

Corking is this easy! Photo by Honey.

Making labels is fun, now that you can get full-sheet sticker paper, and color printing is affordable. I usually use a painting or photo that I like, add text over that, sometimes in a framed space, and fit six or eight labels to a sheet. Remember that the bottles should be stored in a cool, dark place, on their sides, and that ten-year-old mead should be re-corked if you want to keep it safely for even longer. 

Back to that jug of mostly sediment. Hang onto that, and when you bottle your next batch, add the clear top part of that jug to the sediment and cloudy part of the second batch. Same thing with your third batch, and after a while you'll have a big jug of Plonk, which is what we call the blend of settled-out dregs from several batches. It makes a fine table mead, or cooking mead. My Plonk label usually says something like, "A fine artisanal blend of meads, expertly concocted in our sink just last Tuesday."