Make Mead, Part 1

Honey is an amazing food, and is what makes mead special

Making mead for over 25 years has been one of my greatest ongoing pleasures, and I want to show you how you can find the same satisfaction. Right away you can steep yourself in an ancient tradition, and start having your very own for the table, the fireside, gifts, or for your cellar to bring up as golden treasure years from now! Mead is a wonderful, ancient, magical beverage, essentially wine made from honey. Most people who have heard of it know it from the saga of Beowulf, and imagine mead-halls with vikings surviving winters with the comfort of vats of mead and roasting wild game. Varieties of mead have been made throughout history all over the world though. Africa, Australia, Asia...the Greeks even had a mead culture before wine caught on.

There are so many possibilities for flavors and styles that you could make a new kind of mead every year for life, and still have unexplored options. We'll show you how to begin, using the example of the Tupelo Honey Vanilla Mead that we just started. I'm very happy about this batch in particular, since it's the first time my Honey and I have made mead together! The kids were asleep, we both were coming off a long day, but we persevered, whispering instructions, trying not to bang the pots too hard, making magic by moonlight on a beautiful autumn evening in our little hollow...

Mead in the bucket, soon to be treasure in the cellar

First, let's talk about your equipment. What you need is simple and easy to find. If you have a big pot, like a canning kettle, that's perfect. A thermometer that measures from room temperature up toward boiling is helpful even though I don't recommend boiling your mead. A carboy (big glass bottle, often five gallons) or brewing bucket, with a bubbler (simple vaporlock), and a wine hydrometer, all available online and from brew-shops and health food stores all over, are the only specialty items you should have.

The bubbler is a simple tool that allows carbon monoxide to leave the fermenting container without letting air back in, by bubbling through water, either through an s-curve or out from under a little inverted plastic cup. The hydrometer is a tool that measures the specific gravity of your must (mixture that will become mead). You want to start the must at a certain level of sweetness, which means it is dense because there is honey dissolved into the water, and the hydrometer measures this accurately, at 60 degrees fahrenheit. Then, as the yeast converts the honey to alcohol, the must gets less sweet, more alcoholic, and less dense. Your hydrometer helps you know how close to finished it is, and how much alcohol you have. More on this later.

This plus water and patience makes mead!

Let's just start with the basic recipe. I can explain some of it as we go along. Here's what we used:
One gallon of Tupelo Honey, about 12 pounds.
About two and a half gallons of hot water (tap-water hot)
The juice of 7 clementines.
Three basic black teabags.
Two vanilla bean-pods.
One packet Cote des Blancs dry wine yeast.

Pour all of the honey into your pot. Then fill the honey container with hot tap-water, emptying it into the pot, twice. Next, put the three teabags into two or three cups of boiling water to steep. Squeeze the juice of the clementines (or oranges, but use five or six because they are bigger) into the pot. Cut the vanilla bean pods in half lengthwise, and scrape out all of the stuff inside with a knife, then add all of it to the pot, even the pods. (Keep out the yeast for now!) Stir until all of the honey is dissolved.

Getting the intense seeds from the vanilla pods for mead

If your water isn't hot enough, or if your honey is too solid to dissolve, you may need to heat it carefully on a stove, but don't do it if you don't need to.

If you want to keep things really basic, you are almost finished. Simply add the tea, let it cool to ninety degrees or less, and put in your carboy with the yeast, add on the bubbler, and wait. You'll make fine mead that way! If you want to fine-tune it a bit more, and have more predictable results, here's where the hydrometer comes in.

It helps to understand what's going on with the yeast. It's multiplying, living off of the honey and the nutrients provided by the citrus fruit and the tea. It's making alcohol and carbon monoxide, and the must is getting less dense (that's what the hydrometer measures), as it becomes more alcoholic. When it gets to something in the area of sixteen percent alcohol, the yeast will really be struggling. By then there will be a lot less sugar to live on, and the alcohol starts to make it hard for the yeast to live at all. It will reach a point where the yeast all dies, leaving behind a bit of unused honey and a lot of alcohol. Most wine yeast is vigorous only up to about that sixteen percent level. Bread yeast will not survive that long, which is why you won't use it to make mead.

Add oranges to mead for the citric acid, and flavor!

If you like a sweet mead, then you will want to start with something like 18-20 % "potential alcohol" on your hydrometer reading. There will be enough honey left when the yeast dies off to leave some sweetness in your mead. If you like a dry (not-sweet) mead, then you will want to start with something like 14-16 % "potential alcohol" on your hydrometer reading, or even less. To do this, you need to cool a small sample of the must to about sixty degrees, measure it in the tube that the hydrometer comes in, and add water if needed.

Harper and Honey's first batch of mead!!! <3

For example, when we made this batch, my first reading came to about 20% potential alcohol after we had cooled a quarter cup to sixty degrees and measured it. We added three cups of cold water, stirred, and measured again. We got just over 19%. Added two more cups of cold water, stirred, cooled a sample, and measured it at 18.2%. That sounded about right to us, so we stopped there. As soon as the pot had cooled to about ninety degrees, we poured it into the brew-bucket, added the yeast, and fitted the lid with a bubbler.

We'll comment on this batch as it progresses, and will follow up soon with a Part 2, some notes and observations that will fill in a lot of blanks for you, but this post should definitely get you started. Contact us with any questions, and happy meading!