How to Make Mead - Wine from Honey

Honey wine, known more properly as "mead," is probably the first alcoholic beverage created by humans, predating the now much more popular wine and beer.  While not commonly available as a commercially produced product, mead is very easy to make at home.  In this posting, I'll tell you a little bit about this ancient beverage and give you basic instructions on how to make it.

If you are a bee keeper and have plenty of "free" honey on hand, mead has one other advantage compared to other beverages you can make like beer or grape wine -- mead is incredibly inexpensive to make.  Honey is the only real ingredient, so outside of the initial equipment costs, the only expense to produce a batch of mead for a bee keeper is a few corks, some yeast and yeast nutrients -- These amount to less than $1 per bottle.

Different Types of Mead

Mead in it's simplest form is fermented honey and water.  This is the type of mead I make.  However, there are many different styles of mead produced around the world.  These add other ingredients including various fruits, berries and spices: 

• Acerglyn - Mead made with the addition of maple syrup.
• Braggot - A Welsh mead made with the addition of hops.
• Capsicumel - mead made with hot chili peppers.
• Cyser - mead made with apple juice.
• Metheglyn - mead with the addition of spices including orange peel, ginger and nutmeg.
  
• Myod - a Russian mead made with the addition of berry juice.
• Sima - a Finish mead made with lemons.
  

 Like wine made from grapes, mead can vary dramatically in it's sweetness depending on the amount of sugars that remains in the beverage after fermentation.  Mead can be dry like as Sauvignon Blanc, sweet like a Riesling, or super sweet like a Sauternes, Moscato or other sweet wine.

Mead Ingredients

The least complicated mead is made from just honey and water.    Sweetness in mead is driven primarily by the amount of honey that is initially added to the fermenter.  A good guideline for the amount of honey required to make a five gallon batch of mead is as follows:

• Dry Mead - between 9 to 12 pounds honey
• Off Dry Mead - 13 to 14 pounds of honey
• Semi-Sweet Mead - 15-16 pounds of honey
• Desert Mead - 12 to 22 pounds of honey (Not added all at once)

I'm not a fan of sweet wines, so my batch of mead is being made with just 9 pounds of honey.  This should produce a dry "white" wine with nice floral notes. 

The other ingredients required include:

• Mead yeast
• Yeast nutrients (Fermaid-K, Go-Ferm, Diammonium Phosphate)
• Preservative for sweet meads (Potassium Metabisulphite, Potassium Sorbate)
  

Equipment

The easiest way to get started is to buy a basic wine making kit from a local or on-line wine making store.  These kits normally cost $90-$150 and include everything you need to get started including the primary and secondary fermentation vessels, a corker to insert corks into bottles, siphon tubes, a fermentation lock (more about this below), cleaning equipment etc. If the kit does not include it, I highly recommend adding a hygrometer and test jar to your equipment list ($10).  This device will help you determine when fermentation has ended and also the percentage of alcohol contained in your mead.

Here are some sources you might want to look at for these beginner kits:

Midwest Supplies

Austin Home Brew

MoreWine

Basic Mead Making

The primary ingredient in mead is honey, but the magic is all created by yeast, single celled micro-organisms.  Yeast literally eat the sugar as food but in the process of doing so create alcohol (the stuff we want) as one of the bi-products of this fermentation.

Fermentation is a completely natural process.  If you leave honey water in a bowl on your kitchen counter, wild yeast cells in the environment would be carried to the bowl through the air, land in the bowl, and begin fermenting the honey.

What makes "mead making" different from the above mentioned "natural process" is that mead makers choose a specific yeast strain to do the fermentation based on the desirable characteristics of that strain and exclude wild yeast strains and other bacteria that can alter the flavor, or even ruin, the mead. 

Ten Steps to Making Mead

1. Since you don't want wild yeast or bad bacteria to spoil your mead, clean and sanitize your fermentation equipment.  A good cleaner used in brewing is called PBW. Once clean, sanitize the equipment using Iodophor, an iodine based liquid that kills bacteria and wild yeast.  PBW and Iodophor can be purchased along with your equipment.
2. Decide on the sweetness level you want (see above for the amount of honey required to produce dry to sweet mead) and add water to your honey to create a total of 5 gallons of honey-water.  Start by placing the honey in your primary fermentation vessel and adding 1 gallon of water.  Stir and then add additional water till you reach 5 gallons.  The water in my area is tastes good so I just use tap water.  If you live in an area that doesn't have good tasting water, use bottled water.
   
3. Add the yeast nutrients per your mead recipe.  This is normally a few teaspoons of various nutrients the yeast need to thrive but are not provided by the honey.  It's like giving your yeast a vitamin to supplement their diet.
   
4. Use your hygrometer to measure the amount of sugar in the honey water.  To do this, take a sample of the liquid and place it in the testing jar.  Now place the hygrometer in the jar so that it floats in liquid.  The higher the hygrometer floats, the more sugar there is in the water.  The hygrometer has markings on its side that allow you to measure sugar content precisely.  "Specific Gravity" and "Brix" are two competing standards for measuring sugar content.  I use specific gravity, but either standard works.  (If you are making a dry mead, the Specific Gravity will be around 1.090 while a sweet mead will have a specific gravity of 1.135 or greater.)
   
5. Add yeast to the mixture and then cap your fermenter using a rubber stopper and fermentation lock.  The fermentation lock is a one-way valve that lets carbon dioxide gas out of your fermenter, but doesn't allow wild yeast or bacteria in.   One uses a fermentation lock because, in addition to alcohol, one of the bi-products of fermentation is carbon dioxide.  The fermentation lock allows this gas to escape, but prevents the aforementioned airborne yeast and bacteria from getting inside your fermenter.  There are several styles of fermentation locks, but all work by filling the lock with some water. (see below photo and video showing fermented carbon dioxide escaping through the lock).
6. Within 24 hours you should notice carbon dioxide from fermentation escaping through the fermentation lock.  The first days of fermentation are the most vigorous and is called "primary fermentation."  During the primary fermentation, the yeast population explodes as they consume the sugar in the honey and reproduce. Primary fermentation is over when the specific gravity of the mead falls to about 1.018.  Primary fermentation takes 7-21 days to complete depending on the amount of honey you use, the strain of yeast and the ambient temperature which effects yeast activity.  
   
   
7. Once this vigorous process is complete, the liquid is siphoned out of the first fermentation vessel and into a second vessel where fermentation is completed.  This process separates the mead from dead yeast cells that will have collected in the bottom of the primary fermenter during the vigorous period and begins the process of clarifying the mead (At this point, the mead will appear very cloudy from all the yeast swimming in the liquid)
   
8. The mead is allowed to further ferment for 3-4 weeks during which point it will reach its finished specific gravity: Dry Mead has a final specific gravity of 0.990 to 1.006, Medium 1.006 to 1.015, Sweet 1.012 to 1.020, and desert +1.020. You'll know your mead has finished fermenting when the specific gravity readings you get don't change for three or four days. If you're interested in knowing the alcohol content of your mead, you can use one of many online tools to calculate this value as long as you know the starting and ending specific gravity.  The difference between these numbers represents the amount of sugar that has been converted to alcohol. 
   
9. At this point, certain additives are mixed into the mead depending on the specific recipe and type of mead you are making.  For example, more honey is added to dessert meads, an acid might be used to add better balance the flavor of the mead, and finally, inhibitors (potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulphite) are added to stop the fermentation process and prevent any wild micro-organisms in the mead from taking over while in the bottle.  The inhibitors are important because you don't want fermentation to occur once the mead is bottled.  Further fermentation would cause carbon dioxide to build up within the bottle and could cause them to explode.
10. The final step is to bottle the mead by syphoning it into clean, sanitized wine bottles and corking these with the corking device included in your starter kit.

Like grape wine, mead improves with age but can be consumed immediately.

For more detailed instructions, recipes and information about mead making, check out the following web sites:

• GotMead.com - There's a wealth of information at this site, but it's not always easy to find.  The amount of information can be overwhelming for newcomers.
• TraditionalMead.com - a web site for purists.  No adding berries or spices here, just honey.