This is a brief article about how Mead is made.

I have another article here on the beer alcohol blog that explains what mead is and I give you a short history of this wonderful wine made from honey. In this article I give you a brief overview of how it is made.

The process for making mead is quite a simple one and if I could boil it down to the basics all you really have to do is add honey, water and yeast together – then wait for it to ferment and age. That is the whole process! Wow, pretty simple right? And well, you could do it that way but there are a few more things that should be done if you want your mead to be tasty and successful!

The most important thing about mead making

There is one factor that overrides all other factors when it comes to making mead. You have to make sure you take the utmost care in sanitizing everything and keeping everything pure while it is fermenting. This is where making mead gets to be a little more complicated.  The reason for this is that you are creating a batch of honey, water and other things like fruit and spices. Let’s say you just left this batch exposed to the air. What would happen?  It would quickly become contaminated by bacteria, wild yeast and all other kinds of unwanted things. It is , after all, a rich solution of food just waiting to be devoured by micro-organisms.

So, sanitation is your number one priority when making mead. Wash everything including containers, spoons, and siphoning hoses in some kind of solution made for sanitizing food stuffs. There are many readily available chemicals that will only cost around five dollars including EZ clean.

The Process of Making Mead

This is an overview of the steps you take when making mead.

• Sanitize all your equipment
• Mix honey and water together, approximately 1 quart of honey per gallon of water – stir and shake it very vigorously to make it homogenous. And when you are done stirring and shaking stir and shake it some more.
• Add your fruits or spices to the mix
• This whole mixture you have created is called the “Must”.
• Pre treat your yeast by adding it to about a cup of warm water. Each type of yeast will have a recommended way to pre-treat. This revives the yeast from it’s dormant state and prepares it for the must.
• Gently stir the yeast into the Must (This process is called “Pitching” the yeast.
• Cover it and put an airlock on it. It is absolutely necessary to have some kind of airlock. This allows gases to escape from the mead while not allowing anything to get into the batch.
• Within 24 hours the airlock on  your mead will start bubbling vigorously. This is a good sign.
• After a period of time (usually 2-4 weeks) the bubbling of the airlock will taper off dramatically and you can optionally siphon all the liquid into a new container (This process is called racking). At this point a thick layer of sediment will have formed at the bottom of the jug. Leave all this sediment behind and dispose of it.
• Place the airlock on your new jug. This is because the ferment is still occurring -but at a slower pace.
• Allow it to age for a minimum of six months before drinking. You can optionally rack it again at monthly intervals. This will clarify it quicker and give it a subtler taste.

Will Kalif has been a mead maker for many years. You can visit his website for lots more mead making tutorials, articles and videos. The Joy of Mead Making

Many homebrewers will go spend money on new homebrewing equipment, fancy homebrew bottles, and expensive homebrewing supplies but will overlook the most important piece of homebrewing equipment. A homebrewing journal.

There are many ways to keep a homebrew journal. Some people start a homebrewing blog, some buy fancy journals from homebrew shops, and others use a simple notebook. My main homebrew notebook was stained and dirty and had been through many different mishaps. It had a bottle stain on the cover from an over carbonated beer over flowing on the cover. I can no longer find my oldest journal and even though I was using beer brew kits, I still feel like something is missing from my journey.

I used the journal to copy down the beer recipe, note brewing temps and boil over’s, and review the taste of the beer. Additionally I would make notes before drinking the first beer. I would write about color, clarity, taste, smell, and give the beer an overall beer rating.

After 5 moves and 3 states in the past 5 years I have sold my brewing equipment. After moving a refrigerator, 10 Cornelius kegs, kettles, bottles, fermenters, CO2 tanks twice I determined I would replace my equipment for less than it cost me per move. I am in process of designing my new system, on the cheap. I will still have my most important tool, my second brew journal.

When I fire up the brewery next time I will be using BeerTools to keep my journals.

Mead is a very misunderstood beverage. Over the centuries it has been characterized as a bitter and cloudy beverage that only Vikings with strong stomachs would drink. Nothing could be further from the truth and I believe that the Vikings themselves started this rumor just so they could keep the golden beverage all to themselves!

So What is Mead?

It is a wine that is fermented with honey instead of grapes. It is pretty much as simple as that and if you think about it doesn’t it make sense that it would be a beautiful and sweet beverage? And that it is. A typical gallon of Mead uses about three pounds of honey which is about one quart and that is one quarter of the volume. That is a lot of honey.

So, why isn’t mead very well known?

Basics of Homebrewing Beer

The normal batch of homebrewed beer is five gallons in volume, which is enough for 2 cases, or 48 12 ounce bottle of beer.