How to Make Your Own Mead

As with all brewing projects, please keep in mind that it is legal to brew homemade alcoholic beverages in the USA and Canada as long as they are not distilled or sold. Further, you must be of legal age to possess alcohol regardless of whether you brewed it yourself or not. Now lets talk about home to make your own mead!

Mead is one of the simplest homebrew projects you can undertake. However if you have no previous brewing experience, I recommend you try brewing a cider before you try to make a mead. Cider is both easier and cheaper to make than mead. Cider is also a better first time brewing project than mead because you can brew a fantastic cider in two months....a good mead should be aged for a year or more! So if I have persuaded you to try making a cider then check out one of my articles on brewing cider:

How to Make Your Own Hard Cider (Simplest Recipe)

How to Make Hard Cider (Slightly more complicated Recipe)

Some Mead Basics

First we need to start with a little terminology:

Traditional Mead/Show Mead: This is the most basic variety of mead which is brewed with no ingredients other than water, honey, and yeast.

Short Mead: Mead brewed for relatively immediate consumption....Only needs to be aged a few months.

Sack Mead: A variety of mead made with large amounts of honey resulting in a sweet beverage with stronger alcohol content than other meads.

Great Mead: Mead intended to be aged for several years.

Melomel: Mead produced with a mixture of honey and fruit. There are also different names for different mixtures; Mead from honey and apples is called cyser, which is an example of a melomel.

Metheglin: Mead with any variety of additional spices.

This article will focus on Traditional Mead and Sack Mead. You can easily produce Melomel or Metheglin using this basic recipe and adding fruit juice or spices. You can also find more brewing recipes and instructions at my Content Producer Page .

What You'll Need to Make Your Own Mead

Naturally the first thing you will need is honey for making mead. You will probably need a lot of honey if you are going to make a large quantity of mead. Some recipes require as much as several pounds of honey per gallon of water. On the other hand some recipes use far less honey. For example hydromel is a very light and refreshing mead which has a little as half of a pound of honey per gallon of water. I recommend that you try using about 2 pounds of honey per gallon of water for your first attempt at making homemade mead.

The next thing you're going to need is a proper yeast. You really need to use a yeast which is well suited for mead rather than simply a bread yeast. I love Lalvin EC-1118 for yeasts and ciders. Any champagne yeast should do pretty well for your homemade mead, but some brew sites or your local brewing supply store may have other recommendations as well as yeasts specifically for making mead. You need one packet of yeast for every five gallons of mead.

Your going to need a primary fermenter and an airlock. I use a 6.5 gallon bucket with a spigot as my primary fermenter. Buckets work great. For small batches you can simply use empty gallon jugs or make a big batch and distribute it among several jugs. If you don't have an airlock, you can make one for less than a dollar by following the directions on page 2 of my article How to Make Your Own Hard Cider.

Finally you're going to need bottles. Grolsch swingtop bottles are my favorite because they are easy to reuse and don't require a bottle capper. Really you can use anything which you can seal airtight. Even canning jars work well if you don't mind people making moonshine jokes. If you're planning on doing much brewing, you ought to just buy a bottle capper. You can get one for around $10.

Finally Making the Mead

Now let's get to what you've really been waiting for....How to make your own mead. Decide how much mead you want and then subtract about one quart per gallon to decide how much water you need to start with. So let's say you want to make 5 gallons of mead...so subtract 5 quarts from 5 gallons and you are left with 3 gallons and 3 quarts of water total (15 quarts of water.) If you are going to use more than 2 pounds of honey per gallon you will need to start with less water.

Next add your honey. If you stuck with my suggestion of 2 pounds of honey per gallon, you will be adding about 1 quart of honey per gallon of water. Now you need to decide if you will boil the mixture. Boiling will certainly decrease the likelihood of any contamination which might ruin your mead, but boiling honey can really remove many of the aromatic compounds in the honey. Personally I prefer not to boil and I haven't had any problems yet. If you do decide to boil, do it with a lid on and only allow it to boil for several minutes. Five minutes should be sufficient to kill any unwanted bacteria.

In the meantime, you should be preparing your primary fermenter for your homemade mead. You will need to sterilize it somehow. The best way is to buy a sanitizer from a homebrew supply store and follow the directions on it. Another great sanitizer is vodka! Just buy the cheapest stuff you can find and rinse your fermenter with it and then rinse it again with water.

Add your honey, water and yeast to the fermenter and seal it with an airlock. Again if you don't have an airlock follow the directions for making one in my article How to Make Your Own Hard Cider. Several days later you should see your airlock start to bubble. Before preceding you need to wait until your airlock has completely stopped bubbling. Wait at least a week after it has completely stopped before you continue. This process is your Primary Fermentation.

You now need to start your Secondary Fermentation. You need to carefully transfer your homemade mead into another container. There will be some brown sludge in the bottom of your fermenter. This sludge is just the yeast which has grown in volume and is called trub. Try to get as little of this stuff into the new container as possible. It's not harmful, but it will make your mead look cloudy and possibly scare people away from tasting it. I should also mention that your Secondary Fermentation can be carried out in the same container as your Primary Fermentation as long as you have washed out all the trub.

Now seal up your mead with the airlock again for secondary fermentation. Let it rest for about two weeks or so before bottling it.

The next step is to bottle your mead. Start by rinsing and sterilizing all the bottles. Transfer the mead to the bottles and cap them up. Now comes the really really hard part. Put the bottles in a dark place and leave them for a long time. After you make your own mead, it should be ready to drink about a month after bottling, but the flavor will greatly improve with time. Ideally you should wait a year before you drink it.

If you taste your mead and it has a strange taste like burnt rubber, this is a sign that you didn't age it long enough. Likewise if it has a strong "burn" going down, it will get smoother with age. You need to be much more patient when you make your own mead than you do when you make beer or cider.

For much more information about brewing check out, Homemade Hard Cider: Tips, Recipes and History.