Mead: Brewing the Oldest Booze

Mead is the oldest alcoholic beverage in the world. This is because mead can occur naturally in the wild: if wild yeasts and rainwater mix with honey, mead happens. If rain and some stupid bees can make mead by accident, I guarantee that you can make it on purpose. This primer gives you some basics about brewing the world’s oldest booze.

The Basics

When you tell somebody that you make mead, fifty percent of the time they’ll just stare at you blankly. Forty percent of the time they’ll think you said “meat,” and start asking you awkward questions about sausage. Roughly ten percent of the time they’ve watched enough Vikings to know that mead is a wine-like drink made out of honey. If you’ve had mead before, you probably had something golden, smooth, and pretty sweet, like a dessert wine.

The truth is, mead is an underrepresented but extremely versatile drink. If the only wine you’ve ever had was, say, a sweet Moscato, you might not imagine the breadth of tastes that wine has to offer. Mead is the same way. It can be dry or sweet. It can be still or sparkling. Its alcoholic content can range from about 8% (like a strong beer) to 20% (like a strong wine). It can have fruit, spice, or herbal flavors. Different honeys, yeasts, and ingredients will reveal a wide variety of tastes and experiences.

Mead is a great introduction to the home brewing hobby. Compared to beer, it’s pretty simple to make and the process is forgiving. When you feel comfortable with the procedure, there are literally thousands of mead recipes online that let you modify the flavor profile for a variety of tastes.

The Science

Alcohol is made with yeast and sugar. Yeast are little single-celled fungi and they’re one of humanity’s oldest friends. We’ve been cultivating them for a long time because they have a pretty neat trick: when they eat sugar, they fart out alcohol and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide bubbles out and leaves the precious alcohol behind. This process is called fermentation. When the sugar is supplied by way of honey, we call the end result mead.

A mead’s basic components are water, honey, yeast, and nutrients. Yeast create fermentation. Honey provides the sugars that the yeast will eat. Water dilutes the honey. Nutrients are an added booster that ensure that the yeast can thrive and live long enough to do their job.

You can add further complexity to a mead by adding additional ingredients. Additional ingredients sometimes act as the nutrient component, as well as provide additional flavor and richness. Fruit is a common one. Mead flavored with fruit is called a melomel. If the fruit used are apples, it’s called a cyser. If the fruit are grapes, it’s called a pyment. Melomels tend to be sweeter meads because the taste we associate with fruit is usually that of their fructose sugars.

Herbs and spices, like cloves, cinnamon, or nutmeg, are also common additives. Mead brewed with herbs is called metheglin. Historically, metheglins were thought to have curative or healthful properties. Some specific herbs also lend special names to mead that contain them. Roses, for example, make rhodomel.

The Dirty Deed (Done Somewhat Inexpensively)

This is a no nonsense, starter recipe for 1 gallon of traditional mead. If you find that you enjoy doing this sort of thing, you can get a lot more elaborate.

When the ancient Scandinavians made mead, they’d recycle yeast cultures by using the same wooden spoon and cooking pot from past batches. Today, we’re a bit more careful (and a little less gross) about what goes into our mead.

Lucky for you, my would-be mead maker, the proliferation of home brewing means that you probably have a home brew shop near you. If you don’t, the internet has you covered. The buy in for materials to make a mead isn’t unreasonable. For your first batch of mead, here’s what you’re going to need:

Equipment

• Star San sanitizer
• 2 gallon brewing bucket with drilled lid
• 1 gallon carboy
• Plastic piping
• Airlock
• Drilled carboy stopper (aka a “bung”)

Sanitizing everything is the most important step in the home brewing process. Star San is the poster child of brewing sanitizers. It comes as a concentrate that you mix with water (tap is fine) at the rate of 1 ounce Star San to 5 gallons of water. Use it liberally. If possible, get a spray bottle to use with it—it makes spritzing down all of your equipment, work surfaces, containers, and hands super easy. This is a no-rinse sanitizer, so you just have to spray and go.

Even though this recipe is only making a gallon of mead, you’ll initially want a 2 gallon bucket. You’ll want your primary brewing container bigger than the amount you’re actually brewing. The extra room allows for the mead to expand and bubble during fermentation and gives you space to work while adding ingredients to the mix.

As a note, a brew bucket is only marginally different from a normal food-grade bucket. A brew bucket has a “drilled lid,” which is a lid that accommodates an airlock. As fermentation happens, C02 bubbles out. The airlock lets that stuff escape and not build up pressure, blowing the lid off of your concoction.

From there, you’ll transfer your mead into your glass 1 gallon carboy. This is where your mead will age. You’ll top the carboy with a drilled carboy stopper and your airlock to seal it. A size 6.5 carboy stopper fits most 1 gallon carboys.

Ingredients

• 3 lbs. of raw honey
• Yeast: 5 grams of Red Star Cote Des Blancs
• Yeast Nutrient: 1 tablespoon of diammonium phosphate
• Yeast Energizer: ½ tablespoon of yeast hulls
• 1 Campden tablet
• A little cheap vodka

The honey is probably going to be your most expensive component for this project. Buying honey in bulk online is a cheap option for large batches. For this small batch, you might want to look at your local farmer’s market or Amish store.

A word of warning: sometimes big box stores like Wal-Mart sell ultra-filtered honey that is bad for mead making. If it comes in a little plastic bear, avoid it. If it says True Source Certified, you should be good.

With that caveat, you otherwise don’t have to worry about what kind of honey you use for this batch. Wildflower or clover honey is probably cheapest. If you experiment with a second batch, try varying your honey; maybe blueberry blossom, tupelo, or mesquite honey. Notice how it changes the flavor profile and see what you enjoy best.

The yeast suggested here will make your mead semi-dry or dry, depending on your conditions. Lalvin 71B-1122, Lalvin D-45, or Red Star Montrachet are also good yeast choices. If you’re in a brew shop and are having trouble finding these particular yeast strains, you can just ask for “champagne yeast.” That’ll do.

The nutrients—diammonium phosphate (also known as DAP) and yeast hulls—are going to make sure your yeast are happy and healthy while they do their job of turning the honey into alcohol.

A Campden tablet is a sulfur based product you can find at a brew store that will help protect your mead against wild yeasts and oxidization.

The vodka is for your airlock (or you, if you need to take the edge off the brewing process). If you use water in your airlock, it’s possible that the water can harbor bacteria, spill into your mead, and infect your batch. Vodka is more hygienic. The worst thing that can happen is the vodka gets into your mead and makes a gnarly mixed drink.

Procedure

Read through this procedure a couple of times before following it on brew day.

1. Step one is always to sanitize everything. Spray that Star San! Spray it everywhere!
   
   
2. Pour your honey at room temperature into your bucket. To get all of the honey out of its container, empty as much honey as will easily flow from its jar into your bucket, then seal the jar and put it into a hot tap water bath. Hold the jar under water for a couple of minutes, then empty it as much as possible again.
   
   
3. Add room temperature water (tap is fine) until the total volume of your honey + water is 1 gallon. This is called your “must.”
   
   
4. Add 5 grams of yeast to your must.
   
   
5. Add the diammonium phosphate (DAP) and yeast hulls to your must.
   
   
6. Stir vigorously! (Don’t forget to sanitize your spoon or whatever.) Stir the must for about 3 to 5 minutes. If you get tired, get your partner or kid to stir for a while. This is a family effort.
   
   
7. Seal your bucket with your drilled lid and airlock. Put a little vodka in the airlock.
   
   
8. Store your bucket in a dark location at about 60–75° F. The basement is a good candidate for this.
   
   
9. Fermentation should begin within 1 or 2 days. You’ll probably notice your airlock bubbling. If you don’t, don’t panic! Brew buckets sometimes don’t seal hermetically. Fermentation is definitely happening in there.
   
   
10. Wait! The fermentation process lasts for 1 or 2 weeks. This is variable on a few factors. You can wait 3 weeks to be safe. During this time, your must becomes mead! The yeast will die off and settle to the bottom of the bucket.
    
    
11. After 3 weeks, siphon your mead using the plastic tubing into your carboy. Be careful not to stir up too much of the yeast at the bottom. It tastes kind of bad. This is called moving your mead into secondary. This step turns your mead from cloudy to clear and will improve its taste.
    
    
12. Add a crushed Campden tablet into the mead. The siphoning process should be enough to dissolve it completely.
    
    
13. Seal your carboy with your drilled carboy stopper and your airlock. Add a little vodka into the airlock. As you age your mead, be careful not to let your airlock go dry.

Now comes the boring part. Once you’ve transferred your mead into secondary, you just have to wait. Like wine, the longer it ages, the better it will be. This mead should be very drinkable in 3 to 5 months. When you can’t stand to let your mead age any longer, use your plastic piping to siphon it into bottles/growlers/directly into your mouth.

Bonus: If you want, add a vanilla bean, some orange peel, and a cinnamon stick when you add your yeast. This adds some additional flavors. This stuff will be left behind when you filter the mead into your secondary container. Technically, this step lets you call your mead a “metheglin,” if you’re feeling fancy.

When you make mead, you tap into one of humanity’s oldest traditions: the tradition of vikings and Renn Faire nerds alike. Cheers!