This week I take a look a the fine art of making mead and how modern mead techniques have revolutionized the hobby. In particular I look at how we can take a process that once tool a year or more and cut the timeline down to 30-60 days. Also the average home brewer has about 95% of the equipment needed to make mead.
Mead Making History and Older Techniques
Mead is arguably the oldest fermented beverage. Vessels in China dating to 7000 BC have organic compounds consistent with fermented honey, and as you can spontaneously ferment honey mixed with water, it is very likely that mead was enjoyed by hunter-gatherer societies and pre-dates the rise of agriculture. While mead was revered as the “nectar of the Gods” in ancient Greece, and played a central role in a variety of religions and ceremonies it has largely faded to become a niche drink in modern times.
Mead is simply wine made from a honey base. You can literally take honey mixed with water in an open vessel and it will spontaneously ferment from wild yeast. Modern mead styles span a wide range of additional ingredients including melomels from honey and fruit, pyment made with honey and grapes, spiced meads, and braggot which is a combination of mead and beer. Also there are varietal meads made from various varieties of honey which take on the flavor of the underlying honey like mesquite or orange blossom.
The traditional method for mead making is to use honey, water, yeast and if desired fruit or other additives and ferment them in a closed vessel. However honey lacks many nutrients, notably nitrogen, so it can take 12-18 months for a mead made in this way to completely ferment. The results can be great, but many of us in the modern era don’t have a year and a half to wait for our mead to reach maturity.
Modern Mead Making
Given the lack of nitrogen in honey, one obvious way to speed up your mead fermentation is by adding nutrients. However, additional techniques have been developed, largely by home mead makers to accelerate the overall process even further and create even a high gravity mead in as little as 60 days. Lower gravity session meads can be fermented for serving in as little as two weeks.
While covering all of the different mead styles, design of mead recipes and possible techniques would easily fill a book, I’m going to cover the making of meads with fruit below. High gravity fruit meads are my favorite mead style, and the one I make the most, so I’m going to cover those. Note that you can use BeerSmith software (version 3 or 4) to formulate your recipes, and I did cover basic mead making in an article here. I also wrote two articles for BYO a few years back one titled Modern Meadmaking and another titled Melomels: Brewing Big Fruit, though both of these are behind the BYO paywall at the moment.
Here are the elements of modern mead making:
- Cold Preparation of Ingredients: Virtually all modern mead makers I’ve interviewed or worked with do not boil their honey or fruit as it can lead to flavor and aroma loss. Instead honey is thinned a bit with water and added directly to the fermenter. Whole fruit is washed and then often frozen to break up the cell walls and then thawed and added to the fermenter. I prefer to use a grain bag to contain the fruit, which also allows me to remove it after a week or so to minimize losses and avoid the fruit going bad. Making mead is simply a matter of mixing honey, water and fruit in the correct proportions for your recipe.
- Proper Yeast Hydration: Most mead makers use dry wine yeast as it has a higher alcohol tolerance. The top yeast, by far, used by mead makers is Lalvin 71B Narbonne dry yeast. This yeast has a very consistent 15.1% alcohol tolerance, works very well with fruit meads, and tastes great. While you do not need to hydrate dry yeast in general, meads with very high starting gravities over 1.100 are subject to an effect called osmotic shock, so if you are making a high gravity mead you need to hydrate your yeast by slowly introducing small amounts of must to the yeast over a period of 30-40 minutes to give the yeast cells time to adjust.
- Aeration of the Must: After mixing your honey, water and fruit together the mixture (called must) benefits from oxygen. Directly add oxygen, much as you would when you aerate beer. The best way to do this is with an oxygen source and aeration wand, just like you would use for beer. For high gravity meads you should give an additional dose of oxygen approximately 12 hours after your initial dose. Unlike beer, the must will rapidly uptake the additional oxygen and use it for the fermentation, so this second dose does not create oxidation issues.
- Staggered Nutrient Additions: I mentioned that honey is lacking in key nutrients that yeast needs, especially nitrogen. Therefore modern mead makers add several nutrient additions in a “staggered” method over several days to promote yeast health and rapid fermentation. The most popular method for staggered additions at the moment is called Tailored Organic Staggered Nutrient Additions 2.0 (TONSA 2). This uses measured amounts of the organic Fermaid-O nutrient in four equal sized additions at 24, 48 and 72 hours after the start of fermentation, with a final fourth addition either at 1 week or when the 2/3 sugar break is reached. You can calculate the mead nutrients needed using BeerSmith software, or any of several online TONSA-2 calculators.
- Degassing the Must During Fermentation: In the early stages of mead making CO2 from fermentation can build up in the must and create carbonic acid. This acid can actually work to inhibit fermention, slowing the overall process. So mead makers degas the must twice a day during active fermentation to get the CO2 out of solution. This is done with an electric drill and a device called a wine whip which is available from most home or wine making shops. Typically I move my fruit bag out of the way, and then vigorously use the drill and wine whip to force the CO2 out of solution. Note that this can create a lot of foam, so its best to use an oversize bucket for the initial fermentation. Some oxygen will be introduced in the must but this is not a problem during mead fermentation as the yeast with rapidly mop it up. If you are using a fruit bag its a good idea to rotate it twice a day as well so the floating fruit does not form mold or other growth on the top. You should degass until about 2/3 of the sugars have been fermented away, which is roughly the first week for a high gravity mead.
- Monitor the Gravity and pH: You need to monitor the gravity of the must as it ferments as you want to know when to add the final staggered nutrient addition as well as when to stop degassing. If you are making a fruit mead, I also recommend monitoring the pH. The pH will drop as fermentation continues and if you are using fruits with high tannins and acidity such as the noble mead fruits, they can drop the pH further. If the pH drops below 3.0 it can actually stop your fermentation. I typically will begin adding small amounts of Potassium-Bicarbonate once the pH drops below 3.4 from the wine or home brew shop as it is alkaline and will raise the pH. My goal is to keep the pH above 3.4 if possible.
- Transfer the Mead for Secondary Fermentation and Use Finings: After the primary fermentation is complete and the gravity has stabilized, I like to move my mead from the plastic bucket I used for fermentation to a secondary fermenter that won’t allow oxygen in. I also remove the fruit bag at this point. The secondary container could be a glass carboy, stainless steel fermenter or a high grade plastic that is impermeable. I will also often add finings at this point to help the mead clear more quickly. I’ve had good luck with “Super-kleer” which is a two part agent of Kieselsol and Chitosan, but you could use unflavored gelatin or other post-fermentation finings to aid in clearing the mead. Low gravity session meads can be ready to drink in as little as 2 weeks, but high gravity fruit meads typically take at least 60 days for the flavor to stabilize and they often get better with age.
- Packaging: How you package the final mead depends a lot on the style of mead. I server my high gravity fruit meads still and store them sometimes for years. I will usually keg these in a stainless keg and use a “stout mix” of 70% nitrogen and 30% CO2 at very low pressure to serve the mead. Many lighter session meads styles are carbonated with either stout mix or CO2. Some lower gravity meads are also backsweetened to add sweetness back in. You can bottle still meads as well as carbonated ones though you should not bottle backsweetened meads. Finally it is very common to add a small quantity of potassium-metabisulfite (aka sulfites) as a preservative for the mead. BeerSmith has both a backsweetening tool and a sulfite tool to help you determine the right amounts to add.
I should mention that I prefer to make extremely high gravity fruit meads which have extremely high starting gravities. If you want to see a few examples here’s my Blackberry Mead recipe made with over 16 lbs of blackberries, and my Tart Cherry Mead made with Knudsen Tart Cherry Juice.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s article on modern mead making techniques. Thanks for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog. If you want to take the guesswork out of brewing, please try my BeerSmith recipe software from BeerSmith.com. Be sure to sign up for my newsletter or my podcast (also on itunes and youtube) for more great tips on homebrewing.
