How to Brew Mead: An Ancient Art for Modern Makers

The first time I tasted proper mead, I was standing in a friend's basement surrounded by carboys and the sweet smell of fermenting honey. That golden liquid changed everything I thought I knew about alcoholic beverages. It wasn't the syrupy Renaissance faire drink I'd expected – it was crisp, complex, and somehow tasted like sunshine trapped in a bottle.

Mead might be humanity's oldest alcoholic beverage, predating both wine and beer, but most people today have never made it themselves. Which is a shame, really, because brewing mead is surprisingly forgiving for beginners while offering endless complexity for those who want to dive deeper. After fifteen years of making everything from traditional meads to experimental batches with wild honey and foraged herbs, I've learned that mead-making is less about following rigid rules and more about understanding the dance between honey, water, and yeast.

The Soul of Mead: Understanding Your Ingredients

Honey is everything in mead. Not metaphorically – literally. The type of honey you choose will fundamentally shape your final product in ways that grape varietals affect wine. I once made two identical batches, changing only the honey source: one with orange blossom from Florida, another with buckwheat from upstate New York. The orange blossom mead turned out light and floral, perfect for summer afternoons. The buckwheat? Dark, malty, almost porter-like in its intensity.

Most beginners grab whatever honey they find at the grocery store, and honestly, that's fine for your first batch. But once you start exploring local apiaries, farmers' markets, or specialty honey suppliers, you'll discover that wildflower honey from your region tastes nothing like wildflower honey from three states over. The bees' foraging territory – whether it's dominated by clover, basswood, or sage – creates distinct flavor profiles that survive fermentation.

Water matters more than you'd think. If your tap water tastes good, it'll probably make good mead. But chlorinated municipal water can stress yeast and create off-flavors. I learned this the hard way with a batch that tasted vaguely like a swimming pool. Now I either use spring water or let tap water sit out overnight to let the chlorine evaporate. Some meadmakers get obsessive about water chemistry, adjusting mineral content to match historical water profiles. That's fun if you're into it, but unnecessary for making excellent mead.

Yeast selection opens another rabbit hole. Wine yeasts work beautifully for most meads – Lalvin D47 creates fruity esters that complement honey, while EC-1118 ferments bone dry and clean. But here's something the books don't always tell you: bread yeast works too. My grandmother made mead with Fleischmann's active dry yeast, and while it won't win competitions, it produces perfectly drinkable mead. The key is understanding what each yeast strain brings to the party and matching it to your goals.

The Process: Simpler Than You Think

Making mead strips fermentation down to its essence. No grain mashing like beer, no fruit crushing like wine. You're essentially making honey water and letting yeast transform it into something magical.

Start with sanitization. Everything that touches your mead after heating needs to be clean. I use Star-San, but back in the day, people used boiling water or even strong alcohol. The goal is eliminating wild bacteria and yeast that could turn your mead into expensive vinegar.

The basic ratio I've settled on after years of experimentation: 3 pounds of honey per gallon of finished mead for a semi-sweet result. Want it drier? Use 2.5 pounds. Prefer dessert-wine sweetness? Push it to 4 pounds. These aren't rules carved in stone – they're starting points for your own exploration.

Here's where traditional and modern methods diverge. Old-school meadmakers boil their honey-water mixture, skimming off proteins that rise to the surface. This creates a clearer mead but drives off delicate honey aromatics. I've switched to the no-heat method: mixing room-temperature honey with warm (not hot) water. Yes, it takes more stirring to dissolve everything, but those volatile compounds that make expensive honey worth buying actually make it into your glass.

Temperature control during fermentation separates good mead from great mead. Yeast produces different flavor compounds at different temperatures. Too hot, and you get fusel alcohols that taste like paint thinner. Too cold, and fermentation stalls. I aim for 62-68°F for most batches, though I'll push it warmer for certain styles. Before I had temperature control, Iused the seasonal method – brewing lighter meads in spring when my basement stayed cool, heartier ones in fall when temperatures fluctuated less.

Nutrients: The Secret Nobody Talks About

Here's something that took me years to figure out: honey is nutritionally barren from a yeast's perspective. It's basically sugar and water with trace amounts of minerals. Wine yeast evolved to ferment grapes, which contain amino acids, vitamins, and other nutrients yeast needs. Honey doesn't provide these, which is why many beginning meadmakers end up with stuck fermentations or sulfurous off-flavors.

The solution? Yeast nutrients. You can buy commercial blends like Fermaid K and DAP (diammonium phosphate), following staggered nutrient addition schedules that would make a chemist proud. Or you can go old school with boiled bread yeast, which provides dead yeast cells for the living ones to cannibalize. I've even used raisins, though their contribution is more superstition than science.

My approach falls somewhere in the middle. I use commercial nutrients for important batches but have made perfectly good mead with just a handful of raisins and some strong black tea for tannins. The key is giving your yeast something beyond just sugar to work with.

Time: The Ingredient You Can't Buy

Mead requires patience in ways that beer doesn't. While you can grain-to-glass a pale ale in three weeks, mead benefits from months of aging. My fastest turnaround for a drinkable mead was six weeks for a low-alcohol hydromel. Most traditional meads need at least three months, and high-alcohol sack meads might take a year or more to mellow.

This aging serves multiple purposes. First, it allows harsh alcohol notes to integrate. Fresh mead often tastes "hot" – not temperature-wise, but with an aggressive alcohol burn. Time smooths these edges. Second, complex honey flavors emerge during aging that simply aren't present in young mead. I have a five-year-old traditional mead that tastes completely different from how it did at six months – richer, more integrated, with notes of caramel and dried fruit that developed in the bottle.

Beyond Basic: Exploring Mead Styles

Once you've made a few batches of traditional mead, the real fun begins. Melomel (fruit mead) opens infinite possibilities. I've made mead with everything from conventional choices like blackberries and cherries to weird experiments like prickly pear and hawthorn berries. The trick with fruit additions is timing – add them in primary fermentation for integrated flavors, in secondary for brighter fruit character.

Metheglin, or spiced mead, connects you to historical brewing traditions. Medieval brewers added herbs and spices partly for flavor, partly for perceived medicinal benefits. My favorite metheglin uses vanilla, cinnamon, and a touch of black pepper – basically liquid gingerbread. But I've also made versions with lavender, rosemary, and even pine tips foraged from my backyard.

Braggot straddles the line between mead and beer, combining honey with malted grains. It's trickier than straight mead because you need to understand both brewing processes, but the results can be extraordinary. My best braggot used local wildflower honey with chocolate malt and oatmeal, creating something that tasted like alcoholic breakfast cereal in the best possible way.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Every meadmaker has disaster stories. Mine include the Great Bottle Bomb Incident of 2012 (always ensure fermentation is complete before bottling) and the Lavender Catastrophe of 2015 (a little goes a long way with strong herbs). But most failures teach valuable lessons.

Overcomplicating your first batches is the most common beginner mistake. Start simple – honey, water, yeast, nutrients. Make a traditional mead before attempting that rosehip-cardamom-oak-aged masterpiece you're dreaming about. You need to understand how honey ferments before you can predict how additions will affect the process.

Impatience kills more good mead than anything else. I've dumped batches that would have been excellent if I'd waited another month. Young mead often tastes rough, but time performs alchemy. Keep detailed notes and taste periodically – you'll learn to recognize when harsh flavors are temporary versus actual flaws.

Oxidation is mead's silent enemy. Every time you rack (transfer) your mead or open the fermenter, you risk introducing oxygen that can create cardboard or sherry-like flavors. Minimize headspace in your containers and consider using CO2 to purge oxygen if you're getting serious about the hobby.

The Philosophy of Mead Making

After all these years, what keeps me coming back to mead is its connection to place and season. When I use honey from the apiary two miles from my house, I'm literally fermenting my local ecosystem. Those bees visited the same wildflowers I walk past, the same fruit trees I pick from. There's something profound about transforming that concentrated sunshine into something shareable.

Mead also teaches patience in our instant-gratification world. You can't rush good mead any more than you can rush a tree to fruit. This forced slowness becomes meditative – checking fermentation progress, tasting evolution, waiting for that perfect moment to bottle.

Starting Your Mead Journey

If you're ready to start brewing, here's my advice: begin with a one-gallon batch. The equipment investment is minimal – a glass jug, airlock, siphon, and some bottles. Five pounds of honey will make a gallon of medium-sweet mead that'll teach you the basics without breaking the bank if something goes wrong.

Choose decent honey, but don't obsess over finding the perfect varietal for your first batch. Use wine yeast from a brewing store rather than bread yeast – D47 or 71B are forgiving choices. Add nutrients, even if it's just boiled bread yeast. Keep fermentation temperatures steady. Be patient.

Most importantly, take notes. Write down everything – honey source, amounts, temperatures, how it tastes at different stages. These records become invaluable when you want to recreate successes or avoid repeating failures. My brewing notebook reads like a diary sometimes, with entries like "tastes like grandma's attic" evolving to "holy shit this is good" six months later.

Mead connects us to our ancestors in tangible ways. Every culture with access to honey developed some form of mead, from Ethiopian tej to Polish półtorak. When you make mead, you're participating in a tradition older than written history. But you're also creating something uniquely yours – your local honey, your water, your choices in yeast and technique.

That first successful batch will hook you. Maybe it'll be perfectly clear, golden like liquid amber. Maybe it'll be cloudy and rustic. Either way, when you pour a glass for friends and explain that you transformed honey into this complex beverage, you'll understand why people have been making mead for millennia. It's alchemy you can drink.

Authoritative Sources:

Piatz, Steve. The Complete Guide to Making Mead: The Ingredients, Equipment, Processes, and Recipes for Crafting Honey Wine. Voyageur Press, 2014.

Schramm, Ken. The Compleat Meadmaker: Home Production of Honey Wine From Your First Batch to Award-winning Fruit and Herb Variations. Brewers Publications, 2003.

Morse, Roger A., and Kenn Aellen. Making Mead: A Complete Guide to the Making of Sweet and Dry Mead, Melomel, Metheglin, Hippocras, Pyment and Cyser. Wicwas Press, 2003.

Ratliff, Michael. "Optimizing Honey Fermentation." Zymurgy, vol. 38, no. 4, 2015, pp. 44-49.

American Mead Makers Association. "Mead Style Guidelines." AMMA.org, American Mead Makers Association, 2023, www.meadmakers.org/guidelines.