15 Easy Mead Recipes for Beginners (2024)

FAQs

How much honey do I need for 1 gallon of mead? ›

We'll go over it in further detail later, but we recommend using between two and three pounds of honey per gallon of mead — 2 pounds if you want it on the dryer side, and 3 pounds if you'd like it to be sweeter.

To make a dry 5% ABV mead, the BatchBuildr predicts you will need 0.98 lbs honey, and recommends a 1.034 SG to start. For the 10% ABV dry mead batch, you'll actually need 2.02 pounds of honey and should have an SG of 1.071. For the 15% dry mead, you'll need 3.13 pounds of honey and an original gravity of 1.110.

Keep fermentation temps up to around 70° or 75° F. Fermentation should last between 10 to 20 days. Rack into a conditioning vessel and bulk age for 3 to 6 months. Bottle, then enjoy now and again to see how it's progressing.

A Berry Mead are Melomels made with berries, such as raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, currants (black, red, and white), strawberries, boysenberries, elderberries, Marion berries, mulberries, lingonberries, huckleberries, cranberries, etc. Generally, any fruit with 'berry' in the name would qualify.

(Some recipes call for boiling the honey, which makes for a cleaner, quicker ferment. However, many of the aromatic oils that are characteristic of the different flower honeys are boiled off as well in this process. Either method will make you mead.)

If you put in a bunch of honey and you get enough yeast (the right kind of yeast where it ferments all the way out) then you'll have a really dry, high alcohol champagne-like mead. You can use less honey to make a lower alcohol mead. Using less honey might make it a little bit more dry, though not necessarily.

Smoothing out, over time, to make a mellow, less dry experience, letting the latent sweetness emerge. If you want to create an experience for yourself or your friends, we suggest storing a few bottles of mead, out of the sun at room temperature, for 6 months to a year.

The ratio ranges from 1 lb. honey per gallon of water for a very light "soft-drink" to 5 lbs. per gallon for a sweet dessert wine. The less honey, the lighter the mead, and the quicker it can be made.

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In general, more yeast is actually better, at least at first. But you can, if you severely over-pitch, end up dosing your must with so many ravenously hungry yeast cells that they over compete for the sugar and nutrients, resulting in stressed yeast and resulting production of off flavors.

If you're using less honey to make more of a beer-like mead, those can be fully fermented and drinkable in under a month. Other types can take a few months. It just depends on the amount of honey. Amount of honey primarily is what it depends on, and some yeasts ferment honey faster than others.

What yeast should I use for mead? ›

Lalvin D-47

This white wine yeast is the primary choice for many mead makers. It ferments at a moderate to fast pace with little foaming and is good for medium to dry meads. It tends to accentuate the honey characteristics so it is a good choice for traditional varietal mead.

Preservatives will impede or prevent fermentation. Likewise with bottled juices or frozen fruit juice, look out for Potassium Sorbate, a preservative that will prevent fermentation. If using juice, use pure juice. Added sugar in commercial juices can add strange flavors.

Some people add lemon or other citrus juices to mead as a source of acid to help balance out the sweet flavor of the honey, but this is by no means mandatory. Adding sugar or honey will not actually neutralize the acid or change the pH; it will only help to balance the flavor as David had mentioned.

Straight traditional mead is typically served chilled in a wine or co*cktail glass; but there is really no wrong way to drink it. From ice cold fruit meads to piping hot spiced meads, this versatile beverage can be served at a variety of temperatures depending on the style and ingredients.

The ratio of water to honey depends on the type of mead you want to make. For a dry mead, the ratio is 4 parts water to 1 part honey; a sweet mead is 2 to 1. Kluz likes his mead sweet, so he typically uses 1 3/4 gallons of honey and tops it off with 3 1/4 gallons of water.

The short answer is that for every gallon of mead that one wishes to be made, you would need anywhere from a pound and a half to five pounds of honey, then enough water to make a combined gallon. This is the 'yes' part to question above.

The fermenting process depends on various factors, like temperature, the amount of honey, the type of yeast, and the presence of additives and nutrients. Depending on how active the yeast is, it will take around 2 to 6 weeks.