How To Make Mead At Home ( Step-by-Step Guide)

Mead is among the oldest boozes known to mankind and if you never made one you’ll love the end result.

I began my homebrewing adventure with beers, but then I realized that I should give the chance to other fascinating drinks such as meads, ciders, and even kombuchas.

When I first time made a traditional mead two years ago, I was mesmerized by its rich honey flavors and sophisticated mouthfeel and my family and friends gave me positive feedback, so I knew I must continue to make meads and try other recipes which included the addition of fruits.

In this article, I want to share with you a traditional mead step-by-step process that can be used as a baseline on which you can later develop other styles by tweaking them.

Compared to beer, I find mead to be quite easy to make but there are certain differences that I want to cover in this article.

This guide will explain everything you need to know about making mead and as time goes I’ll be updating it with additional shorter articles which will further explain some niche mead questions.

So, let’s kickstart your mead-making journey, you won’t regret it!

What do you need to make mead at home?

To make mead at home you’ll need to acquire the following:

Honey

The quality of the honey will determine how good will your mead be, so try to find good, quality honey from local manufacturers. Honey can be expensive and that’s a fact, but when you take into consideration that the only ingredients for mead are honey, yeast, water, and nutrients you can make at home for low cost, the costs are actually lower than for brewing beer which requires various grains and hops.

What’s great about mead is that you can make a low abv and high abv mead and sweeten it for your taste. While it’s true that you’ll need more honey which will add to the costs to make high ABV and sweet meads, you can save lots of money by making low-medium ABV meads, and meads taste great without later sweetening.

You can buy the honey produced in big commercial factories on sale for your first mead too. This is exactly what I did and although you can notice the difference in quality between cheap, mass-produced honey and more expensive quality honey, the difference won’t be so huge and the mead will still be great. (This will later change as you develop the palate).

Best honey for mead

You can find a comprehensive list of honey used for mead making and its substitutes in my article about the best honey for mead.

Here are a few quick recommendations I prefer.

Blossom orange honey – Noticeable light citrus aromas, brown-golden color, ideal for beginners and will please most tongues.

Clover honey – Probably the most popular honey used for meads and especially for melomels. Clover honey has mild, sweet flavors that perfectly blend with fruits and other flavors. This honey is ideal if you want to add fruits to your mead and thus create a melomel (mead with the addition of fruits).

Wildflower honey – Bitter, rich in flavors, simply wild… this honey is a flavorful bomb that creates beautiful, colorful meads. By no words is this honey neutral, so it can easily overwhelm other flavors such as fruit additions. I’d use this alone or perhaps mix it with other honey you have on hand and experiment if you are brave.

How much honey do you need?

I’ll give you an approximate rate for how much honey you should put in per gallon to achieve the desired ABV.

Alcohol Range	Honey Amount per Gallon
6-8%	1.2 – 1.6 pounds
9-11%	1.8 – 2.3 pounds
12-15%	2.5 – 3.5 pounds
16-18%	3.6 – 4 pounds

Yeast

Ideally, you should use wine yeasts as the mead is essentially a wine made from honey. There are many available yeast strains that will get the best out of honey.

However, it’s also possible to make meads with ale yeast typically used for beers, but you’ll certainly have different results than me.

I always used wine yeasts just because It worked and is a standard practice, yet I plan to experiment with ale yeasts and see what can I create.

Want a safe bet? Use wine yeast recommended for mead make, feel adventurous? Try to make one with ale yeast.

The only important factor is that you use yeast that can handle the alcohol you want to achieve and for this reason, wine yeasts are always a safe bet because wine yeast strains naturally work in highly alcoholic environments while many ale yeasts have limitations and go up to 8% ABV or so, thus If you’d use it on a 16% ABV mead you’d end up with plenty of unfermented sugars.

Yeast nutrients

Yeast nutrients help the yeast strains to work in a sugary environment by providing the yeast with enough vitamins and minerals required for yeast to operate.

You see, honey is the only fermentable sugar used in meads, and it naturally doesn’t contain any nutrients for yeast.

Compare this to brewing beers where you get plenty of yeast nutrients naturally from the grains and you can see why we need to manually add yeast nutrients for a healthy fermentation.

Now, when I first time made my traditional mead, I aimed for 12% ABV and didn’t use any yeast nutrients, and had a successful fermentation within 4 or 5 weeks.

You can try the same, but yeast nutrients increase the likelihood of healthy fermentation and may hasten it, so it’s a good practice to include some from the beginning (it’s super easy to add some).

The best yeast nutrient is the yeast itself, so just boil some yeast at the beginning to kill it, and when you later cool the must and pitch yeast, it will feast on both the dead yeast cells rich in nutrients and the sugar from honey.

Brewing kettle

What’s great about making mead is that there are no steps for mashing grains and adding hops as it’s the case when brewing beer which simplifies the process a lot.

If you are making a 5-gallon batch, at least a 6.5-gallon brewing kettle will be needed for convenience, yet you can use smaller pots, pour the must into the fermenter, and simply top off the volume with extra water and stir.

After all, we need a brewing kettle only to raise the temperature and dissolve honey in it (and nutrients).

Fermenter with an airlock

Fermenters are needed to make mead as it’s important to reduce the oxygen from entering, while simultaneously letting the Co2 out.

Any plastic, glass, or stainless steel fermenter with an airlock will do.

Bottling equipment

When it comes to bottling you can use flip-top bottles, classic beer bottles, or even wine bottles.

Just bear in mind that if you are making a carbonated version (this is my favorite type I make), you must use beer bottles because wine bottles can’t sustain the pressure caused by Co2.

If you make a dry flat or sweet mead without carbonation, wine bottles are a great choice.

Moreover, you’ll need a bottle capper and caps along the beer bottles for any sparky mead.

Sanitizer

Sanitation comes before anything, don’t let your mead turn into vinegar. Furthermore, there are no hops in the mead that can serve as an anti-contaminant, so your sanitation level must be top-notch.

Clean, ensure there are no stains, and then sanitize all your gear (fermenter, bottles, and everything that gets in touch with the mead).

I have written a guide on cleaning and sanitizing brewing equipment that can be of use here.

How to Make Mead

1. Bring the water to the boiling point

It’s important to purify water and it can be easily done by boiling it for 15 minutes. The boiling doesn’t only come with sanitation benefits, it also evaporates the chlorine found in tap water. The mineral composition of the water you use plays a noticeable role, so don’t use the distilled water as all minerals are removed from it which means you’d have to manually add the minerals.

If you want to do this you can and there are plenty of articles on the internet on how to, but I found it unnecessary and a task that complicates things, especially if you are making mead for the first time and already have decent tap water.

Add nutrients

Add nutrients such as simple baker’s yeast at the beginning, the boiling will surely kill it and the yeast will later feast on its fallen brothers.

In case you forgot it or didn’t pitch enough nutrients, it’s also possible to add nutrients later if you feel the fermentation is stuck. (Never risk contamination by adding raw, unpasteurized yeast nutrients!)

2. Dilute honey

It’s important to dilute honey for easier manipulation (it doesn’t stick to the walls) and to break the sugars with heat into edibles for yeast. Any heat above 140°F (60°C) will do this, moreover, this is the common reason why homebrewers boil priming sugar.

The heat breaks down the sugar molecules, so the yeast has an easier task at feasting.

Should honey be boiled?

It’s not necessary to boil honey to achieve this, and many experienced mead makers suggest against boiling as it has a tendency to destroy the rich flavors honey is known for.

After all, if you buy high-quality honey and then boil it, it will decrease its quality and in such a case you’d be way better just going with a cheap, mass-produced honey instead.

Home mead makers who boil honey do it because they are worried about possible contaminants in honey, but honey is a natural preservant and it’s not typical for any contaminants to live in it. Obviously, if you find a fly or something you should remove it, but the basic heat explained in the step above is all you need.

If you are skeptical about this, I have written a dedicated article on should mead makers boil honey where I explained this in detail.

In the beginning, I was boiling my honey and then I figured out that I am making better mead when I stopped.

3. Transfer to fermenter/Chill the must

You can chill the must in the brewing kettle, but I prefer to transfer it to the fermenter and then chill it.

It’s time to chill the must to a temperature that fits the yeast prior to pitching it. Don’t rush to pitch yeast before you are sure the temperature is right or you’ll kill it.

I have shared a few tips on chilling the wort for beer brewing and you can use the same methods for chilling the must.

4. Pitch yeast

Wine yeast is similar to ale yeasts, but it can work at even warmer temperatures (68-86°F). Thus pitch yeast when the must temperature falls in that range.

I prefer to ferment mead closer to 68°F because the upper range closer to 86°F will result in a harsh alcoholic taste and you’ll have to condition it for longer in order to mellow it.

It’s important to control the temperature for the whole duration of fermentation, and reduce the oscillations in temperature!

5. How long do you leave mead to ferment?

Mead is among the highest alcoholic booze which commonly ranges from 8% to 20%, and most meads will definitely go above 12%.

More alcohol equals more sugars needed for yeast to eat, so the higher the alcohol %, the longer it will take for mead to fully ferment.

Secondly, how long will it take for mead to ferment also depends on the yeast used, temperature, and environment in which the yeast thrives (nutrients help).

If you are making a lower to medium abv mead (6-8%) it could take no more than 2 weeks of fermentation. If you are making an above 10% abv mead, expect that fermentation will take at least a month to finish.

How to know when is fermentation complete?

You can take gravity readings, ideally two with 3 days in between. If the gravity didn’t change when you compared these two readings it means the fermentation is complete.

It’s common for mead to go below 1.000 when they finish dry, my last mead ended at 0.998.

6. Rack to secondary (Optional)

When fermentation is complete, you can further condition it in a secondary container.

This secondary conditioning is useful when you are adding dry additions such as fruits as you can put some additions and keep them there for a week or two.

I won’t touch on this topic that much here because it deserves a separate article I mentioned above, but if you do add additions to the secondary be sure you don’t contaminate mead and be aware of the extra sugars that may come from the fruit as they’ll re-activate the dormant yeast.

Another reason for racking to a secondary is filtration. Your mead won’t be clear as soon as it’s done fermenting as there will be plenty of sediment in it which affects both the appearance and flavors.

This sediment looks and acts similar to sediment and floaties found in unfiltered beers.

The best way to get rid of it is to rack it in a container that is clean otherwise most sediment will be left in the primary at the bottom which will end up in your bottles if you don’t remove it.

Furthermore, after racking to the secondary you should cold crash your mead as this will hasten the filtration process and make the remaining sediment fall to the bottom.

After this stage, you can prime if you want a carbonated mead and bottle (or skip priming sugar additions for flat mead).

7. Prime with sugar (optional)

While some people like their mead flat just like a glass of wine, carbonated, sparky mead is my favorite type of mead and It’s easy to accomplish it.

Simply use corn sugar (dextrose) or more honey to prime your bottles.

Dextrose is neutral and won’t affect the mead while honey might, yet more honey flavor is welcome and it anyways won’t make a big difference in such a small amount.

How much priming sugar you need and how to prepare it is explained in my dedicated priming article.

If you need a quick calculation and don’t want to dig deep into the priming stuff, just use simple brewing calculators to determine the amount of sugar for desired carbonation.

8. Bottle and condition

To bottle your mead you can follow the bottling guide I created for beer bottling, it’s the same process.

Be careful not to bottle carbonated mead into wine bottles as they could not handle the pressure and thus explode.

You can use any type of beer bottle or even a champagne bottle for carbonated mead.

After bottling and ensuring the cap is strongly sealed so no oxygen can enter during conditioning, your fresh mead is ready for at least a few weeks or months of solitude in a dark place at a cellar temperature.

Light meads (3-5% abv) will peak after 3-5 weeks of conditioning. Medium meads (6%-9%) will peak after 2-3 months, and strong meads (above 10%) will peak after 3 to 12 months depending on how heavy they are.

My highest abv mead was 12% and it took it 4 months in the fridge before it peaked (perhaps it would get even better with more time but we drank all the bottles.)

Don’t underestimate the power of conditioning when it comes to mead, especially those heavier ones. Sometimes it could taste mediocre at the beginning which could drop your confidence but after enough time it will surprise you and I am not exaggerating.

How to sweeten mead after fermentation

Mead can be enjoyed flat, sparky, dry, and sweet, so depending on your preference there is a lot that can be tweaked.

If you want to make sweet mead you’ll have to back sweeten in once it’s done fermenting. (Pasteurize then add honey according to your likening).

However, if you want both a sparky and sweet mead it will be harder to achieve this due to the fact that all sugar added after primary fermentation will continue to ferment because the yeast will be still present.

As a result, all sugars you add will continue to convert into alcohol and Co2 and it won’t be easy to prevent this.

If you add sugars like honey to mead after fermentation and bottle it, you’ll create bottle bombs which won’t be a nice experience.

To prevent this from happening you’ll have to kill yeast by pasteurizing it which can be easily done either in a bottle or in a fermenter or in a bottling bucket (bulk pasteurization).

Unfortunately, this means that although you’ll create sweet mead this way, you won’t be able to naturally carbonate it as carbonation is created by adding a small amount of priming sugar and letting the yeast convert it into Co2 within a bottle. As you remember, we recently decided to kill yeast by pasteurization.

So, to combat this problem you can check my dedicated article on how to create a sweet, sparky mead and (cider).

I created this article with cider in mind as I usually make sweet, sparky ciders, but the same methods can be applied to the mead.

Conclusion

In this article, I showed you how to make traditional mead in a simple way.

From here you can continue with the exploration of mead making, and try adding fruits and spices!

In my experience, making a great mead isn’t that hard, especially if you are making a dry, sparky, or flat, sweet mead.

There are so many opportunities with mead making and after learning the basic concepts it’s so easy to get lost in the creativity.

Yet be careful! You start mead-making today, and you soon realize the hobby is consuming your whole spare time, but honestly, it’s worth it.