When it comes to making mead, honey plays a crucial role as it’s the most important ingredient in the mead that can’t be replaced.
The question arises, should you boil honey when making mead?
You don’t need to boil honey as boiling will hurt the honey’s flavor profile which is important for mead flavors. Boiling is an old practice from the times when we had less knowledge and is used to sanitize honey from potential bacteria and wild yeast.
Honey is a wonderful gift from the divine realms and in the opinion of many mead makers, any exposure to the heat destroys its qualities.
What’s the premise for boiling?
You’ll hear people claiming that boiling honey is necessary to kill bacteria and wild yeast.
Bacteria such as lactobacillus can make the mead taste vinegary due to the formation of acids these annoying bacteria are responsible for.
Next, wild yeast can grow in colonies and take over, producing a weird-tasting mead as you never know the characteristics of wild yeast and can’t control it.
While people used to make first meads with wild yeast as there were no lab-cultivated yeast strains centuries ago, wild yeast is unpredictable and can create wonderful booze or a bad-tasting disappointment.
So, if you shouldn’t boil your honey when making mead, how are you going to deal with these annoying pathogens? You’ll find out soon.
Why are you not supposed to heat honey?
Any heat exposure will slowly take away from the beauty the honey beholds, but boiling will certainly massacre it.
On the other hand, the usual way to sanitize stuff in homebrewing besides using chemicals is by increasing the heat, which is after all the important practice in beer brewing.
However, grains in beer aren’t the same as honey, as honey is full of distinctive aromas from flowers the bees collected only for us to feast on it, and then we pay them back by destroying it, I don’t think so.
By skipping the boiling or any serious heat exposure we can preserve the quality of honey and rely on a few proven facts that will ensure our mead doesn’t get contaminated or bad.
Dealing with bacteria and wild yeast
Bacteria and wild yeast can be found in honey, but honey is naturally a preservative with strong antibacterial properties, so no germs can reproduce in it and spoil it.
That said, it’s still possible to find dormant bacteria, spores, and wild yeast trapped in honey in low amounts. Most of these bacteria and wild yeast aren’t a concern, but there are some organisms that people can be vulnerable to.
In some cases, there might be Clostridium botulinum in honey (link to a study) which is a dangerous bacteria that creates toxins and causes botulism, a dangerous condition in which the toxins attack the nerves.
Now you might be thinking if there’s a harmful organism in honey we must boil the hell out of it to make it safe for consumption.
However, Clostridium botulinum sometimes found in honey isn’t dangerous to humans older than 12 months, so it can be dangerous for infants only.
Thus, you don’t have to worry about dangers from raw honey in mead, just continue keeping away the mead from any nearby infants!
Moreover, bacteria and wild yeast which could otherwise contaminate fermentation and spoil the mead are also not a real concern if you pitch enough yeast.
Yeast creates its own colonies and battles over anything wild and bad, so that’s what we count on!
Can you use raw honey in mead?
You can use raw honey in mead but sanitize the fermenter and any equipment that will get in touch with mead.
There will always be a low amount of bacteria and wild yeast in raw honey as it’s unavoidable, but such low amounts of these pathogens can be overrun with yeast.
Also, bear in mind that it’s crucial to kickstart the fermentation as soon as possible so that the yeast can colonize and overcome any impurities.
To do so, don’t prolong the time from cooling the wort to pitching yeast more than necessary, and always pitch the yeast nutrients.
Yeast nutrients will quicken the response of the yeast and boost it, so you’ll have a quick and healthy fermentation.
Yeast nutrients are recommended when making mead because honey doesn’t contain enough nutrients on its own like the grains for beer brewing do.
Don’t forget to heat it just a bit
On the other hand, heating isn’t only used for sanitation purposes, but also for lowering viscosity and breaking down the sugars which helps yeast eat the sugars easier.
It’s enough to heat the must to 122°F (50°C) for a few minutes to lower the viscosity of honey which is highly viscous at room temperature and hard to handle, thus making it easier to dissolve the honey in water and later rack it to a fermenter.
If you feel skeptical, try this
In case you are still unsure and don’t believe me or especially if you plan to prolong the cooling of pitching times or don’t plan to use yeast nutrients, you can expose the honey to heat and achieve pasteurization with the following techniques.
You can pasteurize mead by Increasing the temperature to 140°F (60°C) for 20 minutes, as this temperature is hot enough to destroy wild yeast, but won’t seriously impact the honey (it still could a bit).
Regarding spores and bacteria, you’ll need to raise the temperature and boil it for at least 10 minutes as some of these pathogens are pretty resistant.
However, while bacteria will die at boiling temperatures, spores are extremely difficult to destroy even at high heat, so don’t count on it. I mean, after all, it’s not that important as I mentioned above, these spores found in honey are only potentially dangerous to infants.
You can also use Campden tablets instead of heating for the purpose of pasteurization.
However, I avoid using any unnecessary chemicals in brewing or mead-making because I worry it could have a negative effect on allergic people.
Moreover, Campden tablets aren’t fully effective either as they create an environment that is unfriendly for wild yeast and bacteria but don’t stop them but rather make them go dormant for a limited time.
Final take on
Mead makers experimented throughout history with various techniques just to figure out what works the best.
Today, we have plenty of knowledge and can come to a conclusion of what practices are the best in mead-making, and one of them certainly isn’t boiling.
This is a statement you’ll likely hear from most mead makers, so if it works for most people it should work for you as well.
Now, I believe that for this to work it’s important not to delay pitching and the yeast nutrients should be used to have strong yeast colonies straight after the pitching.
This way, no organisms can affect your mead because they don’t have time to do anything!
As long as you follow these simple pieces of advice your mead will be worthy of Valhalla!