Ingredients
Every mead contains water, honey, yeast, and yeast nutrients. These ingredients are the bare minimum to make a good mead. In this chapter, we will step through the ingredient specifics and the importance of each ingredient.
Water
Since water makes up the majority of your mead, it better be good. Let’s review each source of water and determine which is best for mead-making.
Distilled Water
Distilled water lacks minerals and will seriously stress your yeast if you don’t add them back. Do not use distilled water for creating mead.
Tap Water
Tap water should generally be avoided. Most tap water is treated with chlorine or chloramines. Chlorine can be boiled away, but chloramines cannot be boiled off. These chemicals slow down fermentation and produce an unappealing plaster-type off-flavor in mead.
Well Water
Well-based water may or may not be good for mead-making, depending on the mineral and sulfur content. I would recommend a carbon-based filter for well water if you decide to test it. You can also do side-by-side testing of your well water and spring water to determine which is better.
Spring Water
You want good spring water. Spring water contains the trace minerals necessary to keep your yeast healthy. This makes spring the best choice of water for mead-making.
Honey
Honey makes mead. Good honey makes good mead. Great honey makes great mead! Spend some time tasting different kinds of honey. Train yourself to taste the underlying flavour beyond the sweetness. Those more subtle flavors will be added to your mead. Every honey is unique!
Supermarket Honey
Be wary of supermarket honey. It may or may not even be honey; often it is sugar syrup due to some shady practices! The best way to obtain good honey is to buy it directly from a beekeeper. Your local “beek” (beekeeping geek) is great, as are online beekeeping websites. Farmers markets are a great place to find your local bees.
Varietal Honey
Varietal honey comes from bees that have pollinated mostly one type of flower. These honeys can be all shades, from extremely light to extremely dark. All of them are different and can have wonderful uses for the creative mead maker. Try to pair the honey you have with the recipe you want to make!
Raw Honey
Honey should be raw. If it has wax and bee parts in it, it is good raw honey. Never, ever boil honey. Even if you are making a bochet, which is a variety of mead that involves caramelising the honey sugars before fermenting. When making a bochet, slow cooking or using a sous vide is better. Boiling drives off the wonderful aroma compounds that make raw honey worth seeking.
Yeast
Yeast is the driving force behind every mead you create. In mead-making, they convert honey sugars into ethanol (alcohol) and CO2.
Liquid and Dry Yeast
Yeast is available for purchase in both dry and liquid forms. Liquid yeast requires refrigeration and typically has a shelf life of six months from harvesting. Dry yeast has a drastically increased shelf life and does not require refrigeration.
Prior to use in mead-making, dry yeast requires rehydration. Rehydration minimises yeast stress and leads to a cleaner ferment.
Most popular yeast strains are available in dry format. However, some yeasts are only available in liquid format.
Experiment With Neutral Yeast
Yeasts are like tools. You don’t use a hammer on a screw. Your yeast choice will depend a lot on the particular ingredients in a mead recipe as well as your personal tastes. If you are new and starting out, I suggest using yeasts that are largely neutral and that impart very little aroma or flavor. This allows you to appreciate the flavors of the honey first. Good neutral yeasts include Wyeast 1388, US-05, and EC1118. D47 is great if you have temperature control.
After experiencing neutral profiles, branch out to other yeasts in traditional meads to determine what aroma and taste components they provide. Over time, you will discover what you prefer. Some good yeasts to try are W15, DV10, D21, and 71B. If you want to get really adventurous (or lack temperature control), Kviek yeasts such as Voss, Lutra, and Hornidal are wonderful options for adventurous mead makers.
Fermenting Temperature
All yeast strains will have a fermentation temperature range stated by the manufacturer. Try to stay on the low end of the range. When yeast converts sugars to ethanol and CO2, they produce heat. The faster the fermentation, the more heat is produced. It is not uncommon for your fermenter to reach 5°C higher than your room’s ambient temperature. Batch size also contributes to the temperature increase. The larger the batch, the more difficult it is to radiate the heat away. For batches larger than 20 litres, we highly suggest a temperature-controlled chamber.
In addition, the fermenting temperature can dictate what esters the yeast produces. Esters are chemical compounds some yeast produce during fermentation. Esters can add many flavors but they are usually fruity and floral in nature. Belgian strains are known to produce esters at the high end of the temperature range, while English strains produce esters at the low end. Research your yeast carefully.
Alcohol Tolerance
Every yeast you purchase will have a stated alcohol tolerance. This is the amount of sugar your yeast can turn into alcohol before stopping the fermentation process. It is rare to find a yeast that performs exactly as stated on the packaging. Different fermenting conditions will produce different results, which can cause your yeast to overperform or underperform. Some factors that can change this tolerance are fermenting temperature, sugars, yeast nutrients, and fermenting vessel pressure.
Flocculation
Flocculation is the speed at which yeast will drop out of the mead to make it clear after fermentation has concluded. Different yeast strains can be categorised as having high, medium, or low flocculation. Higher-flocculation yeasts will clear faster after fermentation.
Yeast Dosing
The amount of yeast you should use will depend on the volume and desired strength of alcohol in each mead.
We have a convenient Mead Batch Builder that will instruct you on how much yeast to use, specific to your recipe. The batch builder can be used for both liquid and dry yeast.
Yeast Resources
Wine yeast, beer yeast, and cider yeast can all be used in mead-making to achieve certain outcomes. For example, champagne yeast such as EC-1118 is excellent for achieving high ABV meads. Below are a few yeast producers we use regularly. Pick a few and give them a try!
Yeast Nutrients
Honey lacks the basic nutrients required to maintain yeast health. While fermentation is possible without yeast nutrients, poor nutrition is the reason why you hear about year-long fermentations producing mead that requires years of aging to be drinkable. There is no reason to endure this any longer. Science came to the rescue.
Technically, you can make mead without yeast nutrients, but this leads to harsh off-flavors caused by nutrient-starved yeast. These harsh off-flavors can take years to age out. With yeast nutrients, you will enjoy your mead in as little as a month.
Yeast Stress
Our Suggested Yeast Nutrients
Many nutrients exist for mead makers, but we will suggest what we know to work for making top-notch mead. It doesn’t mean other brands cannot work; it just means they are untested in our hands. And for the record, raisins are not nutrients!
The nutrients you use depend on the yeast packaging. Dry yeast requires rehydration in order to perform optimally. This rehydration is best performed with Go-Ferm in the rehydrating water.
So what are these nutrients we recommend? Below, we outline each yeast nutrient and its purpose.
Go-Ferm
Fermaid O
Fermaid K+ is a yeast nutrient that contains diammonium phosphate (DAP), yeast-based nitrogen, vitamins, and trace minerals.
If DAP is added once your mead has an alcohol-by-volume (ABV) of 9 percent or higher, the yeast cannot consume it. This produces a distinctly unpleasant nutrient off-flavor in the mead. This off-flavor is often confused with fusels but is quite different to a well-trained judge. Since we wish to avoid DAP in the final product, we only add Fermaid K upfront.
Potassium Bicarbonate
Potassium bicarbonate is used to improve the buffering capacity of your must. Buffering capacity means that the mead is more resistant to large, fast pH changes. As fermentation progresses, meads become more acidic. Without buffering, the pH will drop lower and faster than with buffering agents. Fast pH swings and extremely low pH lead to stressed yeast and off-flavors. Potassium bicarbonate is not used to adjust pH up or down; it is simply used to moderate these pH swings.
When mead has a pH below 3, most yeasts start to stall and give up fermenting. Potassium carbonate is added as a bit of insurance to avoid large pH swings.
Potassium bicarbonate cannot be substituted with calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate will leave an undesired chalky flavor in your mead!
When to add Yeast Nutrients
Yeast nutrients are added on three separate occasions. When mixing honey and water together, when preparing dry yeast, and 48 hours after adding yeast. Below is the list of yeast nutrients that should be added at each interval.
Honey and Water Mixing stage:
Fermaid O
Potassium Carbonate
Fermaid K
Dry Yeast Preparation:
Go-Ferm
48 Hours After Adding Yeast:
Fermaid O
We have a convenient Mead Batch Builder that will instruct you on how much of each yeast nutrient to add.