Mix Ingredients
For your first mead, we will walk you through a basic traditional mead recipe, then give you a fully written example recipe for you to create at home.
Feel free to use this as a template for your own recipes. We highly suggest having a written recipe before you start doing anything. It really helps avoid a lot of issues!
Must Preparation
A must is a term used in mead-making to describe the unfermented mixture of ingredients. The first thing we need to do is create our must. You can do this with the following steps:
- Sanitise everything.
- Add honey and yeast nutrients to your vessel.
- Add water equal to half the volume of the total recipe to your vessel. For example, a 5L recipe would require 2.5L of water.
- Mix the ingredients together until they are fully combined.
- For buckets, a stainless steel spoon works best. For small demijohns use a swirling motion. For large demijohns use a drill-powered stirrer.
- Add more water to reach just below your total recipe volume.
- Leave some space for our yeast mixture, which will be prepared later.
- Add your airlock to your vessel while you prepare your yeast.
We cover yeast preparation in the next lesson.