Your First Mead, Step by Step

Step 1

Sanitize everything, then make the must

1. Sanitize the carboy, bung, airlock, siphon, hydrometer, test jar and anything else that will touch the must.
2. Pour roughly half a gallon of cool or warm -- not hot -- water into the carboy.
3. Add 3 lb of honey. Warming the jar in a sink of warm water first makes it pour rather than crawl. Do not boil it.
4. Top up to one gallon, leaving two or three inches of headspace for the fermentation to come.
5. Seal and shake hard, or stir vigorously, until the honey is fully dissolved and the must is uniformly cloudy. Honey sinks and will sit in a layer at the bottom if you let it.

Step 2

Take a gravity reading, then aerate and pitch

Draw a sample into the test jar and read the hydrometer. Target around 1.090 to 1.100. If you are low, add more honey; if you are high, add water. Write the number down -- it is half of your eventual alcohol calculation.

Then aerate deliberately. This is the one point in a fermentation where you want oxygen in the liquid, because the yeast needs it to build healthy cell walls during its growth phase. Shake the sealed carboy hard for a minute, or stir vigorously.

Pitch the yeast and the first dose of nutrient together.

Step 3

The staggered nutrient schedule

This is the part most beginner recipes get wrong by calling for a single dose. Divide your nutrient into three or four portions and add them across the first week:

Follow the specific schedule on your nutrient product where it differs -- formulations vary in nitrogen content. The principle is universal: several smaller additions across early fermentation, nothing after roughly the one-third point.

Stir gently when you add nutrient, both to mix it in and to release dissolved CO2, which otherwise suppresses the yeast.

Step 4

Ferment at 60 to 68 degrees

Cooler is cleaner. Mead yeast will work warmer, and warmer fermentation produces more of the fusel character you are trying to avoid. If you own a fermentation chamber, use it -- most mead advice assumes you do not, and a held temperature is as valuable here as in beer.

Expect visible activity within 24 to 48 hours and vigorous fermentation for a week or so. Fermentation typically finishes in two to four weeks.

Step 5

Rack, then wait

1. Confirm it has finished. Two identical hydrometer readings 48 hours apart. A dry mead will be at or below 1.000 -- possibly as low as 0.995, since there is nothing unfermentable in honey the way there is in wort.
2. Rack off the lees into a sanitized vessel, gently, with the tubing outlet below the surface so you are not splashing. This is the point where oxygen does damage rather than good.
3. Fill the aging vessel as full as you can. Headspace is the main oxidation risk across months of aging. Size the vessel to the mead you actually have, or flush the headspace with CO2 if you have a kegging setup.
4. Wait. Taste at one month, two months, four months. A properly nourished mead improves noticeably across that span and the change is instructive.