What You Need to Make Mead

Essential

The six things you cannot skip

1. Honey -- 2 to 3 lb per gallon. Three pounds per gallon lands around 1.100 starting gravity, which with a robust wine yeast ferments to roughly 13 percent alcohol. Buy by weight, not volume -- honey is far denser than water. Local apiary honey is usually cheaper per pound than supermarket honey and the variety is identifiable, which matters when you want to repeat a good batch.
2. Wine or mead yeast. Not a beer strain: beer yeasts generally have lower alcohol tolerance than mead’s 12 to 14 percent target. A robust wine yeast is the standard choice.
3. Yeast nutrient. The item that actually decides whether your mead is good. See below -- this is not optional and it is not one dose.
4. A vessel with a bung and airlock. One gallon glass carboy for a first batch. Glass rather than PET, because mead ages for months and PET is slightly oxygen-permeable over that span.
5. An auto-siphon and tubing, for racking off the lees without aerating the mead or starting a siphon by mouth.
6. A hydrometer and test jar, plus sanitizer. The hydrometer is the only way to know your starting gravity, your finishing gravity and therefore your alcohol content.

The one that matters

Nutrient, staggered

Honey is nearly devoid of the nitrogen yeast needs to build healthy cell walls. Pitch into straight honey must with nothing added and the yeast gets stressed, and stressed yeast produces fusel alcohols -- the hot, solvent-like harshness that is the entire reason mead has a reputation for needing a year to become drinkable.

The fix is to feed it, and to feed it in stages rather than all at once. A single large dose at the start is partly wasted because the yeast cannot use it all, and leaves the population unsupported later when it needs help most. Staggered additions -- typically at pitch, then at intervals through the first few days of active fermentation -- keep the yeast healthy throughout.

Fed this way, a traditional mead is pleasant at two months and good at six. That is the single highest-value thing in this guide. Follow the schedule on your nutrient product, and the practical walkthrough is your first mead, step by step.

Already own it

What transfers from beer brewing

If you brew beer, your shopping list is three items: honey, yeast and nutrient. Everything else is on your shelf:

• Hydrometer and test jar
• Auto-siphon and tubing
• Airlocks and bungs
• Sanitizer
• Thermometer
• A temperature-controlled chamber -- mead benefits from a held temperature as much as beer does, and most mead advice online assumes you do not have one

The one habit to change is about vessels: use glass or stainless rather than PET for the months of aging, and think about headspace in a way beer never requires -- best mead fermenters covers it.

Optional

Useful, and not for batch one

• Campden tablets (potassium metabisulphite) and potassium sorbate -- needed only if you intend to back-sweeten, because together they stop the yeast restarting on the added honey. Essential for a sweet mead, irrelevant for a dry one.
• Fining agents for clarity. Mead clears well on its own given time, so patience is the free alternative.
• Acid blend and a pH meter for adjusting balance. Genuine tools, and not a first-batch concern.
• Bottles and a capper or corker. Mead bottles well in beer bottles if it is still, or wine bottles with corks. Needed on bottling day, not on day one.
• A degassing wand for stirring out dissolved CO2 before fining. Useful on a 5 gallon batch, unnecessary on a gallon.