In part 1 of this series, we provided information about honey—the primary ingredient in mead. Here, we look at the process of making mead, which is a bit simpler than that of brewing beer, and the mead brew day can be quite short—maybe an hour by yourself.
You basically mix the honey and water together, add the mixture to a carboy, and add yeast. If your honey is crystallized, the best practice is to warm it up. The trick is not to warm the honey above 110°F (43°C) because then you start losing aromatics. An electric blanket around the carboy works well, or anything else you can set for a temperature and hold it. If you can’t get all the honey mixed in, don’t worry. Just take a gravity reading and write it down, then take a gravity reading the next day. The gravity the next day will likely be higher as the honey will dissolve as it sits in solution.
Yeast for Mead Makers
As a mead maker, you have a wide selection of yeasts. The most popular ones are wine (both white and red) and champagne yeasts. However, an important difference between beer brewing and mead brewing is that almost all available yeasts are dry yeasts. For the mead maker, more so than for the beer brewer, proper yeast rehydration is very important. Without it, you can end up with malformed yeast cells with up to 50 percent of the cells becoming useless for fermentation.