Basic mead brewing

Brewing mead is slightly simpler than brewing beer but it takes longer to ferment. The basics are pretty simple: Water, honey and yeast. That's it. All you need apart from that is something to add more flavour but most things you can think of can go into it. The herbs you can imagine, the spices etc. Consider it cooking, because that is basically what it is. If you want it to be more historical accurate you can try to make it ferment from yeast that come natural in say berries. That is a bit more tricky and not something you should start with straight away, it's best if you can buy mead yeast to begin with. The standard honey-water ratio I have used is 1 kg honey with 4 liters of water. The more honey, the stronger it will get. Just before you put in the yeast you should measure the sugar content so you will know how strong your mead turns out to be. During the entire process make sure to take a lot of notes, document everything thoroughly so you can fix mistakes and make things again if it turns out very nicely.

So, the basic steps to brewing mead are:
1. Heat up honey and water.
2. Let it cool down.
3. Add more water.
4. Maybe add hops, herbs, spices etc.
5. Add yeast.
6. Let it ferment.
7. Rack it.
8. Bottle it.
9. Let it rest a week.
10. Drink!

1. Heat up honey and water.
Mix about 1 kg honey with a couple of liters of water, heat it up until you see a white foam starting to form. Remove the foam because that is some unpurities that might add some weird flavours to your mead. It's enough to just remove it before you pour the liquid into your container for fermenting. Repeat this until you have enough honey that you wish to use.

2. Let it cool down.
This can be helped if you want to add more water so it actually ends up being 1/4 or whatever ratio you wish to have. The temperature should be around room temperature.

3. Add more water.
This step and step number 2 can be combined if you want to add more water in order to get the correct amount of water, just make sure that the water quality you have is good since this will not be boiled or heated up.

4. Maybe add hops, herbs, spices etc.
If you wish to have hops in it you will need to boil it for an hour to get the acids from it so you will have to prepare it beforehand. Unless you wish to use dry hopping which is a different way of doing it. Spicing it can be done in so many different ways so I will not go into detail about it here, suffice it to say, this is an important step to get the flavour you are looking for by adding something with a nice taste to it, be it apples, hops, herbs or whatever comes to mind.

5. Add yeast.
If you bought a package where you have prepared yeast, then all you need to do is pour it in. Some yeasts will require a little bit of work but it says what you need to do on the package. Just make sure you have enough yeast cells to jump start your fermentation.

6. Let it ferment.
Close up the container and add a water lock and just.. wait. It can take a couple of days before you start noticing anything so be patient. It also ferments quite slowly most of the time, at least in my experience. Fermentation can take a couple of months, sometimes even longer if you use yeast from berries (which is a different topic). So patience is a virtue.

7. Rack it.
Use a siphon to move your mead from one container to another similar one but make sure you leave the bottom part of it. You don't want to disturb it so it becomes foggy, you want it as clear as possible. This might need to be done twice to make sure it looks and tastes good.

8. Bottle it.
Pour it into bottles, try not to get so much oxygen into the mead when you bottle it since it can make it start fermenting again and give odd flavours.

9. Let it rest a week.
Hard part, I know, but it does need to rest a little so the taste will become a bit rounder and more mature. It does make a difference so once again, patience is required.

10. Drink!
Finally we get the pay off from the hard work! Try and find the different flavours, write down your experience from it and think on what you can correct and what you should keep on doing.