Mead Making

Honey has almost no nitrogen in it, which is why mead goes wrong more often than beer does: the yeast starves, sulks, and makes the batch smell like rotten eggs. Feed it in staggered doses through the first third of the ferment and most of what people call "mead is hard" simply stops happening. Everything else is arithmetic: about 1.3 kilograms of honey in a gallon gives you a starting gravity of 1.100, and the alcohol is the gravity you lost times 131.25.

Continue reading:

1. Honey, water and yeast
2. Why mead goes wrong
3. Never boil the must
4. Honey and gravity
5. The alcohol is the gravity you lost
6. Choosing a yeast
7. Feed it in thirds
8. Sanitise everything it touches
9. The cellar through the year
10. Three steady readings
11. Racking off the lees
12. Faults and what caused them
13. A stuck ferment and the restart
14. Clearing, fining and the second racking
15. Stabilise before you sweeten
16. Dry, semi-sweet and sweet
17. Bottling
18. Varietal meads
19. Patience is a technique
20. Selling mead, and the licence
21. What the cellar leaves out