The books / Mead Making / chapter 1 of 21
Honey, water and yeast
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- Honey, water and yeast
- Why mead goes wrong
- Never boil the must
- Honey and gravity
- The alcohol is the gravity you lost
- Choosing a yeast
- Feed it in thirds
- Sanitise everything it touches
- The cellar through the year
- Three steady readings
- Racking off the lees
- Faults and what caused them
- A stuck ferment and the restart
- Clearing, fining and the second racking
- Stabilise before you sweeten
- Dry, semi-sweet and sweet
- Bottling
- Varietal meads
- Patience is a technique
- Selling mead, and the licence
- What the cellar leaves out
A traditional mead is honey, water and yeast, and nothing else. Add fruit and it becomes a melomel, spices a metheglin, malt a braggot. This book is about the plain one, because every other mead is built on it.
Judges describe a traditional mead by its sparkle, its strength and its sweetness, from where it finishes: dry, semi-sweet or sweet. By strength, from its starting gravity:
- A hydromel or session mead holds 3.5 to 7.5 percent alcohol, usually from a starting gravity under 1.080.
- A standard holds 7.5 to 14 percent, from 1.080 to 1.120.
- A sack holds 14 to 18 percent, from above 1.120.
Both are decided by the honey you weigh out and the yeast you choose, before the first bubble.
In this game the style is read from the starting gravity alone, and every bottle carries both words and its honey, as in "Heather, standard, dry".