The books / Mead Making / chapter 17 of 21
Bottling
All chapters
- 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
Most mead is bottled still, in 750 millilitre wine bottles closed with corks and a hand or floor corker. Sparkling mead is its own craft: a finished mead that has not been stabilised is bottled with measured priming sugar, so its live yeast makes the sparkle, or it is carbonated in a keg.
One US gallon is about five bottles before anything is lost. After the lees and the rackings, a five gallon batch of 19 litres usually fills 21 to 24.
A mead bottled clear keeps improving in the glass for months, and a strong one for years.
In this game the cellar makes still mead, and bottling is the act you come back for. A five gallon batch racked twice fills 21 bottles, a jug 4, and the bottles and corks are paid when it is bottled.