The books / Mead Making / chapter 19 of 21
Patience is a technique
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
A mead tasted a month after pitching is often harsh, hot and yeasty: dissolved gas, yeast by-products and young alcohols that time rounds off. It is not a sign the batch failed.
Strength sets the wait:
- A session mead wants one to two months of bulk ageing.
- A standard wants three to six months in bulk, then up to a year in the bottle.
- A sack wants six to twelve months in bulk, and one to three years or more in the bottle before it is at its best.
Fusel heat can need longer still.
Most of mead's cost is time, not honey or equipment.
In this game a sack takes longest to clear, and two years after it was pitched a sack on the shelf becomes aged sack, which sells at 38 a bottle before its honey's premium.