The books / Mead Making / chapter 3 of 21
Never boil the must
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
Honey dissolves slowly in cold water, so the must is made warm. Heat part of the water to 38 to 43 C, stir the honey in until none lies on the bottom, then top up with cool water to the batch's full volume.
Stop there. Boiling drives off the floral, volatile aromas that make one honey taste unlike another, and it can caramelise the sugars. For a traditional mead that throws away the reason you chose the honey. Caramelising on purpose is a different style, the bochet.
Set honey is as good as runny honey here. Its crystals are glucose that came out of solution, and warm water takes them back in.
In this game the cellar warms the must for you, and a set honey or a wet super goes into mead as well as liquid honey does. Honey that has already fermented is refused.