Brewing Education: What is mead and how is it made?

Mead is the oldest (and first) intentionally created alcoholic beverage dating back to roughly 7000 BCE in Ancient China, and it is also the simplest alcohol to make. At its very base mead has only three ingredients: water, honey, and yeast. Going by a better definition mead is an alcoholic beverage that achieves its fermentation primarily through honey instead of other sugars; but they can definitely include other sources of sugar such as fruit, vegetables, plants, flowers, coffee, etc. Making mead is a bit more complicated than just mixing those three things together and waiting - though not by much.

When making mead there are some things you need to control, else you run the risk of undesirable bacteria infecting your brew and causing sickness, or possibly turning it into vinegar. The first thing you must control is the cleanliness of your equipment; all of your brewing equipment must be properly sanitized to prevent the introduction of who knows what kind of bacteria into the beverage that you are creating. To an extent the same thing goes for your ingredients, they need to be washed and clean and hopefully free of harmful (to yeast) chemicals like pesticides and chlorine. The next thing you need to be able to control is temperature. Depending on the strain of yeast you are using there is a temperature range that they operate optimally at and you need to have the tools to make sure you are keeping the brew within that range, luckily this only requires an instant-read thermometer. Lastly you must control exposure to light and oxygen. Exposure to light is not too big of a deal so long as you don't place the fermenting container out in a sunny window or similar place, just keep it in a closet and you should be okay. Oxygen exposure is the tricky one however. For the first 24 hours or so of the primary fermentation the yeast inside the brew requires oxygen in order to begin building up a healthy yeast colony; however after that point in time oxygen is extremely bad for the yeast and can cause the mead to turn into vinegar (by way of activating acetobacters), and as such exposure to oxygen must be limited only to what is absolutely necessary to perform upkeep on the fermenting mead. These controls are all relatively easy to achieve but also extremely important to follow in order to produce a quality mead.

The steps to making mead are also pretty simple. I will walk you through what the steps of the process of making a mead are.

Step 1: Preparation/Primary Fermentation

The Primary Fermentation stage is where you prepare and combine all of the ingredients you are using to make your mead, the honey water, yeast, and any other fruits, vegetables, peppers, etc. Once combined they are put into a container with an air-tight lid that contains a fermentation airlock - a device that allows gasses to escape from the container without letting oxygen in. Over the course of a few days to weeks the yeast will multiply and begin to consume the sugars in the honey and other ingredients creating alcohol as a byproduct (one of many), as well as CO2 gas which helps push oxygen out of the container and provides an environment friendly to the yeast that allows them to continue making alcohol.

Step 2: Secondary Fermentation/Conditioning

The secondary fermentation (or conditioning) phase is where a couple of important processes occur. The first is moving your brew from its current container to a new (sterilized) container. This happens when your yeast has - hopefully - reached its alcohol tolerance and stopped fermenting. Moving the brew to a new container helps to degas/offgas the liquid getting rid of some of the more undesirable byproducts of fermentation, as well as getting the brew off of the sediment that has begun collecting at the bottom of the current container which is called the lees (sediment from any fruits/veggies and the husks of the dead yeast cells). This will help to begin the process of clearing the mead which gives it a visual appeal (nobody wants to drink a cloudy looking alcohol). This is also the step where you can add more honey/fruits/veggies/flavorings to the mead which is called backsweetening. This allows you control how sweet the mead is, and what flavors you want to be prominent; in short this allows you to condition the mead into what you want the final product to be. Backsweetening can cause another fermentation cycle if the yeast has not reached its alcohol tolerance, so this step does require some research to determine if the addition of sugars will only sweeten the mead or if it will cause fermentation to begin again. Depending on the recipe you follow and the kind of mead you are making there can be many iterations of this step which are named accordingly (Primary>Secondary>Tertiary Fermentation etc.), but they all are essentially the exact same step.

Step 3: Racking/Bottling

This is "technically" two steps in one. Essentially racking is moving the mead between two containers. This process helps remove the lees from the current container as well as improve clarity of the mead. Its pretty simple. At least two racking cycles are recommended, however you are free to do however many racking cycles you wish to do, though each cycle does tend to cause some waste of product so keep that in mind. Bottling is really just racking the mead from its current container into individual bottles, so nothing fancy there. Mead isn't too affected by light after it has completed fermentation so you can store it in pretty clear glass containers if you wish which shows off the undoubtedly pretty color and clarity of your mead creation, or you can use colored glass bottles as well because some of those are really pretty as well. Unlike beer which is relegated to brown glass bottles so it doesn't get skunky (nasty tasting), mead can be stored in any kind of glass bottle so you get to play to your aesthetics as well, hooray!

This is the basic process for making mead, and honestly the hardest part of making mead is waiting. Most meads will take at least 6-8 weeks from Preparation to Bottling, and then it is recommended that meads age for at least 6 months so that they mellow out and lose their "green-ness" which is most notable by a harsh alcohol/antiseptic aroma that overpowers the other aromas of the mead like the honey and any other fruits or other additives you've introduced to the mead. Ageing also increases the complexity of the flavor and body of the mead, however it is not a necessary process if you are happy with how the mead tastes then go ahead and drink it. Just know that nearly all mead benefits from ageing so if you set a bottle aside for a year or so it will probably taste like a better version of that basic mead.