How to make honey mead at home

Mead is about as old as brewing gets. Honey and water, plus a yeast to turn one into the other, left alone long enough to become something worth pouring. If you've ever looked at a jar of honey and wondered whether you could make a drink out of it, you can, and it's a good deal less fiddly than brewing a beer.

What mead actually is

At its simplest, mead is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey with water. You can add fruit or spices to give it more character and plenty of people do, but underneath all of that it's honey and water with a yeast doing the work. If beer is the loud one at the party, mead is the quiet uncle in the corner who turns out to have the best stories.

What you need to get started

You don't need much, and most of it is small enough to sit on a kitchen bench.

• Honey. This is where the flavour comes from, so it's worth using a decent one. About 1.5kg of honey to 4 litres of water gives you a medium sweet mead.
• Water. Filtered beats straight out of the tap, because whatever your tap water tastes like is going to end up in the glass.
• Yeast. A champagne yeast like EC-1118 is a reliable place to start and it finishes clean. There's also a dedicated mead yeast, the Mangrove Jack's M05, if you'd rather use something made for the job.
• A fermenting vessel. A 5 litre glass demijohn with an airlock is plenty for a first batch.
• Sanitiser. Not optional. Anything that touches the mead has to be clean, or you'll find out why in about six weeks.
• Whatever extra you fancy. Berries, or a stick of cinnamon. Start simple and add one thing at a time so you can actually taste what it did.

The steps

1. Clean everything first

Sanitising is the one you never get to skip, because a batch that picks up a wild bacteria isn't a batch you can rescue. Every bit of gear that's going to touch the mead gets done, and that includes the spoon. A no rinse sanitiser makes it about a two minute job.

2. Make the must

The must is just the unfermented mix. Dilute your honey with water, roughly one part honey to three parts water, and warm the water a little to help the honey dissolve. Don't boil it, because you'll drive off the aromatics that made you want to use that honey in the first place.

Let it cool back to room temperature. If you're adding fruit or spice, now's the time, and then give it a good stir.

3. Pitch the yeast

Rehydrate the yeast the way the sachet tells you to, then pitch it into the must, stir it gently and pour the lot into your demijohn with the airlock on. The airlock lets the gas out and keeps everything else from getting in, which is the whole job it has.

Put it somewhere cool and dark and then leave it alone, which is the hard part. Primary fermentation takes somewhere between 2 and 6 weeks depending on the yeast and the temperature, and you'll know it's finished when the airlock stops bubbling.

4. Rack it off the sediment

When fermentation finishes there'll be a layer of dead yeast and bits sitting on the bottom. Siphon the mead off into a clean vessel and leave that behind. This is called racking, and the trick is to move slowly so you don't stir the sediment back up into it.

5. Age it

Mead gets better with time in a way beer really doesn't. Three months sealed is about the minimum before it's worth drinking, six months is better, and a year is better again. This is the stage where most first batches come unstuck, because they get drunk.

6. Bottle it

Once it tastes the way you want it, bottle it, seal it and store it somewhere cool and dark. Then open one and see what you made.

A few things worth knowing

• Taste as you go. Mead shifts a long way depending on the honey you used, so what you learn on this batch is what makes the next one better.
• Start small. A 4 or 5 litre batch is plenty, and if it goes sideways you haven't lost much honey.
• Be patient. Rushing it is the commonest mistake by a mile and it's the one nobody warns you about until you've already made it.

Nobody starts out knowing any of this. The first batch teaches you more than the reading does and the second one is usually where it starts getting good, so don't judge the whole thing on a first go. If you get stuck partway through, come in and ask us.

Shop related products

• Beer Essentials No Rinse Sanitizer 25g. The quick one, for gear you're about to use.
• Beer Essentials Brew Sanitize 250ml. A bigger bottle if you're brewing regularly.
• Morgan's Sodium Metabisulphite 500g. For sanitising gear, and for stabilising a batch before you bottle it.
• Mangrove Jack's Dry Enzyme Sachet 3g. Helps a fruit mead clear instead of staying hazy on you.

Did you know we also stock the Mangrove Jack's M05 mead yeast and EC-1118 champagne yeast in the shop, along with 5 litre Italian demijohns and the clips to suit them, airlocks, two scale hydrometers with a test jar, long handled paddles and local honey in small and large jars. They're not on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what's on the shelf.

The rest of the range is in the homebrew collection, and if you want a hand working out what to buy first, Brewhilder will talk you through it.

Read next

• What fermentation actually does, and how to keep yeast happy
• Top 5 common homebrewing mistakes and how to fix them
• Where to get homebrew supplies on the Fleurieu

Patience is the one ingredient we can't sell you, and I'd buy a box of it myself if we could.

Cheers

Candeece