How to Make Mead: Tips for Beginners

In making mead, one thing is most important and that is to allow the liquid or the liquor to age as long as possible nearly two years. If you want to make mead randomly, it is suggested to think twice about it because you need to have patience for making it. Mead takes much time to get ready for drinking. Usually average mead will take six months to be suitable to drink. The rule is the longer it ages the better the taste is. It may require around two years and sometimes more for getting final product.

Know when you need to change into a new container or carboy. There will be around an inch or more thick sediment in the bottom of your mead and this is rightly normal. This cake of sediment (referred as Leeds) is the reason as to why you should transfer the mead to a new container. You should first rack into new carboy when the airlock has descended to below 1 bubble at every thirty seconds. After a week, you can rack it off into a new jug. Then you can rack off the wine once a month.

Verify when your Mead is complete to drink. This is a very common question asked by people and no perfect answer can be told without testing. Every batch of mead differs and maturity will rely on many factors such as kind of honey, amount of honey, kind of yeast and temperature of the room where your batch is stocked in. The best thing to do is find out how to use a hydrometer. Using this simple tool that floats in your brew, you can determine when your ferment has ended.

When you mix your first batch of wine, because of lots of honey, the liquid is very thick. It holds great specific gravity. The thickness of the wine will reduce as the yeast ferments and changes the honey into alcohol. Finally, as all the honey is finished and the alcohol content rises, the ferment will end. The lack of food and increased alcohol concentration will destroy the yeast. With a hydrometer, you can know when this has happened.

The biggest issue that beginner Mead makers face is the trouble of sanitation. Your batch of new honey wine helps bacteria to grow up in. And for making mead, you need only specific yeast to grow rather than other bacteria. But if other bacteria or strains of yeast lie in the batch, they may capture and ruin your batch or wipe out the flavors. To keep away from this you should always clean all of your tools and equipment with a wine maker’s sanitizer similar to Easy Clean. This isn’t washing; it is cleaning with a chemical that destroys bacteria.


Mead making is quite simple and mainly you just need to set it aside and leave it alone for long time. By following these simple tips you should be able to make yourself some delicious batches of this nectar of the gods.