Brewing & Bottling Mead

Mead 101, plus, how to bottle things at home!

By Megan

Mead! What even is mead? It's not wine, and it's not beer, but it can be made at either strength. It's honey, diluted and fermented, turned alcoholic (and aphrodisiacal, and magical, and medicinal, too, if you listen to the old legends about it)!

Fermented honey drinks have been found in every single culture that exists around bees. Early beekeepers would harvest their honey by smashing the entire hive, and the straw basket it was built in, and just letting it drain. Most of the honey would end up leaking out but to get the wax for candles and medicines, the whole sticky straw and wax mess would be boiled. The straw would get skimmed off, and the liquid would separate into beeswax and honey'd water, if you left it alone overnight to cool. The popular idea goes that some beekeeper left it a little longer than overnight, and when they came back, discovered a magical intoxicating elixir underneath the layer of beeswax!

Mead is just that super simple to make, or it can get complicated. Traditionally, mead needed a very long aging process before it tasted good. That's because there's not the perfect balance of nutrients to sugar for the yeasts, and they ferment under stress slowly. There's also things besides yeast, like a multitude of bacteria, in honey (it is bee puke, after all...) that also like to eat sugars. All of this means that during the first few years, a mead of old tasted gnarly; hot alcohol that stung going down, with a strange aftertaste or smell.

hoses, tubes, a siphon cane, bottling wand,

Nowadays we have science on our side and can make a better habitat for our yeast. We can also *not,* and let the mead progress like any old-time mead would. Laura and I are doing both!

I've got a gallon batch of mead sitting on my counter right now. It's about five months old now, and the airlock isn't bubbling anymore, but I'm gonna keep it sealed (checking the airlock for water) until at least next January, when I'll bottle it and let it age even longer.  My "recipe" for this batch was a pint of farmers market honey, a chunk of honeycomb, a few tablespoons unfiltered honey with all the pollen in it, and water. I put a fabric scrap over the top of the jar. I put a real lid on and shook the crap out of it every day for three days until everything looked dissolved and it was starting to get fizzy, and then I stuck the airlock on and basically dropped it out of my mind. This is as old-school of a mead as I can get without keeping bees myself, and I'm excited to try it in several years.

bottles and a tub to contain drips

You can also get fancy and make specialty meads. The one that Laura and I are bottling today, she made with apple juice and honey. Technically, it's called a cyser. Most common honey+___ combos have names. Honey and spices or herbs makes it a metheglyn; honey and malted grains becomes a braggot; honey and fruit is called a melomel.

We're using recycled bottles, which came with painted Coronita labels. You can see how we removed those last weekend by checking out this post.

Equipment that we used; sanitizer, hoses, tubes, a siphon cane, bottling wand, caps, a capper, and bottles. There's also a tub to contain drips, but a towel laid out works just as well. Even though we're doing just a gallon, bottling is a whole lot easier with two people. We've sanitized these bottles already and they're flipped upside down to drain. One bit of equipment I REALLY want is a bottle drying rack!

Stick the siphon hose down almost to the sediment at the bottom of the jug. Here's where you need nineteen hands: put the bottling wand in the bottle and then pump the thing to start the siphon. The bottling wand has a valve at the bottom, and it's gotta stay open in order for the siphon to start, but both tasks require your full attention simultaneously. Needless to say, we couldn't exactly take pictures during this process, but we did set my phone up to take a video!

the right amount of room in the bottle

Once the liquid is flowing, start filling bottles. The wand is sized perfectly so that when you pull it out of a *very* full bottle, displacement leaves just the right amount of empty room in the bottle! Set it down for your capper buddy, and move to the next bottle. The wand has a valve on the bottom, so it doesn't spray everywhere between bottles, it this is still a drippy process.

Meanwhile, capper buddy takes the bottle and sticks a new cap in her capper. Our capping things call for a little oil up in the cup, so make sure you read the instructions for your own device! Stick the thing on the bottle, and push the handles down. This forces the cap down around the lid and it crimps itself, making a nice seal and keeping your drink good for several years.

I went ahead and added a few fun links you can check out if you wanna know more about mead, but make sure to visit your local public library and see what they have available there, too! Last time I went I found several books on mead!

Here's a recipe for a mead that's supposedly ready to drink in a month. Neither of us have tried this recipe, but it seems to be pretty popular and we know not all of our readers have the patience to wait a year or more to drink their mead! It calls for chemicals which you can buy at your local home brew shop, or on Amazon. It's also written with the assumption that the person reading it has all the equipment and experience that comes from brewing regularly.

Here's a recipe for a rather awesome looking mead made with beets! I think this is my next project.

For you linguist nerds out there, here is a great link about the history of the names of mead and what it might mean about the history of the drink.

~ Megan

Readers, have any of you made mead? What's your favorite recipe? I've been winging it so far, but I'd love some recommendations!