Tips On How To Make Mead

Experimenting with home brewing mead at home can be really fun. Due to the nature of mead having pretty much unlimited possible flavour combinations. There are so many varieties of honey alone that even if you were not adding fruits or spices it would take you a long time to try them all. Hives just a few kilometers apart can have vastly different tasting honey. As a general rule of thumb, the darker the honey the stronger the flavour. This isn’t going to be a step by step tutorial in making a batch of mead as there are books for that but these are my recommendations.

Choice of Honey

When choosing what type of honey to buy I generally would not recommend using store-bought honey if you can help it. Although it will ferment fine, it has been heat-treated to prevent crystallisation on the store shelves which often strips away some aromas. If you have a local beekeeper you can buy from that would be better, check Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree. Do experiments with as many different varieties as you can. I am not a fan of Ironbark honey though, I find it produces a rather bland and watery mead compared to other honey.

Choice of Wine Yeast

I would not recommend high alcohol tolerance champagne yeasts, for example, those that can go to 18% unless you specifically want a high alcohol mead. These yeasts will often strip away honey flavour and will also cause the mead to need to be aged for a long time before it is drinkable (years).

Yeast Nutrient

I often see people in videos or articles recommend using raisins as a yeast nutrient or try to make some other sort of homemade. Maybe raisins are better than nothing at all however for a few dollars you can purchase commercially made yeast nutrients specifically designed for the purpose.

Resources to Learn Mead Making

Most Youtube videos on mead instructions and recipes I come across are made by amateurs themselves, big Youtube channels that you can tell it’s their first Mead but today they are teaching how to make it. Following their instructions will likely still produce you with a mead, but it won’t be the best. So don’t necessarily think the video with the highest views is going to be the best source of information.

I would suggest only following along to videos from channels dedicated to mead.

Although it can be more technical to read a book than watch a video if you want your mead to be the best it can be I would suggest learning from books written by professional mead makers. Two books I would highly recommend are.

Youtube Channels I Can Recommend

There are a few Youtube channels I can recommend though, one being Man Made Mead and the other being Groenfell Meadery. There are two fairly recent videos they’ve made which cover exactly what I was planning on saying in this post which is a bit disappointing as now I have nothing more to talk about! It’s easier if I just leave the links to them here.

If you don’t have your own home brew equipment or months to wait check out our ready made meads in our shop. Delivery anywhere in Australia.