Welcome to the Mead forum!

**kal** · Last edited by kal on Fri Apr 10, 2015 1:00 am; edited 4 times in total

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Mmmmm Mead... the nectar of gods! Patient gods that is! Making good mead often requires fermentation times of 6-12 months but it's worth it!

Got questions or want to share your tricks and tips with other mead makers in this forum? You've come to the right place!

Books we recommend:

The Compleat Meadmaker : Home Production of Honey Wine From Your First Batch to Award-winning Fruit and Herb Variations

Kal

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pola0502ds · Joined: 14 Mar 2011 Posts: 290 Location: poland, Ohio

Have you ever made Mead before, Kal? I'm going to be getting into mead here pretty soon. I have a buddy (Rich) who is in his 60's that has been making mead for 30 some years. You walk into his basement and you see a wall of 43 cases of mead. It's unreal. He has won nationals 26 times for his mease and for good reason. His stuff is off the charts, he was approached more than once by people asking him to turn pro.. Anyway, I have a great mentor if I want to get into it. If anyone has any questions about making meade, let me know and I can get with my buddy.

**kal** · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2011 1:14 pm Post subject:

I've never made mead myself but I've had some really well mead made by a local brewer friend. Absolutely fantastic stuff. Takes a LOOOONG time to ferment (like 6-12 months if I remember correctly) and then he let it age and mellow for a good 1-2 years if not more after that.

Kal

crush · Joined: 28 Dec 2010 Posts: 706 Location: Telemark, Norway

I've made two batches of mead. The first was just plain honey..22lb IIRC for 5 gal. I used the wyeast dry mead yeast, and it did come out dry, but also quite bitter after 18 months. I split this 3 ways with some friends - I've a few bottles left which I'll keep for a few years to see how it develops.

The second batch was a honey, apricot and ginger mead...I guess you'd call that a metheglyn. It's been fermenting in secondary for 6 months, bottled a couple of weeks ago. Like the first, it was also quite bitter, since I'd used the same yeast strain as the first batch. But since it was only 12lb of honey, I'm hoping this will not need 2-3 years to reach it's peak.

pola0502ds · Joined: 14 Mar 2011 Posts: 290 Location: poland, Ohio

My buddy who does the mead and who has won all the awards, he won't enter a contest unless the mead is at least 3 years old. Besides that, he will start to crack bottles after a year and tell everyone that it is a "Young" meade.

Crush, how much honey were you using?

rmessick · Joined: 20 Feb 2011 Posts: 123 Location: Turners Falls, MA

I have a little less than 5 gallons (due to "sampling") of mead I made at a friend's "mead day" over 2 years ago. My friend is a huge mead enthusiast (and has the largest glass carboy collection I have seen on the East Coast of the US!), and does a lot of interesting fruit additions and makes a very interesting (and tasty) habanero mead. He has something he calls Mead Day each year where he invites interested people (usually 10 or so) to make some mead at his place - he obtains the honey, yeast, etc. - it's a great intro to mead!

The mead I made is very dry, and the specific gravity is below 1.000 (I can't tell precisely, because there's no scale on my hydrometer before 1.000)! It started out a bit hot, but is mellowing out over time. I have it in a corny keg to age, so it's easy to pull "samples" from time to time and see how it is aging. Not a bad science project to have in the basement.

-Dick