Ready to make a Mead ?

We will now begin our Traditional Dry Mead.  Keep in mind that this is My way of doing most of my meads. Other meadmakers have different techniques that work well for them. I will try to explain other ways of doing things during the process. Remember that anything you use in making this mead must be clean and sanitized. You can use Star San, Iodophor or any sanitizer available to get your utensils ready to use.

 

Put the needed water in the pot and I heat to 100 and then mix in the honey

Water is now ready to mix in honey

In this particular mead I used 7.5 lbs of Dark Wildflower honey because I wanted a quite dry mead. This is 2.5 lbs of honey per gallon of the batch size. This is going to be a 3 gallon batch and if a very dry mead was wanted - you could use only about 2 lbs of honey per gallon and for a sweet mead you could use 3  to 3.5 gallons of honey per gallon. The yeast also determines how dry or sweet the mead will be. First I put the pot on the stove and put the water in. You want to end up with 3 gallons total so I just put in 2.5 gallons of water in the pot. Then it was heated up to about 100 degrees so the honey would mix in a little easier. Some meadmakers will bring the temperature to 160 and mix in the honey and bring the mix back to160 for a pasteurization but I generally do not do do it this way. Other meadmakers bring the water to a boil and mix in the honey and then bring back to a boil for 15 to 20 minutes while skimming off the layer on the top of the boil. You can try either of these ways but I just heat to 100 and mix in the honey.

Pour in the honey and mix well

I use nutrient in most of my meads

Now that we have the water at around 100 we will mix in the honey. You can pour it in and maybe take a little out of the pot and put in the container that the honey came in to clean out or you could pour some of the water into the container with the honey and mix and then pour this into the pot with the other water. The main thing is that the honey is mixed in very well. I usually always put in some type of nutrient in the honey mixture so this will help the little yeasty's  to propagate and do their job a little better. I added 1.5 teaspoons of the Fermax nutrient to this batch.

Sanitizing Stopper and airlock

Using Star San to sanitize the carboy

Now that the honey mixture is ready, you need to sanitize the carboy or bucket that mead will ferment in.  Also the stopper and airlock needs to be sanitized. While these are getting sanitized we will go on and rehydrate the yeast.

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