Making a basic mead is a great way to start home brewing and this basic mead recipe is so simple anyone can easily do it themselves. So, say you wanted to make the same must (3 pounds of honey per gallon), but swapped out the yeast. Consider fermenting it out and then splitting it off into smaller 1 gallon containers where you can make a sweet mead by adding more honey to one, vanilla bean to another, fruit to another, etc. To do this, you'll need to stop the fermentation process (described above) and then add the additional sweetener.
Put all the equipment (including the lid and stirring spoons) into the fermentation bucket, fill with water, and add 2 teaspoons of making mead bleach. Moreover, mead is often judged against beer or, due to labeling laws, more commonly wine. Once the water reaches a boil, remove it from the heat and stir in all of the honey.
If mead tops 7 percent abv, it's deemed a honey wine, no matter if it's hopped and aged in a whiskey barrel. When fermentation is complete, carefully pour off the mead into another jar, leaving the sediment behind. Tap water may add off flavors if it is hard water, has a high chlorine content, other additives such a fluoride, or if you are on well water which in some parts of the country may have a higher sulfur content.
Due to variations in honey sugar content, it is strongly advised you build your batches from the og. To help with building your mead recipes, we have created the batchbuildr that takes your desired alcohol content, final gravity (an estimation of sweetness), and the batch volume to estimate the amount of honey you need to make your batch.
To get a dry mead, use a lesser amount of honey (like the 2 cups mentioned) and stick with the champagne yeast. All homemade mead is made from a similar honey mead recipe because mead is simply a fermented beverage made from honey, water, and yeast. Plain mead is a nice treat on its own, but you can flavor this honey mead recipe to make it even better.
Unlike wine, mead goes down very easily, much like flavored rum. Honey lacks necessary nutrients, notably nitrogen; without it, yeasts become stressed and develop funky flavors. Each pound of honey also adds about 35 gravity points, bringing the must original gravity from that of water, 1.000, to 1.035 (specific gravity is a measure of the density of a fluid compared to water).
