A community dedicated to homebrewing beer, mead, wine, cider and everything in between. If it ferments, bring it over here.
Share recipes, ideas, ask for feedback or just advice.
Some starting points for beginners:
Quick and diry guide to fermenting fruit - cider and wine
https://meadmaking.wiki/en/home
In terms of advise, don't bother simmering your honey as this will remove a lot of the flavour and buy some yeast nutrient if you want to drink it early. The nutrient will make your mead drinkable without having to age it for over a year, cause yeast needs nitrogen and unhappy yeast makes rocket fuel that needs to age out. When in doubt, age it out. Apart from that, just play around, use the GotMead calculator to estimate ABV and have fun.
There's some great stuff out there ... The Compleat Meadmaker is a great book with a ton of good resources, when I was getting into this I picked it up for around $5.
I'm putting this here as a placeholder to remember to come back and give you some advice when I have time to sit down at the computer.
Not an expert, but I drink other peoples mead, and my best bit of advice is to avoid strong flavoured honeys: Eucalyptus honey such as Leatherbark is great on toast, but not so great in mead. Better to try for very boring honeys, and add the other flavours (if it's a metheglin) yourself instead of letting the bees do it.
Good tip! Thank you!
I am personally a fan of the Bray Denard method for making mead. It works really well as a nutrient regime and they have their own calculator. They actually have a business centered around home-brewing mead as well called YouToBrew that sells things like yeast, nutrients, and stabilisers and gives recipes and advice.
You might also want to think about tannins and acids. They help give the mead a balanced flavour. Wine has the same concept of sweetness, acid, and tannin balence. For tannins you can use tannin powder, wood chips like oak or cherry, teas, or fruit skins. Acids come in powders or in a pinch you can use lemon juice. Sweetening requires you to stabilise the mead or to use non-fermentable sweeteners.
I would also have a look at some other beverages you can make like fruit wine and cider. I have had good results turning jam into wine; it's a very cheap and easy way to make a fruit wine. Cider is also very simple and generally tastes alright with little time and effort.
Are you aiming to make a traditional or another mead style?
havent done a mead in years but:
sterilize all of your equipment first (different ways, find the one that works best for you)
simmer the honey and water (unchlorinated), skim off anything that floats to the top
let it cool to skin temperature & add the yeast, give it a nice stir and drop it in your fermenting vessel
top it up with unchlorinated water but leave a bit of head space. if your ferment is very active, you'll see why
attach a cork & airlock, and put it out of the way, somewhere dark and cooler but not cold
forget about it for a few weeks
buy some bentonite clay, add a bit when it looks like the ferment is done/has slowed. this will clarify the mead
decant, bottle/age for a while. the longer the better!
I'd recommend using a digital thermometer to check the temperature before pitching the yeast. measuring by hand requires a bit of experience. check the instructions for the yeast whether they might need rehydration before pitching. if you are doing rehydration, make sure that the temperatures are fairly close to avoid temperature shock. good luck
This is outdated advice. You shouldn't simmer raw honey. If chlorine is a concern then use sulfites or boil and cool the water separately.
If you want to use bentonite clay then add it at the beginning. It's not effective to just add it in secondary and just leave it, it has to be agitated. That's why people use it in primary fermentation now as this helps to get it moving.