7 steps to making a mead drink in under 3 weeks

Buy the full course with www.pretasurvivre.com

1st stage

Honey + Water + Yeast. That's all there is to it. This is mead wine. Worthy of a grand cru.

If you use raw, unheated, unpasteurised and unfiltered honey, you don't even need to add yeast as all the good yeasts are already present.

You don't even need to heat the wort or pasteurise it. But you can heat it too if you like!

So how come there are books, websites, forums, Facebook groups, brewers' meetings and even national conferences devoted to this subject? Knowing that it's all about combining honey and water!

And baguettes are nothing more than flour, water and yeast. It's hard to argue with that if you're the best bakery around.

Before we get into the exciting details of honey varieties, yeast nutrients and fermentation, here are the reasons why you should brew craft.
Mead has had a bad reputation in the past because there has been a lot of poor quality mead. If you've ever had a bad home-brewed beer, you'd assume that the brewer was bad. But if you've had a bad mead, you'll think that it's the mead itself that's unpalatable.

If you haven't yet tasted an artisanal mead (commercial or homemade) worthy of the name, it's a wine that can be alcohol-free but also up to 20°C. It can also be dry, semi-dry, sweet or mellow, with or without bubbles and effervescent like champagne, and packaged in cans, beer bottles, wine bottles or liqueur bottles. We'll tell you more about the definition of artisanal mead a little later.

Chances are you've never tasted anything like it, because there used to be only a handful of meaderies and home brewers producing this kind of product around the world. But times have changed.

In many ways, mead is the ideal drink for the craft or home brewer who wants to produce an excellent wine quickly, without vines and with minimal investment:
- You don't need any special equipment; if you have a special brewing bucket, you have everything you need to make mead. You don't even need a carboy or a fermentation vat to keep things simple and economical.
- Mead can be made quickly. If you've got ten minutes and an electric drill? Well, you've got yourself a mead.
- The ingredients are actually surprisingly inexpensive. A good honey may come at a high price, but neither hops, liquid yeast nor beer-brewing equipment can match the investment required to produce a good mead.
- Most of your friends have never tasted a good mead. Why did we become amateur or craft brewers if not to impress our friends and make a living from our passion for drinks that rival great wines?
- Your mead may be ready to drink in three weeks, but it can also be matured in oak casks for 24 months or more!

On that last point. You've probably been misinformed. You've probably been told that the mead will have to be stored in a cool, insulated cellar, away from the public and your drunken guests for no less than a decade... two if you can manage it. This is not true. Wonderful meads can be created and blended in a matter of months or even weeks.

There are two good reasons why you should take time and age with a mead:
- If the mead has an extremely high alcohol content - over 16%, for example - it needs to be aged for a long time, as is the case with all high-alcohol beers.
- If you are not well trained or bad at making mead.

And that's it. That says it all. Bad tastes and prolonged ageing are caused by people not knowing the basics and the process of what they're brewing. And why shouldn't it be that simple? Isn't taste the root cause of most of a product's bad reputation? Do people really know what they're doing?

Before going into detail, we need to make sure that everyone knows what's going on. In brewing, there are three categories of information: Facts, opinions and opinions disguised as facts. This third group is the biggest margin and the most important category.

Having said that, what I'm going to present here are facts and the fruit of my experience and knowledge, and each allegation has been tested at every level of mead winemaking, from simple jugs to conical fermenters.

As I said earlier, it's really the lack of training that hinders the progress of the mead-making apprentice. Mead is in some ways fundamentally different from wine, beer and all other fermented beverages. By understanding these differences, you'll be well on your way to making home-made mead at home or in your production workshop.

2nd stage

Honey doesn't want to become mead.
Grapes would love to become wine if given a chance. Try to stop them.
Honey? Have you heard the legend that archaeologists can eat honey from ancient tombs? Well, it's true. The combination of pH, defensins, hydrogen peroxide and moisture content makes honey indefinitely stable.

Add a little water and all you've done is change the moisture content; you've still got other antimicrobial elements to deal with. To make matters worse, your mixture is essentially nothing more than sugar water. Like humans, yeast can survive for a while on an all-sugar diet, but it certainly won't thrive.

Poor initial fermentation is responsible for a large proportion of the off-flavours of cardboard and sulphurous odours in home-brewed meads (and some craft and commercial meads).

Solution number 1 Making your wort more yeast-friendly
When I give courses, my first piece of advice is to make your wort (your honey-water-yeast mixture) as beer-like as possible. Yeast likes beer. Add a nutrient to the yeast or find another way to add minerals and nitrogen.

Something else that's extremely important? Pollen is an extraordinary natural yeast nutrient, which is why raw honey creates healthier, more reliable fermentations[1]. It also contains many, many more volatile flavour and aroma components than filtered honey, which significantly improves the flavour of the final product. More on this a little further on.

Solution number 2 Brew like your ancestors but updated with the techniques of your contemporaries
You know what term you'll never hear me use in my training and recipes? "Traditional mead". Asking what the traditional taste of mead was is like asking what people experienced in ancient times: the taste of food, the colours, the perception of smells and even the quality of the air would be quite foreign to us today.

Our ancestors often used their pharmacopoeia directly in their meads to make powerful medicines, according to the writings we have been able to rediscover. In India today, there is a remnant of those times, when Ayurvedic medicine combined spices and medicinal herbs with mead to treat ailments.
Cinnamon? An antioxidant that helps prevent paper-thin flavours and sherry aromas. Thistles and sage? Preservatives. Fruit and cereals? These are your nutrients, flavour enhancers and natural remedies! The possibilities are endless.

Chances are, people have always drunk very little plain mead, i.e. honey and water (mead fermented with only raw honey + water). With modern techniques, yeast and laboratory-prepared nutrients, it's much easier to brew mead in a controlled and supervised way, but it can be just as much fun to make it in the old-fashioned way.

3rd stage

It will never be more important for you to understand the life of yeast.
Yeast is obviously the workhorse of your brewing premises. Understanding strain selection and the yeast life cycle can make or break a good mead. Once you've made the environment (your wort) as hospitable as possible to making a good mead wine, it's time to learn more about our yeast friends.

Solution number 1 Knowing the yeast strains
Yes, there are yeast strains made specifically for mead in the laboratory, and they are excellent. They also come at a price
Wine strains are prepared for the unfavourable and stressful conditions of mead fermentation. However, with the right nutrient load, the natural strains present in fresh pollen or beer can work wonders!

We use in-house strains specific to mead, renowned wine strains, wild strains and beer strains in our meaderies.

Yeast for champagne! a plus ?
These yeasts are quite technical to use, and I invite you to follow my complete training course on making and maturing mead. You will find this training.

What is the purpose of champagne yeast? To create a lot of alcohol and very little flavour. In fact, it is known to digest aromas and volatile compounds. Why would you buy expensive honey and then take all the goodness out of it?

Many mead-makers who have made award-winning meads in international competitions with champagne yeast will be frustrated by this statement. They will probably have made some very alcoholic meads containing enough volatile compounds and aromas for some to survive fermentation. Note that back-sweetening with honey can also produce similar results without the use of champagne yeast.

Solution number 2 Knowing the life cycle of yeast
For all the complex process of yeast propagation, mutation, primary metabolites, secondary metabolites and so on, the yeast life cycle is quite simple.

When you inoculate your yeast, the cells first go through a period of acclimatisation in their new home (your mead wort), after which they quickly begin to feed on oxygen and nutrients. This whole process takes about 24 hours.
You can also use staggered inoculation of your nutrients into the must. But why?

Of course, nitrogen is used in small quantities throughout fermentation, but the idea that the yeast won't be able to absorb the vast majority of what it needs for its entire process from the outset doesn't hold water in the face of experimental data.
You can stagger if you want, but here is my advice and practice on this.

When we actively blend our wort to give it all the oxygen it needs, we add around 30 grams of nutrient per 2o litres of mead wort. Sound like a lot? Well, what the yeast doesn't use is simply distributed harmoniously in the wort.
Not all nutrients are created in the same way, and some will give you strange tastes if you use too much. That's why you shouldn't overdose the nutrients from your favourite laboratory. Personally, I often use a homemade mixture made from fresh pollen, which you can find in my complete training course on Become a Hydromellier Master.

Oxygenation. We obviously have an oxygenation system, but vortexing the must manually with a long spatula in one direction and then in the other for 10 to 20 minutes will ensure that your must is well energised before the yeasts are inoculated.

Just after oxygenation, we inoculate the equivalent of one packet of yeast for around 20 litres of must. Dry yeast is cheap and very efficient at doing what it was programmed to do in the laboratory. Since this article is about our practices, I'll tell you that we don't rehydrate. We sprinkle the yeast directly onto our must. This way, fermentation often starts within four hours.

Most dry yeast manufacturers recommend rehydration, of course, but on comparison we found no difference in taste, and we're confident that our method gets you started more quickly.

Solution number 3 CO2 degassing
One of the main factors delaying fermentation is excess dissolved CO2. If you find that your fermentation is painfully slow, go ahead and wake up the yeast while gently stirring the feverish bubbles.

Don't forget, however, that every time you open your fermenter, you risk letting in oxygen and therefore potential oxidation. What's more, the CO2 is there to protect your mead from oxidation and other infections. If you have enough oxygen and nutrients, you should be able to reach an alcohol content of 9 % in a few days in a temperature-controlled environment. We generally stick to the maximum temperature recommended for the yeast strain we have chosen, or even a little higher.

4th stage

It's a question of honey.
Not only does your honey do everything, it's the one that will give your wine its unique imprint and notes on the palate. It may seem obvious, but it bears repeating: your honey is the foundation of every aspect of your mead, and it's up to you to understand it from every angle.

Also, to set the record straight, it is possible to make extraordinary mead from supermarket honey, but it's a lot more difficult. Imagine brewing beer with supermarket grain; it's possible and even a fun challenge, but you need to know exactly what you're doing.

Raw, unfiltered, unheated and unpasteurised honey is king.
Raw honey is a veritable cornucopia of vitamins, minerals and even fresh pollen compared to its pasteurised and filtered brethren. This doesn't mean you can get away with not using any nutrients, but it does mean you're making up for a smaller deficit. The combination with fresh pollen to replace lab-made nutrients is just magic. Follow my full training on Become a Hydromellier Master.

Raw honey is also full of complex flavours and aromatic compounds that volatilise or break down during pasteurisation. Many of the magnificent floral aromas present in high-quality meads come from the use of raw honey.

You don't have to break the bank, of course; there are plenty of good resources online, but you also simply have to look for the beekeeper in your area who will become your privileged partner in your quest for the grail. Do the rounds of the small local markets and, once you've found a good source, jealously protect it from all your friends.

You've just spent a lot of money on an exceptional honey that your favourite beekeeper has unearthed for you, so don't spoil it once you've reached the stage of preparing your wort.
Probably the most controversial subject in mead making is the debate over boiling versus sulphites. Let me put it simply:
- Boiling, even if it is limited to pasteurisation, will volatilise many of the compounds for which you have just paid a high price.
- Gently warming your honey to break down the crystals if it's not naturally liquid and mixing it with water is a good idea.
- Heat to a temperature of around 40°C, just to allow our wort to combine gently with the water. This will not harm your mead.
- If you use them, sulphites are an effective compound that kills wild yeast and has virtually no effect on humans... well, almost none at all, because personally I get a headache when too much is added to a good table wine or a vintage mead.
- You don't need to do either (sulphite or heat) as long as you accept that part of the fermentation will be thanks to the wild yeast in the honey. It works very well for me too, but you also need to know what the conventional processes are in order to make the right choice.

Have you got it? Heat to blend and gently combine the water and honey, but do not boil. Add sulphites if you like, but don't if you have any doubts, especially if those around you are sensitive to the idea of sulphite-free wine.

An addendum When cheap honey is acceptable.
Many meads are bland, lacking in consistency and boring to drink.
Honey without quality or character won't make interesting mead. Unless, of course, you are making mead with grapes (pyment), malted cereals (braggot), apples (cyser) or any other mead in which a substantial proportion of the fermentables come from another source.

Braggots, in particular, can overwhelm the delicate flavours and aromas of high quality honeys. Just as we don't pour syrup into a renowned Gewurztraminer to make a kir, you probably don't want to waste your Manuka honey on a hop and malt based mead.

5th stage

Bubbles in mead production.
It's a real niche in the market for non-alcoholic or low-alcohol drinks. When assembled for this type of tasting, sparkling mead is very sexy in a can or in an attractively designed glass bottle with all sorts of condiments added and improbable combinations... the combinations are endless. Imagine a fresh, sparkling drink that explodes in your mouth with a recipe that includes honey, old-fashioned apples, wild blackberries, isabelle grapes and sainfoin.

This is a pragmatic rather than an arbitrary definition, as many of the 'rules' for making low-alcohol meads are different from those for high-alcohol products. For example, artisanal meads may dispense with multiple additions of yeast and nutrients, as well as prolonged ageing.
The advantage is that once you've mastered the process, you'll have a market-ready drink in no more than 4 weeks. Who can beat that?

You can enter the mead niche, where meads are designed to be carbonated and alcohol-free. You'll be reaching an endless audience while producing a healthy beverage that can be endlessly adapted to new formulas. Whatever the quality of the carbonated version, much of the brilliance and complexity of artisanal mead is achieved through carbonation (the artificial addition of CO2 or honey before canning).

Carbonation also has the advantage of making your drink drinkable more quickly. Carbonation (adding CO2 or honey) works wonders to speed up the finishing process.

We force carbonation in-house because some of our strains produce sulphurous components when stressed at the end of fermentation. Craft mead takes carbonation very well in home kegerator systems and has been known to knock your friends on their backs. If you're a bottler, don't worry, mead can be bottled just like beer!

6th stage

A final remark on the transparency of the product.
We are not crazy about transparency and crystal-clear mead.
Some of our meads are rather opaque, like organic apple juice pressed and bottled on the lees, and this does not bother customers or friends in the least. I note to my delight that our most popular meads are those that retain their cloudiness. Our theory is that these residual components enhance the mouthfeel and bring out subtle flavours that would otherwise be rushed.

But then again, this may just be an opinion disguised as fact.

7th step

Quick review - Business opportunity guaranteed - Happy friends
Artisanal mead, as we define it, differs from honey wine in two essential respects:
It can be considered and matured as a great table wine or sparkling and non-alcoholic. I would add that it can be used to make liqueurs with a high alcohol content to create subtle aperitifs with an alcohol content of around 20°C.
It may have a single-digit or double-digit alcohol content.
It can be dry, semi-dry or mellow, sometimes with a final density of less than 1,000 and more than 1,150, but this is not a rule.

The path from honey to glass in three weeks is simple:
- Start with good honey.
- Heat gently but never boil your wort.
- Oxygenate your wort with dynamism and kindness.
- Put plenty of nutrients in your wort.
- You should not use too much yeast, especially if your honey is of high quality
- Keep it sufficiently warm during fermentation to avoid temperature-related stuck fermentations
- Make it fizzy by adding CO2 or by adding honey before canning.
- Package your drink in a sexy, fresh and cool offer

Take the full 150-hour course to become a Become a Hydromellier Master.  I promise you'll know everything!