Originally published in the January/February 2015 issue of Zymurgy magazine
by Ken Schramm
As part of this great, growing hobby, we all want to make some really delicious mead. Making great mead allows us to share one of the finest joys that life has to offer. It can be very easy, and immensely satisfying.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with a few basics when it comes to mead. The defining element of mead, honey, is critically important, and you’re going to want to find a reliable source of high-quality honey at a decent price. It’s a matter of personal preference, but supporting your local beekeepers is one thing you can do to ensure that good honey is available to you. You’ll also need to follow solid sanitation procedures. No amount of skill in recipe formulation or process will overcome a lack of cleanliness. But once we’ve gotten this far, what are some practices that will help a good meadmaker move up to making consistently great meads? Here are 10 tips for making meads you can serve with pride.
1. Use Nutrients
Use a compleat nutrient supplement regimen, and specifically a nutrient addition protocol that delivers the nitrogen and other metabolic needs of your yeast on a just-in-time basis. Many people refer to these as staggered nutrient additions, but the protocol I prefer is not staggered at all, and is timed at even 24-hour intervals. Regardless of the name or the regimen, proper nutrient additions make for healthy fermentations. This is not to say that I haven’t made great mead without any of these timed protocols. When I first started making mead that my friends and family raved about, it was a result of adding nutrient to the fermentation right at the end of the lag phase.
A good deal of available information indicates that frequent degassing is a necessary part of a healthy fermentation. Removing carbon dioxide during your fermenting must reduces the chances of stuck fermentation. Degassing at the nutrient additions has proven sufficient for me.
My current method is to divide the nutrients needed into five additions, then add two at the end of the lag phase, and one more every 24 hours with a vigorous stir to degas and dissolve the nutrients. More information on nutrient types and amounts is available at HomebrewersAssociation.org in the “Mastering Mead” article available in the Magazine/Free Downloads section.
2. Make Mead Locally and In Season
It’s easiest to make great mead if you use quality local ingredients at their freshest, peak condition. The central aphorism in winemaking is “Great wine is made in the vineyard,” and the same can be para- phrased for meadmaking. The odds that you are going to be the breakthrough individual who figures out how to make top- shelf mead out of government surplus honey and canned fruit are not in your favor. Show me a talented, conscientious meadmaker in Minnesota, and I’ll bet they can make a killer mead from local black currants. Similarly, the best prickly pear mead is probably going to come from the Southwest. Find your best sources and use them to your advantage.
3. Don’t Scrimp on Ingredients
This is especially true if your goal is to rack up a medal or two with your mead. You will come up against other meadmakers who have spared nothing to make incredible mead. In head-to-head competition, given a sound fermentation, better ingredients will always show. You only get one chance to choose what goes into each batch of mead. Whether for competition or personal consumption, in two or 10 years, you will never be bummed that you spent an extra $20 or $50 when it comes down to it.
4. Keep It Simple: Don’t Overthink Your Recipes
It’s easy to be seduced into trying to craft a perfect Montmorency cherry/chocolate/bacon mead (Bacon? Seriously? Well, no, but you get the idea) in one try. The chances of that happening on your first crack, though, are probably pretty low. Bill Pfeiffer, the 1985 AHA Meadmaker of the Year, was a firm advocate of this philosophy. His suggestion: “Never adjust more than one variable at a time when you are perfecting a recipe you want to nail.” One approach might be to make meads with each component individually, and blend them to achieve the desired profile. Another would be to get a Montmorency cherry mead recipe to where you like it, then add the chocolate component, and then finish with the bacon.
It can be a slow process. The truth is, if you want it to taste like you’ve been working on perfecting it for years, you might just need to work on it for years.
5. Don’t Be Afraid to Blow a Batch
Taste in advance—pair your ingredients well, and do your best to match them with honeys that harmonize rather than contrast. Blown batches are the cost of becoming great—wear them as badges of honor and not disgraces. No big risk will always equal no big reward. That is at the heart of commercial pilot batching, which regularly results in a spectrum of meads, some not so appealing, and some decidedly more so. There is no shame in that; quite the contrary, that is the cost of true repeatability and progress.
6. Timing, Part 1: Embrace Impatience When Impatience is Needed
Two points in the meadmaking process where timing is critical include post-fermentation and post-clarification.
Get your mead off the yeast when fermentation is completed.
This is most important if you are using a plastic fermenter. The geometry of bucket fermenters creates a huge surface area for oxygen absorption, and a fruit cap, if there is one, provides even more opportunity to move oxygen down into the mead. Many plastic fermenters are also oxygen permeable; all these conditions will allow damaging oxygen to enter your mead. Beyond that, you can reduce the chance of yeast autolysis, which can also impart off flavors to your mead.
Get your mead off the sediment as soon as it clears.
That is not to say that a little sur lie character may not be desirable. Many wine styles rely on the complexity and mouthfeel created by a definite and recognizable yeast component in the flavor, and frequently in the aroma. It can be quite attractive in traditional meads, sparkling ones in particular. If that is your goal, just keep everything clean, and be consistent about tasting regularly at roughly one-month intervals to be sure you do not overshoot your goal. On the other hand, if a yeasty note is not in your planned profile, it is good practice to rack again, get the mead off of any additional sediment that may flocculate in the secondary, and let the mead age in as pure an environment as possible.
7. Timing, Part 2: Embrace Patience When Patience is Needed
There are stages when being decisive is key, and there are stages when patience is a virtue. The most important of the latter is to let the fermentation finish before racking off the yeast. As illustrated in the previous section, you don’t want the mead sitting on lees too long after fermentation is complete, but the reverse is also true: you don’t want to jump the gun and rack before the yeast has had a chance to attenuate completely. The end of the fermentation is the toughest part for the yeast, because the nutrient levels have been depleted, sugar levels in the must are lower, and the yeast has to move alcohol into a solution with an ever-higher concentration outside the cell wall. Let the yeast finish the job, and then rack off of the yeast cake.
The next stage is to age well. Really, you can’t say you’ve wasted any mead you got to drink, but the regret of having consumed a truly spectacular mead too young is tough to swallow on its own. Three months is a minimum for me, six months is not too long to wait, and at a year, meads will be hitting their stride completely. The smaller the bottle or container, the faster meads will mature, so if you’re really impatient, bottle as soon as you’re sure all activity has ceased.
8. Oxygen: Know When It’s Good and When It’s Not
Oxygen enables reproduction in your yeast culture, allowing it to grow to the level where fermentation happens smoothly and cleanly. But after fermentation ceases, oxygen becomes your enemy, in plastic fermenters, carboys, and bottles.
There are several good ways to get your must the oxygen it needs. Using an oxygen diffusion stone and bottled oxygen is an extremely effective method, but for those who are not either well-heeled, obsessive amateurs or going pro, it is a pretty expensive solution to the problem. I accomplish the task by mixing my must with a high-speed immersion blender. Watching it dissolve the gas into the liquid is really satisfying, and it mixes the honey into the must faster than any method shy of a commercial mixing tank. An immersion blender (or a power drill stir attachment) kills two birds with one stone.
After that initial oxygenation, I make sure the must gets a few bumps over the first four days of the fermentation by vigorously de-gassing, using a sanitized, stainless steel slotted spoon. Give it several aggressive stirs, and splash at the surface as much as you can without spraying the mead all over the floor. You could make this more complicated if you’d really like to, but this method has allowed me to make award- winning mead for a decade or so.
After the point at which you’ve transferred your mead out of the primary fermentation vessel, avoid introducing oxygen meticulously. Rack the mead as quietly as possible, fill all carboys completely (fill with sanitized marbles if needed, or jacket with CO2, especially after wine thieving off any samples), and leave only half an inch or less of headspace below corks or caps when filling bottles. Mead can be very long-lived if it is treated well, which brings me to my next tip…
9. Use Good Closures
Closures protect your mead for the long haul. Use quality ones, whether they are corks or caps. Depending on whose scale you use, there are either three grades of natural cork (A, B, and C), or nine (the best of which are Flor, Extra, Super, and First, then Second, Third, Fourth, Agglomerated, and Colmated). There are also synthetic corks from Nomacorc and other manufacturers. At Schramm’s Mead, we use natural corks of Super or better grade, in lengths intended to provide a good seal for 10 or more years.
I haven’t seen conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of oxygen-absorbing caps used as mead closures, but I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. If they do what they claim to do, they should be worth the small additional expense.
10. Treat Your Mead Well
Ours is a world of massive capability and instant gratification. Beer, wine, and mead traders can and do ship beverages around the world, sharing their love of the craft. That may tempt us to abuse our meads by shipping them under less-than-ideal conditions. The wine crowd acknowledges the realities of this practice, and tries to ship in the spring and fall when most of the country is bathed in temperatures between about 38 and 70° F. It is a good philosophy to embrace, as it ensures that the quality of the mead when it is received is as close as possible to the quality of the mead when it was shipped, and that it is neither frozen nor cooked en route. Similarly, a mead cellar is great if you live where one is possible and affordable.
Finally, I am a fan of really nice glassware. Currently, there aren’t any glasses manufactured to the specifications of mead makers, but high quality wine glasses make for great presentation both aesthetically and organoleptically. The Riedel Vinum Bordeaux and the Spiegelau Vino Grande Burgundy glasses make great choices for the connoisseur looking for premium options.
Collectively, these are some of the best tricks to ensure that the mead you have created is as delicious on your palate as it was in your imagination. There’s nothing more instructive than experience, but as wonderful as it is to learn from your own mistakes, never pass up a chance to learn from the mistakes of others. It’s time to get at it.
Ken Schramm is the author of The Compleat Meadmaker and the owner of Schramm’s Mead in Ferndale, Mich. He is the recipient of the 2014 AHA Governing Committee Recognition Award.
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