Best Mead Recipes

Am searching for a few of the best mead recipes including ones that are simple to make and have an excellent result. I have never made mead but would love to make some just to see how well I can make it. It is pretty much the same idea I have about making beer. I just want to see how successful I can be at making something I can buy at the store. I certainly would appreciate any help with this.

There's a thread on this site about Joe's Ancient Orange Mead. His method is super simple, and produces a very drinkable product. I use this recipe almost exactly. My only change to it was the type of yeast. I generally use a premier cuvee or ec-1188. With these yeasts your mead will almost certainly ferment to absolute dry. But in my case, that's what I want. I generally shoot for 14-16% ABV, and backsweeten slightly before bottling.


CHEERS!

cryptofix said:

Am searching for a few of the best mead recipes including ones that are simple to make and have an excellent result. ... I certainly would appreciate any help with this.

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Help quantify things a little. Dry or semi sweet or sweet Mead?

Meads are very basically honey and water, but you can use other things in them like spices, replace water with juices (apple and grape are common), fruit additions, etc.

So what do you like?

ACbrewer said:

Help quantify things a little. Dry or semi sweet or sweet Mead?

Meads are very basically honey and water, but you can use other things in them like spices, replace water with juices (apple and grape are common), fruit additions, etc.

So what do you like?

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I would want a semi-sweet mead. I have not thought of other additives yet although that is a great idea. Please give me some recipes with additives for spices and fruit that are popular and not too difficult to make.

Here was my favorite spiced mead recipe given to me by a friend. This recipe never made it to bottles, I just tapped from secondary and drank that because it was that good lol.

1 gallon Spiced Chai Mead
3 lb of Honey
10 bags of Earl Grey Black Tea
1 ½ tsp ground Cardamom
½ tsp of Whole black Peppercorns
2 whole cloves
2 sticks of Cinnamon
1 Madagascar Vanilla Bean (Slit in half, seeds scraped, added to the must and the whole pod thrown in)
3tbs of Ground Ginger
1tsp of yeast nutrients
½ tsp of yeast energizer
1tsp of Acid Blend
Water to one gallon
Yeast “Lalvin D47” (Make sure to keep fermentation temps bellow 68*F and let sit on the lees for at least 30 days after fermentation stops. If you cant keep temps that low then use the folowing)
Yeast "Lalvin 71b" ( Make sure to rack off the lees once 1/4 in. has formed and rack as often as need to keep off the lees.)

Mix the Honey water & nutrients all together leaving enough head space to add your yeast starter as explained below. The energizer will be added when 1/3 of the fermentation is done. Add the entire spices/tea/vanilla bean to a nylon bag and place in the must. The powered ingredients can be added directly to the must. Then create a yeast starter:

1 cup water
¼ cup of honey
¼ tsp of yeast nutrients
5 chopped up fine raisins

Sprinkle the Yeast on top and cover with a paper towel for 8 hours. Then pitch the yeast starter into the must. There should be a lot of activity in the starter after 1 – 2 hours. For larger batches of this recipe “3 or more gallons”, Increase the water to 2 cups, Honey to ½ cup & 10 raisins.

In addition to the JAOM mentioned above, I can vouch for Joe's Quick Grape Mead. Super freakin' tasty. Just go to the recipes section and see what recipes got the most traffic--they're bound to be good.

Well www.gotmead.com has some recipes at it.

I personally have made 2 5 gallon batches using 'standard practices' - ie 12lb/1gallon of wild flower or clove. 4 gallons of water, yeast nutrient - I think it was like 1.5 tablespoon energizer and 1.5 tablespoon of nuetrient. I used the 'sweet mead yeast' both times (it is a B*** on starting, but works ok). In both cases I finished dry (about 2.4 lb of honey finishes dry becasue even sweet mead yeast goes 11 to 12%).

One of the 2 is still sitting in the 5 gal carboy, the other after about 3 months I split into 4 1 gallon batches and the rest was bottled. The 1 gallon batches were blueberry, chocolate, orange and all spice, and cinnomon, nutmeg+clove. Orange and all spice is good, but still a little dry (I'd back sweetend and stablized all fof these) and the cinnomon, nutmeg and clove is very good.. .tastes like christmas!

my og's were around 1.080 -1.085. and FG's were about .990 - .995 All of my meads still taste at least a little 'hot'...

Arpolis said:

Here was my favorite spiced mead recipe given to me by a friend. This recipe never made it to bottles, I just tapped from secondary and drank that because it was that good lol.

1 gallon Spiced Chai Mead
3 lb of Honey
10 bags of Earl Grey Black Tea
1 ½ tsp ground Cardamom
½ tsp of Whole black Peppercorns
2 whole cloves
2 sticks of Cinnamon
1 Madagascar Vanilla Bean (Slit in half, seeds scraped, added to the must and the whole pod thrown in)
3tbs of Ground Ginger
1tsp of yeast nutrients
½ tsp of yeast energizer
1tsp of Acid Blend
Water to one gallon
Yeast “Lalvin D47” (Make sure to keep fermentation temps bellow 68*F and let sit on the lees for at least 30 days after fermentation stops. If you cant keep temps that low then use the folowing)
Yeast "Lalvin 71b" ( Make sure to rack off the lees once 1/4 in. has formed and rack as often as need to keep off the lees.)

Mix the Honey water & nutrients all together leaving enough head space to add your yeast starter as explained below. The energizer will be added when 1/3 of the fermentation is done. Add the entire spices/tea/vanilla bean to a nylon bag and place in the must. The powered ingredients can be added directly to the must. Then create a yeast starter:

1 cup water
¼ cup of honey
¼ tsp of yeast nutrients
5 chopped up fine raisins

Sprinkle the Yeast on top and cover with a paper towel for 8 hours. Then pitch the yeast starter into the must. There should be a lot of activity in the starter after 1 – 2 hours. For larger batches of this recipe “3 or more gallons”, Increase the water to 2 cups, Honey to ½ cup & 10 raisins.

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couple questions about this one:

1. Why scrape the seeds out of the vanilla bean?

2. According to http://www.foodsubs.com/SpiceUniv.html 1 cardamom pod = 1/6 tsp ground. Therefore for a 3 gal batch I'd use about 27 pods. This seems heavy on the cardamom

3. How long do you leave the spices & tea in? Til you rack to secondary?

I forget where now but the conversion of whole cardamom to powdered was much different then what you described. But i will say that the cardamom is not overpowering in that powdered amount. i think it was something close to two whole cardamom per gallon. Scraping the seeds out of the vanilla bean just helps to get the flavor leached out. a lot of the flavor is in those tiny seeds. i just left everything in primary and racked off the spices once i went to secondary. The original recipe I posted is actually in a book called True Brews by Emma Christensen. At the time I posted this that book was not published yet and she had me testing her recipe out and sending her notes so she could fine tune what goes into the book. I highly suggest checking out the book. It is a good read.

Seeds get scraped out because small particles transfer flavor better than large particles due to the ratio of surface area to volume. Same reason a large block of salt will dissolve much slower than the same weight of salt grains.