Straightforward · 19.0 litres · Traditional mead
Traditional mead
Honey and water and nothing else, which makes the honey the whole wine and staged nutrient the whole technique. Get the nutrient wrong and you will spend two years waiting for it to become drinkable.
Starting sugar
20.9 Brix
4.32 kg of fermentable sugar
Original gravity
1.087
from the ingredients, not asserted
Finishing gravity
0.995
dry
Alcohol
12.1%
Brix alone predicts 11.5 to 12.5%
Residual sugar
0 g/L
approximate, from gravity
Ready after
6 months
best around 5 years
Made to Traditional mead, and every computed figure lands inside the published range for it.
ABV inTA inpH inRS inWhat decides this wine
Nitrogen, in stages. Honey has almost none, and an unfed mead produces hydrogen sulphide within days and then needs two years to become drinkable. Staggered nutrient additions and a temperature below 20C are what separate a good mead from the reputation mead has.
What goes in
| Ingredient | Weight | Sugar | Volume | Share of sugar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Honey Never boil it. Everything you paid extra for a varietal honey to get is volatile, and boiling removes all of it. | 5.40 kg | 4.32 kg | 3.78 L | 100% |
| Yeast nutrient In four doses, not one: at pitch, at 24 hours, at 48 hours and at a third sugar depletion. This is the single most important line in the recipe. | 30 g | - | - | 0% |
| Water, to volume | - | - | 15.20 L | - |
The ingredients contribute 3.8 litres and the water makes up the rest to 19 litres. Those figures are checked against each other when the site is built, because a recipe whose volumes do not add up produces a wine weaker or stronger than every number above.
Acid and sulphite
Acidity of the must
5.0 g/L
at pH 3.50
No malolactic
5.0 g/L
the acidity you measure is the acidity you keep
Tartaric to add
10 g
to reach 5.5 g/L. Bench trial before treating the batch
Sulphite at bottling
1.5 g
potassium metabisulphite, for 45 mg/L free SO2 at pH 3.55
The batch
- Must volume
- 19 L
- Ferment at
- 16-19 C
- Molecular SO2 target
- 0.8 mg/L
- Malolactic
- No
- Yeast
- D47 for meadto 15%, medium N
The sulphite figure is worked out against the pH of the finished wine, not of the must. Malolactic and deacidification both raise pH, and dosing a finished red to its must pH under-protects it by roughly a third. Recompute for your own reading.
Method
- 01Warm the honey gently to make it pour, and stir it into cool water until fully dissolved. Do not heat it further.
- 02Take a gravity reading and aerate the must thoroughly before pitching.
- 03Pitch D47 and hold it below 19C. Above 20C this strain makes fusel alcohol that takes a year to fade.
- 04Add nutrient in four doses over the first third of the fermentation, degassing each time.
- 05Rack at dryness, top up completely, and sulphite.
- 06Bulk age six months minimum. It changes more in the first year than any other wine here.
The two instruments this recipe needs
Every number on this page came from a hydrometer reading and a pH reading. Without those two you are following a recipe rather than making a wine, and the sulphite figure in particular is meaningless without a pH you have actually measured.
Measuring
Hydrometer and trial jar
SOLIGT Triple Scale Hydrometer and Glass Test Jar for Wine, Beer, Mead & Cider - ABV, Brix and Gravity Test Kit
$18.98
Tracks the ferment from must to dry. The gap between your starting and finishing gravity is the only reliable way to know the alcohol you actually made.
Measuring
pH meter
Apera Instruments AI1113 pH Calibration Buffer Solution Kit (7.00, 4.00), 8 oz. Each
$18.00
The most important instrument on this page. pH decides how much of your sulphite is actually protecting the wine, and dosing without knowing it is guesswork.