Traditional mead
Honey and water, and nothing else. Everything interesting comes from the honey, so a varietal honey is worth the money in a way it is not in a melomel.
The numbers
Each bar drawn against all 30 styles
Alcohol
10-14%
10% - 14%
Titratable acidity
4-7 g/L
4 - 7
pH
3.2-3.8
3.2 - 3.8
Residual sugar
0-40 g/L
0 - 40
Serve at
10-14 C
Worth opening after
6 months
and it keeps improving to roughly 5 years
Sulphite at pH 3.50
40 mg/L
free SO2, for 0.8 mg/L molecular
What goes wrong
Nitrogen. Honey has almost none, and an unfed mead makes hydrogen sulphide and then takes two years to become drinkable. Staged nutrient is the whole technique.
No legal definition sets these figures. They are typical published analyses of commercial examples, compiled as a planning aid.
Make it
A recipe on this site made to this style
Every figure below is computed from the ingredients and checked against the ranges above before the page is built.