Mead Basics

Mead. Honey wine. It's delicious, it's interesting, and it gets you the kind of drunk that makes people fight frost giants. And you can make it at home, for cheap, with only minor effort. Here's how!

Joe's Ancient Orange Mead (JOAM)
Joe's Ancient Orange is the premiere starter recipe for meadmaking--or, if you prefer, mazing--at home. It's easy, it's low maintenance, and it's delicious. Here's what you need: No, really, that's it. Now, you can find the jug and the cork and airlock at any brew store or online, and those are ideal bits to work with. A standard gallon carboy, a drilled stopper to fit, and an S airlock will do you just fine. Barring that, you can even go plastic jug (best if not a milk jug) and a balloon with a pinhole pricked in, if you want to go full on hobo style. As for yeast, your local or online brew store will probably have Lalvin's D-47 strain, which is the modern workhorse yeast for mead, but bread yeast works fine, too. As for a sanitizer, again, brew stores will have the best option--StarSan, the best thing ever--but you can use bleach, food safe iodine, or a slew of others and do just fine. Keep it easy.
 * 1 gallon jug
 * An airlock and cork or a balloon
 * A sanitizing agent
 * 1 packet of dry yeast
 * 3 lbs of honey
 * Decent water (spring water from the store is fine)
 * An orange
 * Some cinnamon
 * A clove
 * A kid's box of raisins

If you're sanitizing with bleach, the rule of thumb is 1 teaspoon per gallon of water, and then rinse until no bleach smell remains. With anything you get at the brew store, just follow the label. StarSan, in particular, will have foam. Don't worry about the foam--it's yeast food!

Step 1: SANITIZE EVERYTHING
Breaking Bad teaches a good lesson: First, you clean. Sanitize your jug. Sanitize your stopper and airlock (or balloon, but from here out we'll assume you got decent gear). Sanitize any tool or utensil you'll be working with that will touch things going into the jug--knives, funnels, spoons, whatever you've got. Germs are bad. Germs want to eat your mead and shit in it, then laugh while you drink their shit. Seriously. Don't let them.

Me, I like to keep a sink full of sanitizer solution and just toss stuff in it. It's super helpful.

Step 2: Wake the fungus
Yeast is a friend to man, and unlike your useless dog, it gives you booze. Yeast in a dry packet is dormant, dreaming dreams of sugar to eat and booze to fart out and maybe of retiring into a nice bread someday. Wake it nicely. Gently, even. Get a half cup of warm (90ish degrees F) water, and pour your dry yeast in. Plop a raisin in there, as well, to give them something to munch on as they wake. Swirl, but don't stir, the cup you're using to get all the dry bits moist and live. It'll look like beige cream with bubbles. Set it aside for now.

Step 3: Put stuff in the jug
Pour your honey into the sanitized jug. You might want to use a sanitized funnel for this, you might not. Up to you. A lot of folks find it helps to warm the honey up a bit, either with a quick nuke (30 seconds or so), or by leaving the container in a sink of hot water. It loosens the honey up to flow nicely, but it's not completely necessary. Any honey still in the container should be reclaimed by adding water and shaking vigorously. Remember, honey's expensive, and waste is bad.

Now you want to add your raisins, your spices, and your orange. You'll want to chop that orange up so it's small enough to fit through the mouth of your jug. Remember, eventually you'll have to get it back out to clean.

Now you want to add your water so the jug is a little less than two-thirds full and cap it. Now shake it. Shake it hard enough to fully mix the honey and water and get a lot of bubbles and froth in there. Then keep shaking. Shake for a full play of Harry Belafonte's Shake Senora. You want to get a lot of oxygen diffused in that honey water (professionally, it's called "must") so the yeast can breath while it multiplies and gets to work making you booze.

Once it's fully shaken, pour in your creamy yeast water, top the jug off (leave a good two inches of space at the top--there will be foaming), fill your airlock with a strong liquor (Everclear's perfect, but cheap whiskey or rotgut tequila wil do--just need enough alcohol to make sure bacteria can't get through your airlock), and stow your jug in a closet. Yeast, like Gollum, prefers dark places. Maybe throw an old t-shirt on your jug.

Step 4: Wait, shake, wait some more
Visit your jug. Do it once per day for the first week or two, and maybe every couple of days thereafter. You've got a month to wait until any real work comes, but this being your first batch you will probably visit it obsessively for a while. Good. You should see the booze in the airlock bubbling away like mad (or your balloon full and emitting a bready smell from the pinprick). Make sure the airlock isn't full of orange guts, hasn't blown off entirely (it happens), and is still full. If there's a problem like that, just resanitize it and replace it. Those are good problems to have, because they mean your yeast is actively fermenting and putting out CO2. No worries. If the mead is way too high in the jug, it means you need to jiggle the jug a bit to vent extra gas out of the solution.

Don't open the jug if you don't have to. Don't expose the jug to too much light, or let the temperature get too hot or too cold. Just let it chill in your closet and do its thing for a month.

Step 5: The rackening
After a month, you'll see a big pile of gross at the bottom of your jug. That's dead yeast, and you want to get your mead off of that. You have options. One, you can just leave it, hope the orange is strong enough to cover the taste of dead yeast, and chill out. Two, you can get a racking cane from a brew store or online retailer and follow the instructions to siphon the mead off of the dead yeast into a new jug. Three, you can set up a system involving a funnel, a coffee filter, and another jug to mechanically filter out the yeast. Now, of all three, the second is the best option, as the first is straight hood and the third is really, really time consuming and exposes your mead to a LOT of open air, but do what you need to do. A quick search will show you more ways to go about racking than there are people racking, so just figure out what method you like.

After your first racking, you can wait another month, bottle the mead, and wait another month to drink it. Or, you can age it out for a year or more, let the tastes develop, racking again when another cake of yeast has settled out, and eventually tell your friends that '13 was a good year. You can add more spices, you can add oak chips to simulate a barrel, or you can run the finished product through a still because you like expensive moonshine. Whatever you want. But whatever you do, give it at least three months ferment. One for primary, another for secondary, and a third for either more secondary or bottle conditioning. You can drink it earlier, but it's not a good idea--it'll taste like ass and give you the runs, generally.

And that's it! You've survived a batch of JAOM. Now go find new recipes to try, or make another batch of this, or even get funky with different variations with specific kinds of citrus fruit, varietal honeys, or different spices. Get weird with it! Good things happen!