For your first mead, we will walk you through a basic traditional mead recipe, then give you a fully written example recipe for you to create at home.

Feel free to use this as a template for your own recipes. We highly suggest having a written recipe before you start doing anything. It really helps avoid a lot of issues!

Must Preparation

A must is a term used in mead-making to describe the unfermented mixture of ingredients. The first thing we need to do is create our must. You can do this with the following steps:

Sanitize everything.

Add honey and yeast nutrients to your vessel.

Add water equal to half the volume of the total recipe to your vessel.

For example, a 5L recipe would require 2.5L of water.

Mix the ingredients together until they are fully combined.

For buckets, a stainless steel spoon works best. For small carboys use a swirling motion. For large carboys use a drill-powered stirrer.

Add more water to reach just below your total recipe volume.

Leave some space for our yeast mixture, which will be prepared later.

Add your airlock to your vessel while you prepare your yeast.

We cover yeast preparation in the next lesson.