how we make our mead
Our style of mead is pretty unique compared to the other meads on the market. Not only is it classified as a session mead, we also source all of our ingredients hyper-locally. Learn about how we make our mead, and try to make your own using the recipe at the end!
MEAD IS MADE WITH HONEY
If you ever pick up a mead recipe, it sounds pretty simple. Mix some honey, yeast, and water, and let it ferment for awhile. Easy, right? Maybe at first glance, but the whole process ends up being a bit more complicated than just mixing those three things together and calling it a day.
Just like our colleagues in the brewing and wine industries, we also ferment our mead using yeast, which converts the sugars from the honey to produce the alcohol. We like to explain this to new mead drinkers as - Wine is made from grapes, beer is made from grain, and mead is made from honey.
But the categories of beer and wine can be quite expansive. When you think of the vast difference between a sweet Riesling to a dry wine with berry notes like a Malbec or even a bubbly champagne, you know that wines can be quite diverse. Same for beers- there are sour beers, malty beers, and hoppy IPAs, and everything in between.
So we fit into the mead world because we use fermented honey to produce our alcohol. We have played around with different yeasts, but right now we are preferring champagne and ale yeasts.
Our mead tastes more like a cider or seltzer than a sweet dessert mead, which is what is more commonly found at a commercial meadery. We make our meads light and refreshing, sitting around 6-8% ABV, and they are carbonated, which gives it a bubbly and full-bodied mouthfeel.
OUR FRUITS ARE LOCALLY SOURCED
Besides having a low ABV and carbonated mead, the other thing that makes us pretty distinct is that we are sourcing all of our honey and fruit locally.
We are using local Maryland honey, and are also working to add our own bee hives this upcoming spring so we can use some of our own honey in the near future.
We use fruits that are seasonally available as well. We source those fruits directly from our nearby farmers, most of which are within 20-30 minutes of us in Berlin. This year, we used peaches from Berlin and Frankford, Delaware, pears from Berlin, apples from Georgetown, DE, watermelon from Frankford, DE, blackberries from Whaleyville and Newark, Maryland.
Some of the fruits we do grow ourselves at our farm in Bishopville- we used our own strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and mulberries this year. Each year for the past five years, we add a few more fruit trees and bushes to the farm and they will start producing more in the coming years. But as we focus our efforts on producing and selling our mead, the farm is more of a hobby project than a full-time operation that can fully support our mead-making efforts. Plus, there are so many awesome farmers that grow things right around us, and we are so grateful for that!
MEAD MAKING
Once we have our ingredients, the most straight-forward part is that we mix them together. The honey and yeast get combined with water, and everything is stirred up together. We manage our batches fairly intensively for the first few days, which means we are checking fermentation, adding yeast nutrients, and keeping the temperature of the tanks consistent.
After a week or so, the alcohol is all produced by the yeast, so we rack it off and transfer to a new tank. In secondary fermentation, we allow the mead to rest for another 2-4 weeks at least.
Toward the end, we cold crash our mead, condition it with the real fruit juice that we add, and carbonate it. (Sometimes, we ferment the fruit juice in primary or secondary, but we like to add it toward the end to give as much fruit flavor as possible.) From there, we bottle it, and within a week, it’s ready to drink.
Other meads that are higher ABV can take many months, or even years, to age out. Because we make a session mead, we do have the ability to continually produce meads fairly quickly.
Since our mead is carbonated, we also get to put them into kegs and sell them on draft, which allows us to cut the costs of bottling everything. Plus, pouring mead off the side of the van is pretty awesome :)
HOMEBREWING TO COMMERCIAL
The recipe we are using now was refined over many years of homebrewing. We started that journey in Colorado when we lived in Fort Collins, which had 21 breweries in the town when we moved back in 2014. One of the notable breweries in town was New Belgium Brewing. It was a favorite habit of ours to take any friends who were visiting to take a tour of their brewery (see the photos below).
We started homebrewing beer, but then were introduced to mead during a homebrewing day by our friend Kyle. We described to him what we liked to drink, and he suggested we try a session mead and helped us formulate a recipe. Our first ever mead was an orange blossom honey mead. It was so dang good we ran through a whole keg in a week, just the two of us!
Since our introduction to mead, we’ve played around with all sorts of yeasts, honeys, and dry-sweet and still-carbonated variations. But, we always seemed to come back to our favorite style, the carbonated session mead.
After moving back home to Maryland, and then after teaching high school full time, we found ourselves still homebrewing our meads. Truthfully, the mead balances the stress of school, ha! We decided to take the leap and open up our meadery, because we just couldn’t find our preferred style of mead anywhere around us, so we wanted to make it ourselves. Fast forward to today, and we just keep on perfecting that recipe that we stumbled upon so many years ago.
YOUR TURN
If you’ve ever been curious about trying to homebrew your own mead, we wanted to share the same orange blossom honey mead recipe that we brewed for the first time.
ORANGE BLOSSOM HONEY SESSION MEAD RECIPE
Ingredients for 5 gallons:
5 pounds of Orange Blossom honey (get it from a real apiary, or somewhere that you know it’s real honey and not just processed corn syrup- quality matters)
4 gallons water
2 tsp (10 ml) yeast nutrient (Fermaid O/K or similar)
1 tsp (5 ml) yeast energizer
1 packet Yeast (Lalvin D-47 Champagne or 71B-1122 Dry Wine work well)
OG: 1.045-1.050
FG: 1.000
ABV: 6%
Combine the honey and water by adding water to a sanitized bucket and stirring in the honey until it is dissolved. Then transfer to a sanitized fermenter. Note the word ‘sanitized’- all things that touch the must (honey solution) should be thoroughly cleaned and then sanitized with a food grade sanitizer, like Star-San.
Pitch the yeast, add nutrient and energizer, and stir. Oxygenate thoroughly. Put an airlock on the stop of the fermenter to prevent contamination.
Hold the temperature at 65-68°F (20°C) for 1 week. You will likely need to add additional nutrients at day 2-3 and 4-5. If refrigeration is not available, place the fermenter in a cool spot with steady temperatures (such as a basement or closet).
When the airlock stops bubbling, that means fermentation is finished. Next, transfer to a second vessel for continued clarifying and conditioning. When the mead clears (about 2 more weeks), then it’s time to carbonate. Unless you have special equipment to do this in a keg, you may have to bottle condition it by adding about 6 oz of honey (1/2 cup) to the fermenter, stirring it as gently as possible to dissolve it, and then bottling your mead into individual bottles for 1-2 more weeks.
Once your mead is carbonated, it’s ready to enjoy! We always like to drink our meads chilled, so pop it into the fridge first. This mead will also age well.
Last step- if you try this recipe, please let us know! We would love to hear about it. Send us a message over social media, or an email at info@thebuzzmeadery.com