You do not need fruit, spices or oak to make mead. This is honey, water, yeast and nutrient and nothing else, which means the honey does all the work and whichever jar you bought is what you are going to taste. The simplest thing in this section and the one that hides the least.
My batch finished sweet and mild, making it a pleasant match for desserts. Your result may differ with the honey, yeast, and fermentation conditions.
Makes. 5 gallons
Vessel. Food-safe fermenter of about 6.5 gallons, with a lid or stopper and an airlockThe vessels hold about 6.5 gallons to the top and only ever get 5 gallons of brew, so there is an air gap above it. That gap is what stops a blowout.
Yeast. Champagne yeast — Lalvin EC-1118, one 5 g sachet. His own, and the same yeast as every other mead in this section: “always champagne yeast”. Lallemand's data sheet puts it at 20–40 g/hL, so a single 5 g sachet over 5 US gallons is about 26 g/hL and sits mid-range. Its stated range is 10–30 °C (50–86 °F) — wider than most wine strains at the cold end — with a short lag phase, a high fermentation rate, and a LOW relative nutritional requirement, which is the most likely reason the single early nutrient addition below has never given him trouble. Alcohol tolerance is up to 18% v/v. That is well above anything 15 lbs of honey in 5 gallons will reach, so read the sweetness note before assuming the yeast is what stops this. If you want a strain that runs out sooner, Lalvin ICV D47 is rated to 15% v/v and holds a narrower 15–28 °C.
Water. Drinking-quality water — spring water if you can get it, otherwise whatever you would drink. It does NOT mean five gallons of water. The honey is about a quarter of the batch by volume, so roughly 3¾ gallons of water is what brings 15 lbs of honey up to the 5 gallon line. Fill to a marked line on the fermenter rather than counting jugs; there is a note on this below.
Scaling. All of these scale down. A single gallon bottle of fresh apple juice with some of it swapped out for honey will get you a small batch, no special kit required.
Two different jobs and the order matters — sanitiser does not work through a film of last batch's sugar. Wash everything, then sanitise every surface the mead will touch, at the concentration and for the contact time printed on the sanitiser's own label. Fermenter, lid, airlock, spoon, hydrometer, sample cylinder, thermometer and the tubing you will rack with. None of the sanitiser goes into the must.
Put a few gallons of water in the fermenter first, then stir the honey in until nothing is sitting on the bottom — which takes longer than it looks, because honey sinks and stays there. If it will not pour, stand the CLOSED jars in warm water for a while; that softens it without cooking it. Do not boil honey. It drives off the aromatics that are the entire point of a mead with nothing else in it.
Top up with water until the honey-and-water mixture together reaches 5 gallons — the must, not the water. Leave the air gap above it. Then stir hard: an unmixed must gives a reading that is true of the top inch and nothing else, and a gravity taken through a layer of undissolved honey is worse than no reading at all.
Draw a sample into the cylinder, read it, take the temperature, and write both down before any yeast goes in. This is the only reading you cannot go back and retake, and every later one is compared against it. There is no expected number printed on this page: nobody recorded one for this batch, and a figure invented here would be indistinguishable later from one that was measured.
By the sheet for the product in your hand rather than by a rule of thumb. EC-1118 without a protector: rehydrate in ten times its weight of clean 35–40 °C water, stir gently, wait 20 minutes, then mix in a little must at a time until the slurry is within 5–10 °C of the must, and inoculate. Total rehydration should not exceed 45 minutes. With Go-Ferm Protect Evolution — which that same sheet recommends above 13% potential alcohol, and 15 lbs of honey is above it — follow the Go-Ferm sheet instead: 30 g/hL, about 5.7 g, into 43 °C water with the yeast going in at 37 °C.
Estimate About half an hour, and never more than the 45 minutes the sheet allows
Add the nutrient, suspended in ten times its weight of water or must. Ethan adds all of it here and nothing later; the sheet asks for a second dose at a quarter to a third of the way through, and doing that instead is the more cautious version of the same recipe. Fit the airlock. EC-1118 will take 10–30 °C, which is a wide window, but aim at the middle rather than the top — a hot honey ferment is where harsh, solventy notes come from, and this strain has a high fermentation rate that a warm room will make higher.
Estimate Several weeks is normal for a traditional mead, and slower than a beer or a cider. The hydrometer decides, not the estimate
Not when the airlock goes quiet and not when it turns clear — a mead can be brilliantly clear with sugar still in it. Take a reading, take another two or three days later, correct both for temperature, and compare. Equal readings mean it has stopped. What they do NOT tell you is why, and on this recipe that matters: EC-1118 is rated to 18% v/v and 15 lbs of honey in 5 gallons does not come close, so a batch sitting sweet has not run into the yeast's ceiling — it has stopped for some other reason, usually nutrition or temperature. Ethan's stopped sweet and was good, so this is not automatically a fault. It does mean a yeast with headroom is still alive in there, and a cupboard that warms up in July can restart it.
Estimate No estimate. This step is the measurement
Siphon the mead away from the sediment into a sanitised vessel it FILLS, keeping the tube against the side so it does not splash — oxygen is the problem from here on. Airlock on top, cool and dark. Rack again later if another real layer forms. Nothing about this is on a timetable: it happens when there is sediment to leave behind, and a young mead is almost always harsher than the same mead several months later.
Estimate Several months is normal and longer generally helps. This is not a deadline
Before anything goes into a bottle, repeat the two-readings test. Bottling a mead that has not finished makes bombs, and no number of days replaces the check — thirty days is not a criterion, it is a guess about somebody else's kitchen. If it has stopped sweet and you want to keep it that way, read the backsweetening note below: the stabilising step there is what makes a sweet bottle safe, and it is worth doing even when you are adding nothing. This is a still mead, so nothing is primed and nothing is carbonated.
Estimate No estimate. Repeat readings, or do not bottle
Bulk age under an airlock with as little headspace as you can manage, cool and dark, and bottle only once repeated gravity readings agree. Several months is normal for a traditional mead and a year is not unusual; the figure is an estimate about flavour and is never what makes it safe to bottle.
Fermentation produces carbon dioxide, and a sealed or blocked vessel is a pressure vessel — the Valentine's Brew blocked its own blow-off tube. These worked for the brewer, which is not the same as working with a different vessel, yeast and kitchen.
Manufacturer data sheets and published references, each one opened and read. The technical figures on this page come from them. The amounts of honey and fruit do not.
What this recipe depends on you getting right
15 lbs of honey does not guarantee a sweet mead
Ethan's batch finished sweet and the honey is high on purpose — his reasoning is that a plain mead has no fruit or spice to hide behind, so fermented too far down it is thin and hard going. That is a sound reason to build it this way and it is not a mechanism that forces the result. EC-1118 is rated to 18% v/v and 15 lbs of honey in 5 gallons is nowhere near that ceiling, so nothing about the yeast obliges it to stop while sugar is left; a well-fed ferment held warm can take it a long way down. Honey is not standard either — the USDA's own grading table for extracted honey spans several points of moisture, so the same 15 lbs is not the same sugar every time. If yours finishes drier than you wanted, the reliable answer is to stabilise and backsweeten, which is the note below. Hoping it stalls is not a plan, and bottling one that stalled without stabilising is how you find out it had not.
“Finished” is a hydrometer reading, not a quiet airlock
An airlock goes quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with sugar — a lid that is not seated, a cold night, a cap of fruit lying over the surface — and a mead can be brilliantly clear with sugar still in it. Clarity is not a measurement either. The hydrometer is the only thing that answers the question. The American Homebrewers Association's rule is a reading, then another, and if they are the same the ferment is done; on a mead, which works slowly, leave two or three days between them rather than one, and correct for temperature before comparing. A reading that has stopped moving is still not automatically a finish, because a stall looks the same on the scale — it sits well above where the yeast should have landed and stays there. Telling them apart means knowing roughly where your yeast can get to, which is the alcohol tolerance on its data sheet and is repeated in the yeast line further up this page. A must built past that tolerance is EXPECTED to stop short, and that is a ceiling rather than a fault. A must built well under it that stops anyway is the one to worry about.
Every time on this page is an estimate
None of the durations here is a schedule and no date decides anything. How long a mead takes moves with temperature, pitch rate, nutrient and how much fruit is sitting in the vessel, and two people following this to the letter will not finish in the same month. What ends a step is the condition described in it. What allows bottling is repeated stable gravity readings — never the calendar, never clarity, and never a silent airlock.
“5 gallons” is the finished must, not five gallons of water
This is the single easiest thing to get wrong here, and it changes the drink. Five gallons is the volume of the MUST — honey and water together, measured after both are in. The honey is not a spoonful on top of that: it is about a quarter of the batch by volume. Honey runs near 1.4 times the weight of water for the same volume, so 15 lbs of it takes up roughly 1¼ gallons, which leaves roughly 3¾ gallons of water rather than five. Treat that as arithmetic and not as a measurement — the USDA's own grading table for extracted honey runs from about 13.7% to over 18% moisture, and a wetter honey is a lighter one that takes up more room per pound. Fill to a marked line on the fermenter, not to a number on a jug. And expect to bottle less than 5 gallons whatever you do: each racking leaves a little behind on the lees, and every hydrometer sample is a cup that does not come back.
Fermaid O and Fermaid K are different products with different schedules
Both are yeast nutrients and neither one follows the other's dosing. Lallemand's sheet for Fermaid O gives 2 × 20 g/hL — 20 g/hL at the start of alcoholic fermentation and 20 g/hL at a quarter to a third of the way through — which is about 3.8 g per addition in 5 gallons, 7.6 g in total. Fermaid K is 25 to 50 g/hL with a stated maximum of 50 g/hL, split at the end of the lag phase and again at one-third sugar depletion: about 4.7 g to 9.5 g in total for 5 gallons. Either one is suspended in ten times its weight of water or must before it goes in. Fermaid K's sheet addresses honey by name, and what it recommends for a poor fermentation medium is heavier than its general rate — 4 lbs per 1000 gallons of Fermaid K with 2 lbs per 1000 gallons of yeast hulls and 6 lbs per 1000 gallons of DAP, fed incrementally from pitching onward, which is about 9.1 g, 4.5 g and 13.6 g in a 5 gallon batch. Mead-specific feeding protocols circulated in the hobby go higher still, on the argument that honey carries almost no assimilable nitrogen of its own; that is a deliberate departure from the label rather than the label, and the figures here are the manufacturer's. Pick one product and follow that product's own sheet.
Backsweetening: stabilise first, and sorbate alone will not do it
If it finishes drier than you want, the honey does not simply go into the bottle. Virginia Tech's enology extension is blunt about what potassium sorbate is: it “does not kill yeasts but, if properly employed, inhibits their growth”. It cannot stop a fermentation that is still running, which means it is only meaningful once repeated hydrometer readings say the ferment is genuinely over — the two halves of this page people most often skip are the same half. It also does not work alone: lactic acid bacteria growing in the presence of sorbic acid produce 2-ethoxyhexa-3,5-diene, the “geranium” taint, and that source puts the free sulphur dioxide needed at bottling to prevent it at approximately 30 mg/L. The rate given is 150 to 300 mg/L of sorbic acid, and potassium sorbate weighs 1.34 times the sorbic acid level being aimed at — 201 to 402 mg/L, or roughly 3.8 g to 7.6 g in 5 gallons. How far up that range you need to go moves with pH, alcohol and free SO2, and the same source advises against sorbate altogether in anything intended for long aging. Stabilise, wait, then sweeten a measured sample and taste it before treating the batch.