Unlike beer, mead skips the boiling stage and goes directly to fermentation. And while this part of the process is also true for wine, the composition of this honeyed drink is completely different. Instead of strictly using grapes, mead production involves combining honey with water, along with optional spices.
But instead of using the ale yeast strains commonly utilized in brewing, mead integrates a variety of the same yeasts used for champagne and wine production. And like wine, mead is also left to age comparatively longer than beer — an average of 2 to 3 years. Another difference between beer, wine, and mead is alcohol content. First, the grains are heated, dried, and cracked. Then, the processed grains are soaked in hot water to activate the enzymes in the barley and to bring out the sugars.
This is known as mashing. After the grains are fully soaked, the water is drained out. This water is known as wort and is essentially raw beer packed with sugar. Next, the wort is boiled and other ingredients such as hops, flavors, and spices are poured in. Hops are cone-like fruit from the vine plant. They balance the sweetness of malt and give beer its distinctive bitter taste.
The wort is left to cool after which it is filtered then fermented by adding a specific type of yeast to the liquid. The mixture is fermented for a few days or weeks before it is bottled ready to be distributed to the market. Beers that are fermented at warm temperatures are known as ales while those that are fermented at much cooler temperatures are what we commonly know as lagers. The main ingredients here are just water, honey, and yeast.
The mead-making process starts with thinning the honey with water to make it easier for the yeast to break down the sugars into alcohol.
But generally, most skip this stage because they believe it takes away from the potency of honey. After the dilution phase, it is common to throw in fruit and fruit juices and vegetables too to give the must a customized taste.
The next step is fermentation where yeast, oxygen, and extra nutrients are added to the must. After fermentation , the mead is left to age for a couple of months or several years before it goes to the market. Mead and beer are made from the fermentation of sugar. But this is as far as their similarities go.
These two types of drinks are made from vastly different ingredients. While mead is made from a simple mixture of water and honey, and of course addition of yeast, beer requires not just water but also grain and balancing hops.
Mead and beer come in different types and categories. While wine is classified by grape type and beer by style, mead is classified by the ingredients in it and the alcohol content.
Mead rose alongside craft beer in the United States, but then became its own niche when people realized how unique and delicious it was as an alcoholic option. Any fruit or spice additions get tossed in after dilution but before fermentation starts.
They instead count on those antibacterial properties to take care of any potential spoilage. A few different factors determine how sweet or dry and how low or high in alcohol a mead is: how diluted the honey is, what kind of yeast is used, and the fermentation temperature. Once fermentation happens, mead ages anywhere from a few months to a few years before hitting the market.
Meads can be super sweet, super dry, or anywhere in between. A good place to start is picking a mead flavored with a fruit or spice you know you like. If a mead is flavored with blueberries and you know you like blueberries, you can expect to taste blueberries as well as some degree of honey in that mead—and you can probably expect to like it. Look around you! Rowe says just about every state has its own meaderies now. Kitchen Tips and Tools. Delish Shop. United States.
Type keyword s to search. All three beverages are based on the same principles: that yeast, when given access to a sugar source, will ferment the water or juice to create an alcoholic beverage. As Ken Schramm a mead expert and author of The Compleat Meadmaker writes, the Scots also perfected whisky-making around this time period, making mead one of the lesser-known beverages in Western countries by the time the s came around.
For various reasons, including availability and traditions, other countries still drink mead or mead-like beverages more commonly than North America and western European countries have until the last decade or two.
Mead is coming back The resurgence of mead began in earnest in , when Pamela Spence founded the American Mead Association. By , 70 meaderies existed in the US alone, and at this time, over meaderies are listed on the American Mead Makers Association website in the US alone, with over 40 meaderies internationally, including us at Sunset Heights Meadery.
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