How is mead made?

Mead is another word for honey wine.. so of course mead contains honey. Honey by itself is too sweet to ferment, so it must be diluted. Here at Contrivance we gently heat our honey in a warming box, then dissolve it in filtered water. The amount of honey added determines how much alcohol you end up with. Wine yeast is added which will eat all the sugars in the honey and turn them to alcohol and CO2. Different yeasts have different characteristics as well as alcohol limits. It is possible to choose a yeast that will not be able to ferment all the honey, leaving some sweetness behind. The other option is to ferment it dry (no sweetness left) then “back sweeten” to get it to the desired sweetness level. This is done by adding honey after fermentation is completed. You also need some method to keep the newly added honey from fermenting again. There are a few options including potassium sorbate combined with potassium meta bisulfite (aka sulfites), filtration to remove all the yeast, pasteurization (heating it until the yeast dies), or using other chemical methods such as Velcorin (google it). We tend to use a combination of the sorbate/sulfite + filtration method, which is fairly reliable.

So in a nutshell, honey is dissolved in water, yeast is added, then nature does most of the work. Once the yeast is added the process is the same as other wines.