Simple Dry Mead Recipe

This dry mead recipe is one of the simplest, most pure mead recipes I have found, it’s ingredients being basically just honey and water. Because of this it is critical that the quality of both honey and water is top quality.

Dry Mead RecipeI suspect that the juice of a lemon would improve the flavour but the recipe is exactly as the 1951 original.

Ideally you want a strongly flavoured complex honey to add subtle overtones to the flavour. Some mead experts swear by using soft rainwater or spring water. Ordinary tap water will often have chlorine flavour which will taint the mead.

Modern water filters like the Brita system can make all the difference to this dry mead recipe’s final product.

Ingredients for Simple Dry Mead Recipe

  • 3½lb Honey
  • Water
  • Mead or wine yeast
  • Yeast nutrient

Method for Simple Dry Mead Recipe

  1. Start the yeast 2 days ahead. Take a sterilised jar and add a tablespoon of honey. Pour on a ¼ pint to ½ pint of boiling water and stir to mix. When cooled to 20°C or below, add the yeast and yeast nutrient. Keep covered but not airtight, a muslin cover affixed with a rubber band or string is ideal.
  2. Put the honey into a fermenting bin or lidded wine bucket and add 3 or 4 pints of boiled water which has been allowed to cool somewhat but is still hot and stir the honey until dissolved.
  3. Allow to cool to 20°C and then add the yeast starter.
  4. A fierce fermentation should begin quickly. After a few days to a week the rate will have slowed and  the must can be poured into a demijohn and topped up to the gallon with cooled boiled water prior to fitting the air-lock.
  5. Keep in a warm place until fermentation stops
  6. Move into a cool place and when ready to drink, rack off into bottles.

Mead improves with age and is best stored for at least a year prior to drinking. Some of the best meads mature for 7 years prior to drinking.

See Also How to Make Mead

Mead Recipes

Posted in Mead & Honey Wine Recipes
One comment on “Simple Dry Mead Recipe
  1. Jan Wakerley says:

    An old Victorian grandma I once knew, had lemon balm in her garden, and said it was for making mead. That would add the lemon flavour you felt would improve the ‘sweet’ and ‘dry’ recipes. As children I and her grandchildren once a year went with her to pick loads of cowslips, with which she made cowslip wine. I never sampled either though.

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