Brewing Hydromel Meads

When you say “mead,” it conjures images of Vikings — bloodthirsty, beards dripping with foam, fit for Valhalla. The word itself feels like it should be shouted — “MEAD!” — because of its strength. But there’s nothing special about mead that requires noxious amounts of alcohol. It’s not a law — beyond the peer pressure of the dead — that says mead must be 13, 15, or even higher in percent alcohol. It is nice to have a special project that will last ages and ages, but we should also embrace the gentler side of mead.

For everyday drinking, it’s hard not to desire a sessionable version of the glory that is honey wine. Enter the hydromel — literally “water honey.” Not only do they fit a healthier modern lifestyle, they are cheaper to make (magical words to every cost-conscious brewer) and they’re ready faster to boot. Both factors free you to fearlessly experiment without fretting over long commitments, wasted ingredients, and paint thinner in your glass.

Hydro-What?

Let’s start with a working definition. In a world of “sack” mead — the aforementioned 15+ percent ABV heavyweight class, hydromel feels positively strawweight with typical alcohol levels falling in the 3–6% ABV range. Since the name combines Greek roots for water and honey, it’s appropriate that we’re looking at way, way more water than honey.

The Challenges of Brewing Hydromel Meads

But it’s not all rainbows and unicorns with a hydromel. Part of why the heavy meads are so popular is that they pack a ton of flavor in your glass because of all the honey used. As long as you properly ferment a big mead, you’ll generally end up with a flavorful drink. Hydromel, thanks to its lesser nature, dares you to make a beverage that isn’t thin, sharp, and dull like a “two-cents plain.” 

And if you want to feature honey character? You’re doubly doomed. You’re starting with a much smaller amount of aromatics just waiting to get airlocked by the violence of fermentation. There are ways around this, as we’ll discuss, but sometimes challenges can obscure benefits!

The Benefits

Right there in the description, you know that hydromel uses less honey. But how much? My general rule of thumb for regular mead (12+%) starts at 2.5 pounds of honey per gallon of mead (300 g/L) going up to 3.8 pounds per gallon (450 g/L) for a big, sweet, showcase mead. 

A hydromel, by contrast, runs 1–1.5 lbs. per gallon (120–180 g/L). In other words, a batch of hydromel is half the cost of a regular-strength mead! With honey costing $5 per pound for the typical stuff, that’s a radical savings.

Now a challenge becomes a benefit — a hydromel’s softer honey character allows you to mix up the flavor with any number of additions. You’re not fighting flowers and sugars so a less assertive fruit (think strawberries) has a chance to shine. If you have got something unique — it gets the spotlight to itself. 

Additionally, thanks to the low gravity, hydromels — when given proper nutrition and yeast — ferment fast. It’s completely plausible to go from yeast pitch to keg in two weeks. Compare that to multiple months (or years) for
a “full-sized” mead, and you realize mead doesn’t have to tie up a fermenter for ages. 

We spend a fair amount of time in this column reminding you that small-batch brewing is a great thing to do. If you’ve been trapped by your muscle memory mechanics and never successfully gotten small, this is your perfect opportunity to grab a 1-gallon (3.8-L) jug. You may find the “mix it and forget it” methodology of meadmaking more amenable to learning a smaller brew process. You don’t need to worry about mash ratios, losses to the grain bed, minimum volumes needed for efficient operations, etc. Just get the right amount of honey and the right amount of water and stir! 

One last benefit — because they’re honey-based, a hydromel feels like a more sophisticated seltzer. It’s downright classy enough for the Catalina Wine Mixer. 

How To Brew Hydromel Meads

One of the greatest challenges in beer writing is to simplify your instructions to feel less intimidating to a new brewer. Meadmaking is so, so much easier and we’re describing the “more complicated” version of it. 

The trickiest part of making any mead is calculating the water volume needed, and that’s easy when you remember that 1 quart of honey is 3 lbs. by weight. For a 5-gallon hydromel with 5 lbs. of honey, that’s roughly 1.67 quarts by volume of honey, with water making up the remaining 17.33 quarts. (For metric users out there, 1 L of honey is ~1.45 kg. For a 19-L batch with 2.3 kg of honey, that’s 1.6 L of honey.)

The Instructions (Partial Heat Method)

Clean and sanitize your fermenter. Chill 80% of your water volume in the fridge.

Heat the remaining 20% of the water to ~160 °F (71 °C) (it doesn’t need to be precise). 

Turn off the heat, add the honey, and stir to dissolve completely.

Add the chilled water to the fermenter and stir in the “honey syrup.”

Pitch yeast and yeast nutrients as calculated with a tool like the TOSNA (Tailored Organic Staggered Nutrient Additions) calculator.

Example: For a 5 lb./5-gallon (2.3 kg/19L) hydromel, we’d need four 1.6-g additions of Fermaid O nutrient. They’re added at 24, 48, 72 hours after pitch. The last portion goes in when the mead is a third of the way through the sugar or day 7 if things aren’t there yet.

Ferment until complete at 60–70 °F (15–21 °C). Usually 1–2 weeks.

Flavor and package the mead when ready.

Many meadmakers prefer to use a “no heat” method to maximize the preservation of honey character. Instead of messing around with hot water, cold water, and honey syrup, just mix your water and honey together. A powered mixer is highly encouraged for this version as getting honey dissolved in cold liquid is more of a challenge. Break out your favorite food-grade drill attachment!

Either of these methods is far superior to the old-
fashioned “boil the honey to remove the comb and bee parts!” process.

Formulating A Recipe

When creating a hydromel recipe, the two primary questions you need to answer before brew day are: “How strong” and “will it be flavored?”

When thinking strength, remember that 0.8 lb. of honey per gallon (95 g/L) will yield a 4% ABV mead; 1 lb. per gallon (120 g/L) gets you 5%; and 1.25 lbs. per gallon (150 g/L) nets ~6.5%. All of that assumes a fully dry ferment. And remember that other sugar additions — fruit, sugars, etc. — may add extra booze if allowed to ferment.

Deciding the question on flavoring the hydromel will impact the honey that you choose. After all, if you’re going to be flavor blasting the mead, there’s no reason to reach for exotic and expensive honey varieties. Stick to the standard wildflower honey. It’s OK to use inexpensive honey — not everything is better because you spent more! (And if you do use an expensive honey, prepare to do some magic because hydromel’s thin nature makes it hard to hit the senses without a heavy honey hand.)

Comprising 90% of the must, water needs to be clean and clear of chlorine and chloramine. Otherwise, our recommendation is to use a relatively low mineral water — don’t go using IPA or stout mineralization charts! 

Lastly, the subject of yeast. There are a ton of wine and mead yeasts — dry and liquid — available on the market. Truth be told, Drew probably uses dry ale yeast or yeast slurry more often than not and is not terribly picky about a specific strain. A word of caution though, don’t expect a beer strain to produce the same aromatic characters you’d get from a wort fermentation. A mead must is nutritionally different and the yeast can act in unexpected ways.

Adding Flavor

Let’s begin by focusing our flavor additions on restoring the honey aroma and flavor. The most direct solution is to add a dose of honey after fermentation has concluded. You must first stabilize the finished mead by adding metabisulfite and potassium sorbate to prevent fermentation from restarting. Check your manufacturer’s instructions for specific dosing instructions and pH needs (sulfite’s effectiveness is radically impacted by pH). Do this a day ahead of flavoring.

All that’s left to do is blend a small dose of honey (it won’t take much; ~2 oz. per gallon or 15 g/L is a good start) and serve. This also works well with other sugar types — think dark muscovado or piloncillo sugars to bring rummy vibes to the table. To make the additions easy, Drew dilutes the honey with some mead, adds the syrup to a keg or bottling bucket, and then racks the mead in on top. 

It should be noted that stabilizing the mead to prevent a second fermentation also means you can’t carbonate the mead by priming. After all, the yeast won’t be able to ferment and produce CO₂. If you want carbonation in a stabilized liquid, you’ll have to force carbonate, which is a wonderful idea for these easy-drinking meads.

Now, onto the flavor blasting. Without any adjustments to the final character, a hydromel is a fairly simple beverage. The sugar disappears during fermentation leaving behind a watery, vaguely honeyed drink that is ripe for flavor additions of all sorts. 

Since you’re probably a brewer reading this and we’re making a “beer-strength” mead, hops should have been at the top of your flavor list. Dry hop the finished mead with 0.25–0.5 oz./gallon (2–4 g/L) for 2–3 days and then package. You can also create a hop tea to use as your water addition (see Danny’s Blueberry Lemon Hydromel recipe below).

Spice and herb tinctures and tisanes (aka alcohol extracts and teas) make quick sensation hits a breeze. Classics like vanilla extract and cinnamon can bring the dessert vibes. Citrus extracts signal summertime refreshment. Bold flavors like ginger, Sichuan peppercorns or chiles can shake your palate awake. Even wood cubes, spirals, and staves have a place to impart that Bourbon cocktail feel.  As always, use extracts to taste and follow a standard tasting panel that we’ve covered in previous columns to determine how much flavoring to add to your full batch. Keep a light hand! A little flavor goes a long way. 

The natural place to go is into the fruit realm and use the fruit to bump up the sweetness you’d expect from honey. The amount of fruit added will obviously depend on the fruit, form factor, and infusion time. In addition to the bevy of fresh fruit, frozen fruit, and aseptic fruit purees available to homebrewers, here’s a fun tip from Mary Izett’s Speed Brewing— freeze-dried fruit. She takes packages of freeze-dried fruit (Trader Joe’s sells 1.2-oz./34-g bags of cherries, raspberries, and strawberries amongst others) and blitzes them into a powder to stir into the mead. They deliver a stunning amount of flavor with relative ease and low cost.

With all these flavors, we recommend adding them to finished mead. If the flavors have sugars in them, you should stabilize them (as described earlier) before adding the sweetened flavor. Give the mead a few days to infuse and settle out any solids before packaging.

And don’t think of these flavors as single notes played in isolation. Music is more powerful with chords, and so are flavors. You can get crazy and make a tropical bomb hydromel with a dose of pineapple puree, an El Dorado® dry hop, and a little jalapeño heat. If the flavors and aroma make sense from a culinary point of view, you can probably make them work in a mead. Maybe skip the hydromel with Brussels sprouts and balsamic glaze.

On The Balance

A beautiful hydromel hits a balanced note of invigorating sharpness with just enough body to keep things interesting. Sometimes we need a bit of chemical help to perch our mead on that pinhead of perfection. 

Given that hydromel ferments tend to run sharp — think the acidic punch of a Granny Smith apple with none of the sugar — you usually won’t need to worry about adding acid. In the odd case of a flabby and dull hydromel, grab a powdered acid from your homebrew supplier. Typical examples include citric, malic, tartaric, or a “mead acid blend.” A small pinch (less than a gram per gallon/3.8 L) will quickly add sharpness to your mead, so restraint continues as the order of the day.

If the hydromel feels too thin and sharp, you have two levers to pull — tannin and sugar. Tannins are polyphenolic molecules that we perceive as both astringent (boo) but also as a fuller mouthfeel (yeah!). Start with 0.5 gram of tannin per gallon (3.8 L). Mix it in, taste, and adjust. You want that mouthfeel perception, but (mostly) want to avoid noticeable astringency.

Honey and other sugars are your other sharpness antidote. Follow the instructions from earlier about adding honey and stabilizing to preserve the sweetness. Another solution we haven’t covered yet is the use of artificial sweeteners. Drew avoids using them because of concerns about how they change as they age and the bulking agents like dextrose and maltodextrin they’re typically packaged with. If you use them, remember they are incredibly sweet, even in small quantities.

As always, with any of these additions, these are guidelines and it’s always best to do a bench trial to find the appropriate amounts to blend in to your taste.

Packaging

Now that you’ve made it this far, you’re nearly home. Clarify (or don’t) the hydromel as you would any other mead. That means the tested trio of time, temperature, and finings. Most of the time we don’t bother with the finings and give the mead a week or two just above freezing to drop out the most obnoxious gunk. What’s a bit of haze amongst well-mannered, “trying to be healthy” modern Vikings?

Beyond the challenges presented if you stabilized the hydromel – you must decide if you want carbonation. A still (no carbonation) mead can read fuller and richer, but lifeless. Bubbles, on the other hand, bring the prickling of CO₂ that tingles the taste buds, but adds to perceived thinness. You can try it both ways by using a small soda bottle with a carbonator cap to provide a carbonated sample to compare. 

One Last Thing to Think About

In this packed-schedule, modern world we live in, it can be difficult to find the time to enjoy the craft of brewing. You can prep, create, and pitch a hydromel batch faster than you can heat your mash tun. Brewing simple, quick meads like these keeps your hands in the fermenting game. It keeps your larder stocked with sessionable summery beverages. And you get to practice blending flavors in a way we rarely do with beer!

Hydromel Recipes