Mead Making Process
Now you should have a clear mead to your desired sweetness ready to bottle. Traditional meads can be bottled in any colored glass without skunking from light exposure. If your mead contains hops or herbs, we would suggest brown bottles to avoid any issues.
What type of bottle should you use? This largely depends on your mead. We’ve split our advice into carbonated/non-stabilized meads or non-carbonated/stabilized meads.
Non-Carbonated or Stabilized Meads
This category is for dry or stabilized meads. If those criteria are met, you can use any bottle you wish. You are not concerned with pressure in the bottles from continued fermentation: therefore, it is completely safe.
Carbonated or non-stabilized meads
This category requires heavy-duty bottles or kegs due to the fact that the bottle will experience pressure. Absolutely do not use wine bottles with corks!
The following vessels do well here:
Beer bottles with crown caps
Beer bottles with swing tops
Champagne bottles with caps or caged corks
Belgian ale bottles with caged corks
Stainless steel growlers
Kegs
These bottles are safe for this purpose. Beware that stalled meads should never be bottled. If you didn’t hit your expected gravity, beware!
Bottle Closure Tips
A few quick tips about closures for your bottles.
Crown Caps
Make sure your crown caps are the oxygen-scavenging kind.
Standard 26mm beer caps work on most beer bottles, but you will need a slightly larger 29mm size for champagne bottles.
Invest in a metal capper. The plastic cappers always seem to break at the worst times.
Corks
Buy high-quality corks. Even the best-quality corks don’t last forever. Check with the manufacturer to determine how long the cork lasts before you need to re-cork your bottles.
If you are corking a carbonated mead, you will need a cork cage to reinforce the cork when combined with champagne bottles or Belgian ale bottles.
Swing Tops
Be sure to check the integrity of the rubber O-ring. They will need to be replaced from time to time.
Remove the O-ring during sanitization to check for any debris.
How to Bottle Non-Carbonated Mead
Bottling is easiest when you have a pour spout on the side of the carboy. If you do not have a pour spout, then a self-priming auto siphon with a bottling stick attachment is best.
Sanitize all equipment, bottles, and enclosures.
Remove mead from the refrigerator.
Cold mead oxidizes at a slower rate. Bottling while the mead is cold helps preserve fresh flavors.
Place the siphon arm into the carboy and prime the siphon with a bottling stick attached.
When priming the siphon, place the bottling stick into a bottle and press down. This will allow the mead to flow.
Keep gently pressing down on the bottling stick until the bottle is full.
The bottling stick will displace some liquid. Be sure to fill the bottle slightly more to account for this.
Remove the pressure from the bottling stick and place it in the next bottle.
Close the bottle using an appropriate closure specific to the bottle type.
Repeat until all the mead has been bottled.
Pour any sediment into a tall, thin bottle.
Pop this bottle in the refrigerator for a few days, and you will have more mead to enjoy. Or enjoy cloudy… we won’t judge.
Minimizing Oxygen Exposure
When bottling, oxygen is the enemy. Mead that is oxidized has a wet cardboard-type flavor. A few key steps can help you avoid oxygenation.
Stabilization not only prevents fermentation but also protects against oxygenation. As always, stabilizing is best. Alternatively, bottling mead that is still cold from cold crashing is another way to protect from oxygenation. Chemical reactions such as oxygenation are vastly slowed at cold temperatures.
Storing Mead
Mead is pretty forgiving of storage conditions, but room temperature in a dark area is always our suggestion. Why tempt fate with your precious mead? The common advice is that mead gets better with age. This advice stems from poor fermentation practices before we scienced everything. With the proper fermentation practices that we’ve described in this course, most mead is good straight out of the fermenter. Even better after clearing.
Aging Mead
Traditional meads can be aged without any issues as long as they are protected from oxygenation. They often develop a richer honey profile over time. Especially around the 6-month mark. In some rare cases, we’ve experienced meads that have gone through a “dumb” phase. Dumb phase is a wine term that means the flavors are muted right after bottling. Don’t worry. They come back after a few months in the bottle. As I said, this is rare, but it does encourage you to hide a few bottles.
Fruit, herb, and sometimes oaked meads are often better young than aged. These flavors tend to fade over time, thus losing the balance you achieved at bottling. Coffee meads are especially notorious for having a tight window of being at peak. A bit of trial and error is required to figure out the sweet spot on these meads!