Where are the best places to buy mead and which actual brands are best? I'm only wondering because I am thinking of making a batch before I start some of my beer brewing projects because I heard it's easy and really good. I wanted to try some meade before I made the commitment. Any ideas of where I can buy meade? How is it spelled also, mead or meade?
Brian

Well not sure on the spelling but I think it is Mead. Also I have been told that it can take up to a year to make mead. I have never seen it in a store here in AZ. I will be watching this thread myself.

Mead takes awhile. Wine is easy & can be done in a month. My winemaking page is kinda helpful.
& you can get a good buzz on yur own brew. That is incentive to move on in brewing & booze making.

Actually, Mead can be made in the same amount of time as wine, if yeast nutrients are used. However, mead takes a long time to age. You can drink it young, but like wine, it tastes MUCH better with age.

I have made mead several times, and have tried a couple of commercial meads. My mead turned out better than the stuff on the shelves. The commercial stuff tends to be cloyingly sweet, even if the label claims it to be "semi sweet" or "semi dry".

Mead is easy to make. Its actually easier than extract brewing. You just have to mix water and honey, pitch yeast (I would also add yeast nutrient), and wait. You dont even really HAVE to boil it! Like beer brewing, it can be as technical as you want, and therefore more difficult to make.

Best of luck on your mead making!

Cheers,
Dave

As already indicated meads are relatively easy to make though making award winning meads is another story entirely.

Probably the hardest part of mead making is waiting.

Most meads not truly in their prime until they are at least three years old.

Of course, by that time most of you mead is already gone by trying a bottle here and there.

Even if a meads that do not seem to be particularly good they sometimes become wonderful with sufficient aging. I once had an amazing peach mead. According to its brewer it was never particularly good so he was considering dumping it and reusing the bottles. Fortunately, before doing so he sampled it once more. After three years the mead had become awe inspiring.

That is not to say that a mead might not be quite good after aging six months or a year or so but most meads will improve with aging. I'm sure at some point the quality drops off but....

As far as commercial meads I'm not sure what to recommend. I know folks that went to the International Mead Festival last year. These guys are excellent brewers and beer/mead judges and really know their stuff. According to them they were amazed how many substandard commerical meads were on the market. Many were cloyingly sweet or had the unpleasant flavor of higher alcohols. Apparently there were also some very nice meads there as well but their names escape me at present.

One of the guys that when to that festival opened his own meadery (Celestial Meads (http://celestialmeads.com) in Anchorage. I can say that I know his meads are excellent. Another meadery I am familiar with is Ring of Fire Meadery (http://www.ringoffiremeadery.com) in Homer. Ring of Fire meads are excellent as well. Unfortunately, both are in Alaska so I don't know how widely available they are. At any rate, if you ever get a chance to try them by all means do so.

- Scott

A very good friend (and he lives 3 miles from me) has brought over some of his meads and he actually won the Calif. State Fair Best of Show in 2006 with an oaked traditional mead in 06. I have had it, and at 3 years old he say's it is still too young. Patience, and forgetfullness that you've got it around is the way to age mead.

He too does not ever involve heat. Just water, honey, nutrients and yeast. A lees stirrer is an absolute necessity as you have to rouse up the yeast until you get to 1/3 and 2/3's sugar break. Trust me, he could recite a novella on how to make a mead, cyser, metheglin, melomel or cider in 4 minutes with all instructions/ingredients and techniques required. I've watched him demonstate 3 or 4 of them in my garage while we had a brewcommune brew day.

He is also very involved with got mead dot com with vicki too.

It's nice because he come's over every friday and we sit on my driveway and sample a lot of fine beers because we have a minimum of 8% to join in. We call it a sanity check.

I have heard it's true what's been said here about not heating the mixture, and it goes for honey beers as well, you don't want to put the honey in untill the last minute, just enough time to let it mix in, because otherwise the heat can nullify the honey flavour. But if you want something Meady and don't want to wait 3 years, it might be an idea to find a "braggot" recipe: it's somewhere between Meade and Beer (and if you find a good one let us know!). Where I am (Australia) I have never encountered Meade either on tap or even in specialty liquor stores, we are absolutely Meadless.

Incidently a honey-wheat beer of mine that's just ready for tasting has come out without any sweetness at all, I encouraged the honey to ferment out completely, it tastes very strongly of honey, allmost entirely of honey, but no sweetness. I think a sweat Meade would actually be quite unpleasant.