difference between mead and wine?

[Marshwalker]

What is the main difference between mead and wine? is it the sweetness? ferment procedure? some of the recipe's seem similar... any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

[Fishtech]

Mead is wine made from honey. Most people associate the term 'mine' with grapes, but it can really be made from any fruit.

Just started a bee-hive this year- hoping to make some honey brandy from distilled mead.

[Marshwalker]

Ok.. Thanks!!! Honey Brandy you say??? That sounds like some good stuff!

[myles]

There are two main styles of mead, wineish and beerish. I generally make the wine type and most of the time it is actually melomel. This is a fermented mix of honey and fruit juce.

You can use any wine recipe and substitute honey for sugar. Some will disagree but I try to ferment slowly at cooler temperatures.

[Marshwalker]

There are two main styles of mead, wineish and beerish. I generally make the wine type and most of the time it is actually melomel. This is a fermented mix of honey and fruit juce.

You can use any wine recipe and substitute honey for sugar. Some will disagree but I try to ferment slowly at cooler temperatures.

Thanks Myles!! I am in between with ferment temperatures right now from what I've read... It's 70 inside my house and 90 outside and in the garage...but found that my pantry stays about 3-5 degrees higher than the rest of the house so that's where the mead sits....I think low 70s might be a bit cool but it seems to be doing fine..

[Kapea]

Mead is much more diverse than beer-ish or wine-ish. The underlying theme is using honey as the main source of fermentable sugar, which in itself leads to a huge diversity of meads, due to the multitudes of floral sources that bees make honey from.

I have been making mead since 1990. I started keeping bees in 2005 to cut honey costs and have more control over the quality of my honey. I've been making mead brandy since 2008. Mead brandy ROCKS!

If mead is the end-product then one needs to pay a great deal of attention to sanitation, ingredients, yeast, temps...

If mead brandy is the end-product, the flavors in the mead to be distilled can be less than stellar tasting. My lesser attempts at mead very often end up being very tasty brandies. In fact I've begun to play with flavors in my meads that would be considered off flavors, but create very nice complexity when distilled into brandy.

My friend Ken Schramm has written a good book on mead, The Complete Meadmaker. Lots of good info in there. Definetly worth a read if you want to make mead.

[Marshwalker]

I'll have to look into that book... i haven't drank many different types of mead.. have only had it a time or two actually...but really enjoyed it.. i have a batch of half clover and half orange honey going right now with about the same specks as the Ancient Orange Clove recipe... keeping tight notes to have a good reference rather it works out good or bad... as far as brandy, after this run of corn whiskey i want to tamper with a mix of both brandy and whiskey.. combo ferment of corn and fruits.. mainly apple... sounds good...just not sure if it will be... but honey brandy does sound good also if this mead doesn't work out.... just put it on yesterday so i have several months before I will find out!!

[Bushman]

In our state I have only seen beer & wine made from the honey or mead, probably due to legality.

[Marshwalker]

In our state I have only seen beer & wine made from the honey or mead, probably due to legality.

really?... thats crazy.. but not surprising due to how contradicting some of the alcohol laws are state to state and also in federal books..

[myles]

I'll have to look into that book... i haven't drank many different types of mead.. have only had it a time or two actually...but really enjoyed it.. i have a batch of half clover and half orange honey going right now with about the same specks as the Ancient Orange Clove recipe... keeping tight notes to have a good reference rather it works out good or bad... as far as brandy, after this run of corn whiskey i want to tamper with a mix of both brandy and whiskey.. combo ferment of corn and fruits.. mainly apple... sounds good...just not sure if it will be... but honey brandy does sound good also if this mead doesn't work out.... just put it on yesterday so i have several months before I will find out!!

I have been making mead and wine for many, many years. My long time favourite though is a combination of honey and elderberry. A melomel. I have not had the time yet to establish my own hives, so generally just buy the honey in bulk containers. I have also tried a few metheglins but was not that keen.

[Marshwalker]

honestly, i didn't even know people made wine out of elderberrys until joining here and HD i always looked at it as good deer food when scouting for a spot to put up a stand..but never ate any.
I found a link for a honey store www.beefolks.com on one of the threads on mead... they have a pretty good selection of honey... i also have a connection with a friend that brings down fresh raw tupelo honey from Mississippi..... but i just couldn't wait to get one going so i purchased some orange honey, clover honey and some oranges from a farmers market stand nearby... then picked up the rest of the ingredients from the grocery and got a 5 gallon batch going... once doing that, i realized 1 carboy ain't gonna cut it bubba... i'm gonna have to order me a few more.. to many good soundin recipe's out there to be sittin around

[Kapea]

Last weekend I extracted some supers of albizia honey, and lychees are in season big time, so today I made the beginnings of a 25L batch of lychee melomel. Albizia honey is very light in color and flavor and combines well with lychee.

I make up the honey must using no heat. I let the honey must get fermenting real well for three days and then add 5 kg of lychees to the active ferment. I freeze the fresh, peeled lychees, thaw them out and crush them before adding to the ferment. Freezing the fruit breaks down the cell walls in the fruit, which makes the lychees easier to crush and much juicier.

I primary ferment in a 36L Volrath SS stockpot, so basically it's an open fermenter. There is a cover on the stockpot, but no airlock. Primary fermenting in the stockpot makes it easy to do a twice-daily "punch down the cap" on the mass of lychee pulp that floats to the surface by carbon dioxide boyancy. Not punching down the cap makes a bitterness in the mead.

When the fermentation is approaching completion I rack the must to a 26.5L glass carboy, and leave the pulp and pits behind. It finishes fermenting and drops very clear in 3-4 months.

I use Wyeast 4184 "Sweet Mead Yeast" and ferment at 20C for my lychee mead. In this case the mead is the end product. It is my favorite mead.

I have another 50 kg of lychees that are destined to become lychee eau de vie. I need to peel them and get them frozen so I can juice them next weekend. Peeling lychees makes my fingers hurt, and it's hard to resist eating them all while peeling them.

[Marshwalker]

So the Melemol is basically a mead with an addition of some fruit??...which the fruit will then bear the name of the melemol? such as: lychee melemol, eldeberry melemol... i guess what i made could be Orange melemol?????

[punkin]

Cool. I was wanting to ask someone who knew about Lychees.

I think i can squeeze one more fruit tree into my yard, and a bloke at work gave me a couple of fresh lychees a year or two back during morning tea. I thought they were great.

So i've been telling the missus now the cold weather is here and we are getting bare rooted trees in the nurseries that i'd like to put a Lychee in.

We get hard frosts here, but ol mate had a producing tree so obviously they can be coaxed into growing in a spot with a cold winter. My questions have been about using the excess fruit, but if they make a good wine then i'm in.

Can you tell me more about how much flavour carries into the wine (and brandy) and how much sugar is in the fruit?

Do you need to add sugar to get a storable wine or can they be fermented as is?

[Kapea]

There is a good bit of sugar in lychees; 13-20 brix in the juice. The last analysis I saw on local lychee juice showed 3% fructose, 5% glucose, and 9% sucrose. Some people add sugar to their lychee wine. I do not. I ferment on the pulp and pits, and add enough water to float all of the pulp. My lychee wine is not the end product though. It goes on to be eau de vie.

For lychee mead I use 360g/L - honey/water and 200g/L or so lychee/mead. I like my lychee mead sweet. If you like dry mead you can back off on the honey, or use a yeast with a higher alcohol tolerance.

Lychee's distinct aroma and flavor compounds hold nicely in mead and wine, and carryover well in eau de vie.

As to the cold tolerance of lychee trees, I could not say. The trees here are all planted below 600m elevation and never see temps below 10C.

Lychees are delicious. I have never met anyone who did not like them a lot.



Melomel is a overall term for fruit meads. Usually the fruit is named, and often times the honey variety too. So I am making a lychee - albizia honey melomel.

Some melomels have names that are more specific to their friut; grape melomel = pyment, apple melomel = cyser...