Make water

I’m sure you’re all aware that the standard recipe for mead is
honey + water + yeast (+ adjuncts).
is all it takes.

To differentiate our products, we have focused on:
・Using different types of honey
・Selecting specific yeasts
・Using or combining different adjuncts
However, this time I’ve turned my attention to the “water” component.

When making mead, “water” usually means tap or mineral water.
Even if you adjust the water quality or use local water, it’s still just water.

That’s when it occurred to me: why not stop treating “water” as just water, and instead craft it as a “liquid” like tea or juice?

For example, you could mix honey with ginger ale and add yeast to ferment it, or mix honey with pre-fermented fruit juice and then add more fruit or spices.

You might not quite get the picture yet, so let me explain further.

The Weakness of Mead

If you’ve ever tried making mead at home, you might know that if you simply mix honey and water, add yeast, and ferment it out, it tends to taste like shochu diluted with water.
It’s barely drinkable.

Why does this happen?
How is it different from other fermented beverages like beer, sake, or wine?

Simply put, the cause is that honey has too few components other than sugar.

Grain, rice, and grapes contain enough protein, polyphenols, and organic acids that even after full fermentation, these elements provide the complexity and mouthfeel that we perceive as delicious.

Honey, however, lacks these, so once it’s fully fermented, it tends to result in a simple composition of water and alcohol.

That is why you can overcome this weakness by leaving some sweetness or balancing it with adjuncts.

Craft “Water”

To make a delicious dry mead, you have to address the aforementioned problem.

For example, with our recently released blood orange mead, "Poe," we used a yeast that produces a high amount of glycerol—a substance that provides body and perceived sweetness—which allowed us to create a dry mead that still has a substantial mouthfeel.

In this way, you can approach dry mead through the careful selection of adjuncts and yeast.

However, this time I’m thinking that we might be able to make even better mead by crafting the “water” itself, rather than relying on adjuncts, yeast, or honey alone.

We have made mead with this concept at Antelope before.
That would be our tea mead and the mead made with 100% blood orange juice.

For the former, we first prepared the green tea, jasmine tea, and spices as tea before mixing it with honey. For the latter, which hasn’t been released yet, we used only blood orange juice as the “water” and mixed it with honey.

The complexity from the tea or the distinct character of using only fruit juice had a major impact on the mouthfeel.
While the “water” portion had been mixed with adjuncts before, I think these two products embodied the idea of designing and crafting the “water” from the start.

In other words, by crafting the water used in the brewing process as tea or juice, we might be able to make mead with even greater creative freedom.

Culturally Speaking

Mead is honey + water + yeast. Nothing else is permitted.

If that is the culture, then the above idea would be considered heretical.

However, mead as an alcohol already includes various genres such as Melomel (fruit mead), Metheglin (spiced mead), Pyment (grape mead), and Cyser (apple mead).
Since these are even recognized as official categories in international competitions, it wouldn’t be strange to say that mead has a culture that allows for mixing with other ingredients.

It seems common to have added herbs, spices, and fruits to mead since ancient Egypt, so perhaps there have always been people who believed that mixing things into mead makes it taste better.

Thinking about it that way, I feel that creating custom “water” could be accepted as a valid way to make mead taste better.
Though, if that becomes the case, the future might become a bit uninteresting as anything goes...

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As a mead maker, I thought this was quite interesting, but what do you think?
You’d probably get beaten up for turning the water used for sake into juice, but I think that’s exactly why mead is so enjoyable.