Today, I'm going to teach you how to make a mead from start to finish in 8 minutes. First, here are a few things you'll absolutely need to be able to do this. You need one gallon of water, make sure it's semi-nice water, 2 pounds of any honey, 2.5 grams of Laven QA23 yeast or any other wine yeast, and some sanitizer. Alongside your sanitizer, you're also going to need a glass carboy, a hydrometer for measuring your gravity, a scale for measuring honey if you need to do that, an airlock and a bung for putting on top of the mead, and an auto-siphon tubing for racking into a new container. Step 1, you need to sanitize everything really well, otherwise you might have a bad fermentation. Now that we have everything sanitized, you can start to mix your ingredients. Fill part of your carboy with water and part of it with honey. In this case, I had to actually weigh out 2 pounds of honey because I didn't have a pre-weighted amount. You can for go this if you have a pre-weighted amount of honey. You're going to want to now take and put your bung on and shake it until everything's mixed in super well. Shaking adds oxygen, it also just mixes stuff. Now that this is shaken up, I'm going to add more water on top, and I will mix it again, shake it up again because I want to mix my new mixture pretty well. After we have mixed everything, we are going to take a gravity reading. So we are going to need our hydrometer, which is in my bucket right now. I am getting this old tube that will allow me to float the hydrometer. If you have a tall enough glass, you don't have to do this. With my hydrometer floating in here, I see it is floating around 1.065. So I can look at the back of my hydrometer, and if I turn it around, it will show kind of roughly what percent ABV I'm at, which is actually 8.5%. Now that my hydrometer reading is done, I'm going to pour this back in and actually add my yeast. I'm putting 2.5 grams, or roughly about half this packet into this mead, and I will save the other half for another mead in the future because you can do that. Now I'm going to take and put my dunk back on and shake this thing up until everything is mixed and super well again. Generally, it's a good idea to add some yeast nutrient to your mead. This will help your yeast ferment more efficiently and lead to a cleaner fermentation. Your yeast nutrient options include things like DAPT, Dimonium phosphate, Firmade O, Firmade K, or some other ones you find online. There are two ways to add your nutrients. Option 1 is to put them all in the beginning of the mead. The second option is a staggered nutrient schedule, which is where you split them into four parts. Add them on four different days, day zero, two, four, and six. It's super important for you to write down information about your mead, whether that being a notebook or on the mead itself. So that's what I'm doing here. I'm writing down the date it started, the original gravity, all of that information. Now we're going to put our airlock and our bunk back on that's filled, and we're going to take and put this into a dark-ish space to start fermenting. It should start doing something at about 12 to 24 hours. Your mead should look something like this. You'll see some bubbles coming up from the mead. You'll also see your airlock bubble during the fermentation. It should bubble semi-vigorously. Once the bubbles slow down or you see the mead begin to clear up, this generally means your mead is done fermenting. You can double check this by doing a gravity reading with your hydrometer. Depending on the strength of your yeast, you might finish at 1.000. My mead finished at 1.000. To calculate your ABV, use this formula. Now you can rack your mead into a new container. Try to avoid getting the layer of yeast and sediment at the bottom while racking. From here, I would suggest to let the mead sit for a few weeks to allow for any final fermentation and degassing. You should also see the mead begin to clear up from here. Make sure you write down your mead's new gravity. Of course, you can do some taste testing here if you desire. Now we get to taste test it. It's really, really good. A little bit sweet. It's got perceived sweetness even though it is technically dry. It has a nice floral taste to it. A little bit fruity. Of course, with some age, it'll be even better. Now, let's talk about the next step. If you like it how it is, let it age for a few more weeks and then move onto the bottling stage. If you want it to be sweeter, you need to stabilize it first. Use potassium sorbet and camdum tablets to halt the yeast. Now you can add any honey you want to back-sweeten. If you don't halt the fermentation, the yeast will restart fermenting on any new sugars. And in the bottle, this will cause them to blow up. In a carboy or anything else, it will just cause it to be a higher ABV mead. You have a few options for stabilizing. Number one is potassium sorbet and metabysulfite. The combination of these two will slow down the yeast to a halt, making it to where it's stabilized. Option two is to cold crash. You're going to place your meat into a cold chamber, and it will bring it down temporarily to where the yeast cannot ferment. Again, that's temporary. And the last one is pasteurizing. Pasteurizing is where you are taking heating the meat up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. This will actually kill the yeast, allowing you to back-sweeten safely. You'll want to wait about 24 hours before you try to back-sweeten, and this is to make sure the metabysulfite and the sorbet really get in to the meat. And stop the yeast. Here I am adding about two ounces of honey, and this is of course back-sweetening and bolstering the honey character. I'm mixing it up really well. And before I bottle this, I need to make sure that I put it away for another 24 hours, just to make sure that there's no more re-fermentation. And it's time for bottling. I need a bottle caper or possibly a wine bottle corker, like this. You're going to need a bottling wand to fill each bottle. This is a fancy floor corker for lots of corking, and this is a bench caper for lots of capping. And so the bottling begins. Every single bottle has been sanitized, so that's important. Make sure you elevate your liquid so that gravity will help it flow. I'm using my bottling wand to fill up each bottle. And of course, my goal is not to overfill them because I would make a big mess. Now we take our caps or our corks, and we put them on top of each bottle with the perspective instrument you need. Once you finish that, you can take and put a label on each bottle to know what's in what. And if you have a bunch of stuff like me, which is super helpful. In total, I got eight beer bottles out of this and one wine bottle. A few things. Was my meat really clear when I bottled it? No. If I want a really clear meat, I have to try some things. Method one is just a let it age for a long time. This will generally clear things up. Method number two is to use some clearing agents like sparkly, easy clear bentonite, dual fine, things you can find on Amazon or at your local brew shop. Here are a few tips to help you. Tip number one is to age your meat. This will help develop the character of the meat. Now, honey character is the most important one. We want that to be developed well. After a meat finishes fermenting, generally it tastes kind of yeasty, so you also want to age it for that reason. Tip number two is you can put whatever you want into your meat. Fruit, spices, other honey, maple syrup, anything you want. You have options for when to put these ingredients into the meat. You can choose the primary stage, which is where the bulk of the fermentation occurs, generally day zero to 21. The secondary fermentation is after the primary fermentation. If you add more sugars into that meat, it will start to re-ferment. The third option is to put it into the aging stage of the meat's life. And tip number three is to avoid pasteurized and filtered honey, because these strip characters from the honey itself. Here's a list of some other meat styles that you can make. I hope this video has helped you go make some meat. Share this video with a friend if you enjoyed it. And thank you so much for watching. Cheers!