By Magnus von Kageneck, cellar master (who he is) · Updated: September 2026
Every year at the end of September I hear the same question: if I buy honey now, will there be mead on the table at Christmas? The honest answer is yes and no. There are a good twelve weeks left until Christmas Eve. That is enough for quite a lot, but not for a clear, aged honey wine from a freshly started batch.
Doing the math with the calendar
Honey wine ferments more slowly than fruit wine. At 20 to 23 °C, fermentation usually stops after two to three months. It is only finished when the Oechsle hydrometer shows the same reading twice, a few days apart, not as soon as the airlock goes quieter. Then you move the mead somewhere cool, rack it off the lees and add 1 g of potassium metabisulfite per 10 liters. As a rule it clears two to four months after this first racking.
For a batch started in early October, that means fermentation ends in early December at the earliest, often not until after New Year. The mead then clears at some point between February and May. So at Christmas you will at best have a young mead in the demijohn, still cloudy and yeasty. How to measure properly is explained in Measure, don't guess.
What you can really do before the holidays
You are in good shape if you started in spring and racked your mead off the lees by summer at the latest. With that mead, you can take care of everything a gift bottle needs before Christmas:
- Clearing. In the cool, mead often clears on its own. If it is still cloudy two to four months after racking, stir in 10 to 40 ml of kieselsol (silica sol) 15 % per 10 liters, depending on the haze. How to do it is explained in Clearing wine like a cellar master.
- Spicing, sweetening, bottling. All three steps need finished mead; they are covered further down.
If you started in summer and only racked in the fall, you are cutting it finer: fining is often too early before the holidays. In that case, stick to clearing in the cool, and the mead only goes into bottles once it is clear.
Young mead and aged mead
Straight after fermentation, mead is not a finished drink. It is cloudy, tastes of yeast, and the alcohol is up front. It has little acidity: even with the lactic acid from the recipe, only about 3 to 4 g per liter. That is why the airlock protects it from day one, along with the dose of sulfite at racking (why, see Sulfiting without fear).
Aged mead is clear, the alcohol has calmed down, and the honey comes to the fore. There is no shortcut for this time, not even with more warmth. So the math works the other way around: what you start in the fall, you will have clear in the bottle in spring, and by the following Christmas it is an aged mead. If you miss this fall, start in January, when there is little to do in the cellar, and put the demijohn in an evenly warm room.
Which honey goes into the demijohn
Honey is 78 to 80 % sugar; that concentrated, it draws the water out of the yeast. It can only ferment once you dilute it to about 30 % sugar or a little below. For your first batch, use a mild, light honey and water that is as soft as possible. For 10 liters you need 2.5 to 3 kg of bee honey, plus up to 500 g for back-sweetening. Dark, robust honey leaves a strong mark on the mead; save it for a later batch.
Warm the honey only until it flows, at most 35 °C according to the package; the water may be about 50 °C. Everything else goes in only once the mixture has cooled to about 20 °C, because yeast suffers in warm liquid.
Honey brings hardly any acidity, almost no nitrogen and none of the suspended solids that drive a fermentation. That is why 10 liters need 37 g of lactic acid 80 % (31 ml), 3 g of yeast nutrient salt, no more than 6 mg of vitamin B1 (thiamine), one liter of apple juice without preservatives and 10 g of wheat flour or a finely grated apple. You dose the thiamine via a solution: 0.5 g in 500 ml of cold water, of which you use 6 ml; that corresponds to the maximum of 0.6 mg per liter. For honey, 3 g of nutrient salt is on the low side, so add half on the day you start the batch and the rest as soon as the hydrometer reads one third less than at the start. Make the starter in the apple juice, not in grape juice. Why honey leaves the yeast starving without these additions is told in Starting a batch of mead as background; for quantities and temperatures, the figures here apply.
Two batches for 10 liters
Both ferment in a 15-liter demijohn, with at least 10 % headspace and the airlock on from day one. Measure the honey-water mixture at 20 °C before the starter goes in; by then the apple juice is already fermenting. You calculate the starting value of the whole batch from your reading: (9 × reading + 50) ÷ 10, where the 50 stands for the liter of apple juice. How to read the Oechsle hydrometer and the test tablets correctly is shown in the booklet “Measure, Don't Guess” under Booklets.
- Light mead: 2.5 kg honey, 7.3 l water, 1 l apple juice. The mixture reads about 85 degrees Oechsle, the whole batch around 82. About 12.5 % vol is possible. It usually ferments dry or nearly dry and only turns medium-sweet once you back-sweeten it.
- Honey dessert wine: 3 kg honey, 7 l water, 1 l apple juice. Mixture about 102, batch around 97 degrees Oechsle. On paper, 14.9 % vol would be possible if all the sugar fermented; usually the yeast stops at 12 to 14 % vol. If it stalls at 13 % vol, around 32 g of sugar per liter remain in the wine.
Don't use more than 3 kg of honey per 10 liters: above 15 % vol, honey wine counts as an intermediate product for tax purposes, and the alcohol-tolerant yeast that mead needs ferments up to about 16 % vol.
A port-style cultured wine yeast works well; with it, the mead ferments at 20 to 23 °C. If the temperature swings by more than 5 °C between day and night, the yeast stalls, and below 8 to 10 °C fermentation often stops altogether. Put the demijohn in an evenly warm room, wrapped in a blanket if need be; it only goes into the cold cellar once fermentation is over (Winterizing the cellar).
Spiced mead: first the wine, then the spices
Cloves, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg or culinary herbs are better added after fermentation than before, so you can adjust the flavor on the finished wine. I don't give fixed amounts, because there is no reliable figure. Try each blend on one liter first. If it works, hang the spices in a small linen bag in the whole batch of mead, taste at short intervals and take the bag out as soon as you like the flavor. Between now and Christmas, this work fits easily into a few evenings.
Calamus root (sweet flag) does not belong in it, even though it is sometimes listed as a spice: under EU flavorings law, its beta-asarone is limited to 1 mg per kilogram in alcoholic beverages, and you cannot measure at home how much a root releases. For the same reason, wormwood, tansy and germander stay out and sage is used sparingly; the same regulation sets maximum levels for thujone and teucrin A.
If you want to drink the spiced mead warm, heat it in a covered pot to 70 to 75 °C and don't let it boil, because the alcohol evaporates from about 78 °C. With the lid on, most of it stays in the mead. Even warm, it is a wine of around 12 to 14 % vol, and the sweetness of the honey makes it seem milder than it is.
Sweetening, stabilizing, bottling
Sweeten honey wine with honey, not with table sugar. 25 g of honey sweetens about as much as 20 g of sugar; 20 to 50 g of honey per liter is usual, and the honey dessert wine usually needs less. You find the amount in a one-liter jar: draw off a good liter of clear mead, dissolve 25 g of warmed honey in it, taste it next to the unsweetened mead and add more in small steps until it tastes rounded to you. Then scale up to the demijohn.
If sugar remains in the mead, whether added or left over from fermentation, add 2.6 g of potassium sorbate per 10 liters before bottling. Before that, fermentation must have definitely stopped, even at a room temperature of 20 to 25 °C, and the mead must be clear and contain 30 to 40 mg/l of free sulfur dioxide. Months have passed since racking: check with a sulfur dioxide test kit and, if needed, add 0.5 to 1 g of potassium metabisulfite per 10 liters. Otherwise lactic acid bacteria break the sorbic acid down into a compound that smells of geranium leaves and can no longer be removed. Dissolve the sorbate in about ten times its amount of mead, rack the demijohn into a clean, food-grade bucket, stir in the solution and bottle immediately. Only bottle dry mead once the test tablets no longer show any sugar. There is more on this in Stopping fermentation and sweetening wine.
On every bottle that leaves the house, write what is in it, when you bottled it, how much alcohol it contains and that it contains sulfites. You know the alcohol from the drop in must weight: every degree Oechsle the hydrometer loses between the calculated starting value of the whole batch (around 82 or 97) and the end of fermentation corresponds to about 1 g of alcohol per liter; divided by 7.9, that gives the percentage by volume.
Safety note: Lactic acid 80 % and potassium metabisulfite are hazardous substances with the signal word “Danger”; according to the safety data sheet, potassium sorbate powder carries the signal word “Warning”. Wear gloves and safety goggles. Never let potassium metabisulfite come into contact with acid, not even in the same container or measuring cup, or toxic gas will form; add acid to water, never the other way round. Store potassium metabisulfite and yeast nutrient salt separately and labeled, and never put chemicals into drink bottles. The signal word, pictogram and the hazard statements (H) and precautionary statements (P) on the label of the product supplied are authoritative.
Magnus von Kageneck is Maischewerk's cellar master character. The texts in this series are written with the support of artificial intelligence and are reviewed for technical accuracy before publication.
Related in the shop: Mead & Honey Wine and Fining & Clarifying Agents