Should i boil mead

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Thread starter jiffybrew Start date Feb 25, Help Support Homebrew Talk:. Joined Oct 16, Messages 93 Reaction score 0. I've read different mead recipes and some instruct you to boil the honey. Is this necessary? Isn't most store bought honey bacteria free? Or is it a pre-caution taken just in case? Yooper Ale's What Cures You! Staff member. If you boil honey, you can ruin the delicate flavor so I don't boil it. If you have honey that comes fresh with bits of beer parts and honeycomb in it, you may want to strain that out.

You can boil the water first then remove it from the heat before adding any honey. Let it sit for 15 mins to pasteurize. That being said, the home mead maker should adhere to the best temperature ranges for fermentation for the yeast strain that they are using. In most cases, slightly below room temperature is best, no more than 70 degrees. Some strains of yeast, however, require lower temperatures, such as lager yeasts, which work best at temperatures of 50 degrees or lower.

Just like long-term wine or beer storage, the best temperature for mead storage is about 70 degrees, so room temperature for most people.

However, just as with storing wine for long periods, extreme fluctuations in temperature should be avoided, as temperatures above 70 degrees can negatively impact the mead. As a result, you want to store your mead in a dark, dry location that is neither too hot nor too cool. A cabinet indoors is a good idea; better still is one temperature controlled, just like for wine storage.

Excessive temperature swings and excessive oxidation by sunlight can cause mead to skunk, just as the same can occur with fine wines and ales. If you plan to store mead for long periods nothing wrong with drinking it as soon as possible, though! I was going to point out that organisms that produce endospores , like Clostridium botulinum survive in honey, but then I remembered that you can not kill them by boiling.

The spores could also be naturally present in anything you brew or preserve. This is why you should use a pressure cooker for canning non-acidic foods.

The result showed loss of bacterial viability within 8—24 days. It is only the spore forming microorganisms that can survive in honey at low temperature. Honey: a reservoir for microorganisms and an inhibitory agent for microbes , Olatien et. Anything you can kill without a pressure cooker, autoclave or gamma radiation is dead after a couple of weeks in honey at room temperature. Well, I'm a microbiologist and brewer.

When honey is diluted to make mead it's party time for bacteria! Heating honey by boiling may kill some bacteria but spores can survive including Clostridium. To kill spores you need a temperature of C sustained for a minimum of 20 minutes. This is typically accomplished with steam under pressure as in an autoclave or pressure cooker.

Boiling will obviously blow off volatile flavour components but will not by any means toxify the honey. I'm not saying that making mead with raw honey with a heavy dose of yeast to overwhelm bacteria is going to kill you. However I'm guessing that if it did kill someone they aren't posting here to warn us! Sorry apparently I need 50Rep to sub-comment???

Wikipedia says. I'm not sure how dangerous heated honey is, but apparently coffee contains more of 'it'. So your yearly intake of coffee vs yearly intake of mead?

I'd say mead is good to drink! I believe I have read that Honey is not a great food source for yeast as it doesn't have ample levels of all the bits and pieces needed to make happy baby yeasties. So your recipe may need some nutritional source like DAP yeast nutrients or fruits for flavoured meads melomel.

I have myself seen this poisonous effect on one of my relatives who used to take honey in hot fluids. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Six of us gathered for a great evening that began with a tasting. Not just any tasting, it concluded a three year experiment that tested the effect of boiling on making mead. Two meads went head to head that night. I made one with a ten minute boil, and the other was as identical as I could make it without boiling.

I was careful to arrange it so that none of us, not even me or the Lady of the House, knew which one we were tasting at the time. Neither of us knew what the other had done, but we could compare notes afterward to find out which mead was blue and which was orange. Everyone got color coded index cards to write down our impressions of each mead. In addition to reading the comments, we also talked about the meads after the tasting was over. So what did we find?

We confirmed the common wisdom that boiling weakens the aroma. All of us agreed that the no-boil mead had a stronger aroma.

One of us even preferred it. Four of us all the women preferred the the boiled mead, overall, because of its better flavor. Two of us explicitly talked about the body, and both described the boiled mead as more full bodied than the no-boil mead. I specifically asked about the aroma and overall preference, so all six of us commented on that. The other surprise is that there might be some benefit to boiling. Most people, who have an opinion on the subject, seem to think that boiling can only harm the mead — specifically by weakening the aroma.

Giving up some intensity in the aroma can get you a mead that is fuller bodied and smoother — four out of six of us thought it was worth the trade off for this particular mead. I think I understand better how it affects mead, and I can use that knowledge when I make one.

How might this affect my future batches? It also makes me wonder how this experiment would have turned out if I had used a milder honey. Anyone want to give it a try? If you got something out of this article, why not spread the word? Everyone likes a pat on the back - even me!