The Joy of Mead - Everything about the ancient drink and how to make it

90 Days of Mead

Mead as it ferments and develops (A stop motion animation)

I started two batches of Mead on December 9, 2008 and I set them in place and every day since then (for 90 days now) I have taken a picture of them. I wanted to see if I could get a good look at how mead changes in look over time. It really is quite dramatic the way the honey wine changes over time. When you look at it on an every day basis you don't really notice the changes but when you see pictures side by side it is quite dramatic. Here is a picture of how they look right now.

Why do the two carboys of mead look so different?

My original goal of these two carboys was to use two exact same formula and keep all of the variables exactly the same with the exception of the honey I used. The carboy on the left uses 15 pounds of Wildflower Honey and the carboy on the right uses 15 pounds of Clover Honey. Everything else is the same including water, yeast and all the other variables.

This gives me a great way to really learn about the taste difference of different honeys. You can plainly see that they look very different and at this stage of the ferment they taste quite different too. Here is a look at two pictures from the series: They are day 2 and day 90. Quite a dramatic difference in what the Mead looks like!!

About the Mead Animation

It has been 90 Days since I started the experiment but there are only 84 frames in the movie. Oops, I missed a few days in the process but it is quite inconsequential. We still get a good look at the process.

Also, I have racked the bottles twice to get them off the leeds and you will notice that the picture is quite jumpy. I couldn't commit my digital camera to be locked in place for a few months so I had to make up a little jig that I placed it in. This means the video isn't perfect and the picture moves around a bit but you still get a good look at what happens to the mead as it ferments. Overall it is still pretty cool to see how it changes over time. You can also see the levels of the bottles go down over time this is because of the re-racking that I did or when I extracted a sample to do testing. Pause the video if you want to take a good look at the differences over time.

A Note about the video: I am still taking pictures every day so this should continue for a while longer. But I am going to be bottling these batches pretty soon probably - depends on the testing.

Here is the video

Some Observations on the video

There seems to be several distinct periods in the ferment. The first period begins on day two when the batches get real milky in quality and this continues for about 40 days then the batches undergo quite a dramatic change in look where the milkiness quickly disappears. Then the clarification process really starts to kick in right around day 63 after the first racking.