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Start This Delicious Spiced Mead Today & Drink It Next Month

Written by Author Tracey Besemer Published on October 26, 2021

Start this now and enjoy it for the holidays.

Today was a rainy fall day, one of my favorite kinds of fall days. The leaves on the trees always pop when the skies are gray.

It got me whistful for cold weather and spiced mead and snow and the holidays. I know, I know, I’m usually alone in my desire for snow.

A cup of spiced winter mead with a lemon slice and star anise in it with two drink straws. Next to the cup is a small wooden bowl full of mulling spices.
Spiced meads make for excellent winter tipple.

A nice glass of spiced mead would have been lovely to sip while watching the rain. While I wasn’t able to taste any today, I did decide to make sure I could enjoy some during the upcoming holidays.

Normally, this would mean I would have had to start my spiced mead way back in the spring or summer. However, I can still have my mead and drink it too. And you can too!

Making any mead or wine is an exercise in patience.

Good homebrews take time, often requiring a year or two for the flavors to develop. But sometimes you just want to make something fun and easy, that you can drink without waiting that long. And for that, there are short meads.

What’s a short mead?

A one gallon jug with a batch of spiced winter mead next to a small wooden bowl of mulling spices.
So, what’s short about it? Is the jug shorter, or the glass you serve it in?

A short mead (sometimes called a small mead) is a honey wine made using less honey than would normally be used. With less honey, there is less sugar for the yeast to consume, so it takes less time to ferment.

You can usually enjoy your small mead within a month.

Because there is less honey, to begin with, the yeast will make less alcohol, meaning you’ll end up with a lower ABV. Instead, it will render you a lovely mead packed with flavor but without the serious alcoholic punch.

Unlike a traditional mead with higher alcohol content, short meads are meant to be drunk right away, rather than bottle-conditioned. This makes short meads a great choice to make for the holidays or parties. (Planning on going wassailing? A short mead is just the ticket.)

Short Mead – Short Equipment List

A stockpot, a funnel with a strainer, a one gallon glass jug and a three piece airlock arranged on a wooden top.
Making short meads means you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment.

Another great feature of small meads is how little equipment is needed to make them. Because you won’t be bottling the mead to age, you don’t need to worry about bottling equipment. Really, all you need is a stockpot, a wooden spoon, a funnel with a screen, a one-gallon jar, and an airlock and rubber stopper.

You’ll be mixing everything right in the carboy, so you don’t need to drag out the ol’ brew bucket. And as the mead isn’t racked from primary to secondary or bottled, you don’t need tubing or a racking cane.

Winter Spices & Honey

This particular mead is going to be a spiced mead. We’ll add some traditional winter flavors to our honey for a spicy, golden mead that’s perfect for sipping in the evening by the fire. Go ahead, have another glass.

Because we’ll be using a commercial strain of yeast, it’s unnecessary to use raw honey. However, I do find that raw honey always provides the best flavor. And of course, use local honey if you are able.

For the spices I chose for this particular mead, I used a couple of tablespoons of my mulling spice blend. I like using mulling spices because everything is already mixed, and it’s just a matter of adding a couple of spoonfuls into my stockpot.

If you’ve never made your mulling spices, I recommend giving it a try. It’s as simple as mixing whole spices up in a bowl. My recipe makes a one-quart jarful of mulling spice, enough for gift giving, making a couple of gallons of spiced mead, and keeping my family in mugs full of hot mulled cider and wine for the entire holiday season.

However, you can also use spices normally found in your cupboard.

Consider using any combination of the following to flavor your mead:

  • 1 whole 3” cinnamon stick (Ceylon is best)
  • 4 allspice berries
  • 2 star anise
  • 3 cloves
  • 1 slice of candied ginger
  • 1-2 1/8” slices of peeled, fresh ginger
  • 3 juniper berries
  • 5 peppercorns
  • 1 whole nutmeg (crushed)

To achieve a nice, spicy flavor, choose at least three of these spices.

Shall we mix up a short mead together?

Sanitizing

As with all home brewing, it’s important to start with cleaned and sanitized equipment. Don’t forget to wash your hands too.

Spiced winter mead ingredients set out on a wooden base: honey, an orange, a jar of black tea, a packet of Lalvin D47 yeast, a few raisins and a plate of mulling spices.
The ingredient list is pretty small too. I’ll bet you’ve got most of this in your pantry already.

Spiced Winter Mead Ingredients

  • One gallon of water
  • 2 lb. jar of honey
  • 12 raisins
  • Juice from one orange
  • One cup of strong, black tea, cooled
  • Spice blend
  • One packet of Lalvin D47 yeast

Directions

Close up shot of a pot of water with honey being poured in.
Look at that gorgeous honey, very soon it will be time to drink it.
  • In a large stockpot, pour in 4/5 of the gallon of water and the honey. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and add the spices to the boiling honey water.
  • Stir well.
  • Let the mixture simmer for 30 minutes to an hour. The longer you let it simmer, the more flavor will be extracted from the spices.
  • White foam may form on the top of the water; this is natural and expected.
Close up shot of the white foam that develops from boiling honey in water.
When boiling honey and water, white foam often develops. This is any impurities, such as minor amounts of wax, still left in the honey. It’s completely fine.
  • After the mixture has simmered for the allotted time, turn the heat off and skim off the foam. You’ll remove some of the spices; that’s fine as they will be removed when this mixture is poured through the funnel with the screen
  • Let the mixture cool to room temperature. If it’s cold outside, you can cool the spiced honey-water quickly by placing the pot outside for half an hour.
  • While the mixture cools, add the raisins, tea, and orange juice to the one-gallon jug.
  • Once the honey-water is room temperature, add the yeast packet to the jug and swirl it in the tea and orange juice mixture. Let the jug sit for a few minutes.
  • Using the funnel with the screen, pour the spiced honey-water into the jug.
Someone pours the honey and water mixture from a stockpot into a funnel fitted into the glass jug.
  • You want the liquid to come up to the neck of the jug. If you need to, add additional water. Put the rubber stopper in the jug, and put your finger over the hole in the stopper. Swirl gently to incorporate the water.
Close up of the next of the gallon jug with the mead in it.
You want as little airspace as possible, so fill the jug up to the neck.
  • Fit the rubber stopper with a water-filled airlock. Label and date the mead and place your jug someplace warm and dark to ferment.

Within 48 hours, you should hear the happy work of the yeast evident in your bubbling airlock.

Is My Spiced Mead Ready Yet?

Your short mead will be ready to drink in about a month. Remember, these are made to enjoy right away. The finished mead will have lots of flavor, little alcohol, and a bit of fizz to it. You won’t have the same body you would with a mead made with more time and honey.

The jug of mead with a rubber stopper in the top and an airlock. The small bowl of mulling spices is next to it. The mead is cloudy.
The sediment from the orange pulp and spices will settle to the bottom as the mead ferments.

What Can I Do with It?

To enjoy your mead just as it is, slowly pour it from the jug into a glass. Or you can pour the whole thing into another clean carboy, being careful to leave the lees behind.

And of course, you can bottle it if you wish, but you’ll need to bottle it in swing-top bottles and store it in the refrigerator. The cold will slow fermentation almost to a stop. You may need to burp the bottles each day for a few days if excess carbonation builds up. After that, you can enjoy these chilled bottles of mead over the next few weeks.

But honestly, half the fun of making a short mead is skipping all of that fuss.

Short meads are great fun to doctor up in the glass. While they’re delightful on their own, you can easily fortify them with the spirit of your choice. A few personal favorites are whiskey, brandy, rum, and krupnik (a Polish honey liquor). A splash of any of these will give your mead a bit more kick. And small meads make a great base for punch or to be used for mulled mead.

A glass of mead in front of three bottles, whiskey, rum and another whiskey.
Decisions, decisions.

Heat your mead for a warming winter drink.

Get this delightful mead going soon, and come next month, you’ll be enjoying a glass of your own homemade mead.

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Tracey Besemer

Hey there, my name is Tracey. I’m the editor-in-chief here at Rural Sprout.

Many of our readers already know me from our popular Sunday newsletters. (You are signed up for our newsletters, right?) Each Sunday, I send a friendly missive from my neck of the woods in Pennsylvania. It’s a bit like sitting on the front porch with a friend, discussing our gardens over a cup of tea.

Originally from upstate NY, I’m now an honorary Pennsylvanian, having lived here for the past 18 years.

I grew up spending weekends on my dad’s off-the-grid homestead, where I spent much of my childhood roaming the woods and getting my hands dirty.

I learned how to do things most little kids haven’t done in over a century.

Whether it was pressing apples in the fall for homemade cider, trudging through the early spring snows of upstate NY to tap trees for maple syrup, or canning everything that grew in the garden in the summer - there were always new adventures with each season.

As an adult, I continue to draw on the skills I learned as a kid. I love my Wi-Fi and knowing pizza is only a phone call away. And I’m okay with never revisiting the adventure that is using an outhouse in the middle of January.

These days, I tend to be almost a homesteader.

I take an eclectic approach to homesteading, utilizing modern convenience where I want and choosing the rustic ways of my childhood as they suit me.

I’m a firm believer in self-sufficiency, no matter where you live, and the power and pride that comes from doing something for yourself.

I’ve always had a garden, even when the only space available was the roof of my apartment building. I’ve been knitting since age seven, and I spin and dye my own wool as well. If you can ferment it, it’s probably in my pantry or on my kitchen counter. And I can’t go more than a few days without a trip into the woods looking for mushrooms, edible plants, or the sound of the wind in the trees.

You can follow my personal (crazy) homesteading adventures on Almost a Homesteader and Instagram as @aahomesteader.

Peace, love, and dirt under your nails,

Tracey
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