Making Mead

I actually followed the mead making instructions written by the authors in my first attempt to make a batch of basic mead. A complete waste of honey. The fermentation barely started and finally fizzled out after about six months with most of the honey still unfermented. I later found out (from another book listed here on Amazon in which the word "complete" is misspelled to read "compleat," that honey is slightly acidic and ADDING more acid (as recommended by these authors)actually retards fermentation explaining my results.I'm not sure when this pamphlet written, but my copy is dated 1990 and it notes that it entered it's sixteenth printing in 1984. Apparetnly an awful lot has been learned about honey and mead making since then and I would strongly recommend NOT using this outdated information. It might just convince you that mead making is impossible, but it's actually fairly easy (much easier than beer making for example) and fun!

This is a small volume, but packed full of useful and interesting information. The recipes are clear, but you do want to have a little experience with making wine before you start.

I originally bought this book in the early 70's, then lost my copy. When I decided to make mead again (after 20 years) I purchased this book over all the others I had collected. It's all you need to get started, and after you start you can experiment on your own.

Very basic and easy to follow. Don't start your meadery with it!

Received book with different cover, which I already owned dated 1992 and was in very good condition. Book is better for some background on history as many recipes use ingredients not found in my part of the USA. .

Written by a novice!

Great addition to any home brewers library. This book is filled with some great one gallon recipes. I have followed a few recipes with great success.

I'll be brief and blunt. This book offers an ambitious title, but just doesn't deliver the goods.Flaws:* If you exclude the front & rear matter, this books weighs in at a paltry 54 pages. That's not even a proper book ... it's more of a small pamphlet, with a glossy cover that tries ties to pretend it's a real book. I've seem 'chap' books that are thicker, and have far more content.* Weakly researched in general.* Extremely thin on useful details and techniques.* Little useful information on fruit processing.* Some of their choices in yeast strains appear ill advised and/or illogical.* Their sulfiting technique is somewhat heavyhanded and overly simplistic.* They appear to have a very weak grasp on recipe construction and acid/tannin balancing in general. Rather than teaching the reader the HOW and WHY of constructing and testing recipes for various types of fruit (not to mention pairing them with appropriate varieties of honey, and explaining the how/why of that as well), they simply just shoved a random assortment of poorly constructed, unbalanced, and underexplained recipes into their book, and expect the reader to just follow along without asking questions ... and just blindly trust to the equally undescribed results.There's no greater turnoff for me than laziness and incompetence, and this book has a bit too much of both, in my opinion. Even in a topic as poorly covered as this one, there are far better books on the subject out there. I have scads of old meadmaking newsletters (and even an incomplete pamphlet of my own) that are more thorough than this offering, so my advice is to save your money. Easily one of the weakest books in my entire winemaking collection.Heck, Charlie Papazian did a far better, and more thorough, job of discussing mead in the appendix of "The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing" ... and that's a book about BEER (his chapter on mead was really just a brief gung-ho afterthought).

Having decided to start making my own mead I thought it would help to have some books on the subject. I am very familiar with the fact that there are forums and websites all over the internet on the subject which cover the making of mead in very great and minute details, however, I do find some of these sources to be over the top and appear to take the 'fun' out of mead making by evolving a science of what could be looked at as a tradition! Also, a lot of the sources I have come across in my short journey to starting to make mead have been American or Canadian and this presents recipe problems for us in the UK.This book is short, but is worth every penny (and I bought it very cheap!).. The authors are from the UK and the book is aimed at the UK audience making it easy to follow. I have not yet tried any of the recipes as I have started two batches and am waiting for them to finish fermenting before trying more adventurous recipes. The authors explore mead history and making techniques in an unassuming manner making it a pleasure to read and reference.I am very pleased with the purchase and it is rapidly becoming my go to book - over some bigger and newer books!

Before you purchase this book, understand that this is a brief overview regarding the principles of mead making. It does not go into the technical details of the process. It gives recipes, but not really step by step instructions on how to follow it. YouTube is better then this book for describing the process. Otherwise it’s an ok book for beginners to get an overall view on the history and the basics of mead making.

This is the definitive guide to mead-making, full of useful information and recipes. For a long time, it was out-of-print and hard to get, so when it again became available, I bought this as a spare, clean copy, because I already have a working copy, more than 20 years old, which is well-used and much loved. I cannot recommend this book too highly.

The book we received looks very different to the one we ordered. Having had a good look, it is in fact the same book, just a different edition. It has some great history and information, and the recipes seem straight forward to follow.

An interesting book with lots of interesting information. Some of the ingredients are hard to get especially in the quantities listed. The author dismisses natural mead and emphasizes the use of chemicals. A good reference book.