I'm still experimenting, since they take a minimum of three years to mature it's hard to play around. I think if you use nutrient and DAP you can accelerate the conditioning time, but I have never done that. The thing with honey is that it lacks nutrients, so you either have to wait for the stressed out yeast flavors to mellow or you have to add something else to your mead. A lot of people use raisins, but my next batch I am going to try mashing some grains and using the extract from that (braggot). I have also tried blueberries, cider, cranberries, with decent results. I recommend a couple table spoons of lemon juice and a cup of really strong tea for acid/tannic structure. Use the
gotmead calculator to calculate the OG you want (for sweet, semi-sweet, dry) Use a clean ale yeast or a sweet mead yeast if you want a sweet wine, use a wine yeast if you want a dry, or something in between if you want in between. The trick to mead making is once you bottle it, put it somewhere that it will slip out of mind. Try a bottle every year until its tasty. The best mead I had was 15 years old. Ok, that's what I know in a nutshell but you wanted a recipe.
My first batch was
JAOM, which was quite drinkable within 6 months and was fairly sweet, like an off dry riesling. It was really decent actually and was the first thing I ever fermented (at least on purpose).
Like I said above, I don't have a recipe I stick with. Every batch I switch things up trying to get a feel for it, but this is one.
6-8.5kg of honey (6 for dry, 7 for off dry, 8.5 for sweet)
Four tbsp of lemon juice, or some wine acid blend from your LHS
A cup of strong tea, or some tannins from your LHS
Yeast nutrient (optional)
Yeast energizer/DAP (optional)
Do not boil the honey, screw what you know about sanitation, heated honey tastes like pollen and white sugar
You can warm the honey in a pot inside another pot of water, or what I do is pour all the honey into a sanitized carboy then use warm tap water (I'm on a well, use spring if you are on city) to get the last bit of honey out of the container. Add water and other ingredients (except nutrients/DAP have instructions when to add them along the fermentation). Shake the sh** out of the carboy with a bung in it to airate and mix the honey. If you didn't heat the honey, this will be hard, expect a workout, if you did you should be fine. Add two packets of yeast (or white labs liquid mead yeast). Put on airlock and forget about it for six to twelve months, except to be sure the airlock doesn't dry out. Bottle and put in the deepest reaches of your basement/closet/inlaws house. Sneak a bottle every six months to a year. Unlike wine there are no fruit esters to oxidize so it will only get better with time if you have a clean batch. It will probably end up over 15%ABV, so the booze needs time to mellow anyways. If you keg (a great way to store mead if you have the capacity) and CP fill your bottles you can really reduce the chances of mother of vinegar (needs O2) corrupting your prize.
Good luck!
Like I said, there are faster ways to get to a finished product if that's your thing. Check out the interwebs for those, I have never tried them except JAOM, but be warned. Like someone said on here the other day, the internet does not know your tastes. I once tried a rushed malomel that was supposed to be good in four months and is now just getting tasty 30 months later.
