The Still Room
Mead from your own hives, comb to bottle
Four hives, one harvest, and the most complete closed loop in these conditions. Also the point at which it is worth being very clear about what you may and may not sell.
The short answer
Mead is honey fermented with water and yeast. A standard dry mead uses roughly 1.2–1.5 kg of honey per 5 litres of water, fermented for 4–6 weeks then aged for six months or more. Making mead at home for personal consumption is legal in South Africa. Selling it requires a manufacturing licence under the Liquor Products Act 60 of 1989.
Of everything in the still room, mead is the one that closes the loop completely. The bees forage on the property, we take the honey, and the honey becomes something we did not buy any part of.
It is also, unhelpfully, the drink that requires the most patience of anything we make. The fermentation is quick. The waiting is not.
The ratio
For a dry mead, roughly 1.2 to 1.5 kilograms of honey per 5 litres of water. Less and it will be thin; more and you are heading towards a sweet mead, which is a legitimate thing to want but a different drink.
- Do not boil the honey. It drives off the aromatics that made you want to use your own honey in the first place. Warm the water, dissolve, and no further.
- Yeast nutrient is not optional. Honey is almost pure sugar with very little nitrogen, and a yeast colony starved of nutrient will stall or throw off harsh flavours. This is the single most common cause of unpleasant homemade mead.
- Use a proper wine yeast. Bread yeast dies at low alcohol and tastes of bread.
- Sanitise everything. More home ferments are lost to poor sanitation than to any other cause.
The timeline
| Stage | What happens | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Harvest and strain | Cappings off, honey strained, wax set aside | 1 day |
| Must preparation | Honey, water, nutrient, yeast pitched | 2 hours |
| Primary ferment | Vigorous. Airlock active. | 2 – 3 weeks |
| Rack off the lees | Siphon clear liquid off the sediment | 1 day |
| Secondary ferment | Slow, clearing | 4 – 8 weeks |
| Bottle | Into sanitised, sealed bottles | 1 day |
| Age | Nothing appears to happen. It does. | 6 months + |
| Total to drinkable | 8 – 12 months |
Young mead is harsh and slightly hot. The same batch at eight months is a completely different drink, and at eighteen months different again. Anyone telling you mead is ready in six weeks has made something, but it is not finished.
Where the law draws the line
This matters more than the recipe, so we will be plain about it.
Making mead — or beer, or cider, or country wine — at home for your own consumption is lawful in South Africa. No licence, no registration, nothing to do.
Selling any of it is different. Producing liquor for sale requires a manufacturing licence under the Liquor Products Act 60 of 1989, and provincial liquor legislation governs the retail side on top of that. Giving a bottle to a friend is not selling. Putting it on a table at a market is.
And distilling is a separate matter entirely, on which we are unequivocal: manufacturing spirits requires a still registered with SARS under the Customs and Excise Act 91 of 1964. The folk status of witblits and mampoer misleads people badly, because the legitimate producers of both are licensed. We will write about distilling. We will never publish how to build a still.
What went wrong
The first batch stalled at about two-thirds fermented and sat there. We had skipped the yeast nutrient, on the reasoning that honey is food and the yeast would manage.
It did not. Honey is sugar and water and almost nothing else a yeast colony needs to build cells. The result was a sweet, under-attenuated, slightly harsh liquid that we eventually poured away.
What to do with the wax
Do not throw the cappings away. Rendered and filtered, they are the input for candles, salves and wraps — and beeswax is one of the few things on a smallholding that stores indefinitely and never loses value.