Ingredients
Honey makes mead. Good honey makes good mead. Great honey makes great mead! Spend some time tasting different kinds of honey. Train yourself to taste the underlying flavour beyond the sweetness. Those more subtle flavours will be added to your mead. Every honey is unique!
Cheap Supermarket Honey
Be wary of cheap supermarket honey. It may or may not even be honey; often it is sugar syrup due to some shady practices! The best way to obtain good honey is to buy it directly from a beekeeper. Your local “beek” (beekeeping geek) is great, as are online beekeeping websites. Farmers markets are a great place to find your local bees.
Varietal Honey
Varietal honey comes from bees that have pollinated mostly one type of flower. These honeys can be all shades, from extremely light to extremely dark. All of them are different and can have wonderful uses for the creative mead maker. Try to pair the honey you have with the recipe you want to make!
Raw Honey
Honey should be raw. If it has wax and bee parts in it, it is good raw honey. Never, ever boil honey. Even if you are making a bochet, which is a variety of mead that involves caramelising the honey sugars before fermenting. When making a bochet, slow cooking or using a sous vide is better. Boiling drives off the wonderful aroma compounds that make raw honey worth seeking.