Introduction to the Second Edition
Mead Made Easy wasn’t a huge commercial success, but I sold all but five of the thousand copies I printed back in the 1990s, and recently had some people tell me it was still a useful book, even though it’s now out of date by more than twenty years. That led to me deciding to bring the book back, along with a number of updates I had made notes on during the intervening years.
As I write this, I have no plans to produce another print version, though write.as has facilities for producing an epub. If you're interested in that, please use one of the contact addresses to get in touch with me.
One of the major additions is adding Dave's Notes to many of the recipes. I've also added recipes. With more experience and time, I think a lot of these recipes illustrate useful principles. A smaller, but perhaps more useful change was updating many of the links. Time moves on, and some websites die, while others are born. I’ve tried to link to the original sites I used back in the 1990s where possible, often linking to the Internet Archive version. But I’ve also tried to add new links where appropriate so Mead Made Easy can be useful for a few more years.
I've almost tripled the original bibliography. Turns out, there's been a lot of good writing about mead in the past three decades. I also have a friend who has been experimenting with kveik yeast and traditional Scandinavian farmhouse brewing which seems like it meshes well with my philosophy of brewing mead. And I think that was the real strength of the book. Brewing mead should be easy. Yeast can digest honey very easily, and the only thing lacking is the nutrients they need. Add those, either from fruit, malt, or commercial yeast nutrient, and yeast will happily turn honey into alcohol, and pretty quickly, too.
I hope you find it useful.