Types of Mead
As with all wines, mead may be sweet, medium or dry. It may also be sparkling. To make sparkling mead one must start with a gravity of 1.100 and when fermentation has finished the hydrometer reading should be 1.000 or less. The mead may then be primed as for beers, and put in screw-stoppered bottles where refermentation will charge the mead with gas in the same way as beers. But because we use rather more sugar in mead making (the sugar being in the honey), it is not always safe to rely on the hydrometer to give deadly accurate results of fermentation. By this, I mean that we are sometimes unsure whether all sugar has been fermented out.
Now, if we primed a mead to make it sparkling and some sugar remained unfermented, this, in addition to that used from priming, would charge the mead with so much gas that the bottles might explode. So, my advice is to leave sparkling meads to those with experience, unless you are certain that all sugar has been fermented out before priming.
There are many sorts of mead: Sack mead is sweet mead of about 14% of alcohol by volume; Metheglin is the same as Sack mead but is spiced according to whim - and often ruined, incidentally, by the over zealous. This may be dry or sweet.
The spices and other flavoring are for some reason referred to as cruits. Their variety is limited only by the scope of the imagination. I am not fond of spiced mead - at least, not that flavored with ginger and clove. Not only do I dislike it for itself, but I consider it a waste of good honey to use ginger and cloves. If you want a ginger-flavored or clove-flavored wine, surely less regal basic ingredients could be used. Many people ruin elderberry wine with cloves so that they have clove wine rather than an elderberry wine finely flavored with clove. So don’t spoil good spiced meads or Metheglins by over-spicing.
Rosemary, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, mace and cinnamon are the usual flavorings and these must be added to suit the tastes of the operator. Start with a little and increase the amount until you have the strength of flavour required. This will vary greatly with each operator and the only guidance I can give is not to add more than one clove to the gallon to start with and only a very small amount of bruised root ginger. Better not to add enough and be able to increase the amount in safety than to over-do it at the start.