Mead

The obvious use for honey you cannot sell

High-moisture honey ferments on its own schedule, which is a disaster in a jar and exactly the intention here. A batch you would not sell as shelf-stable is good mead honey, and so is honey that crystallized, darkened in storage, or came off frames you would rather not have bottled.

What it takes

Honey, water, yeast, nutrient, time. The equipment overlaps almost entirely with what you already own for extraction: food-grade buckets, a way to keep things clean, and somewhere at a stable temperature.

The thing it takes most of is patience. Mead is slower than beer and often slower than wine, and a batch rushed to bottle is a batch that carbonates in the bottle, which is a different sort of problem.

Which honey

Varietal character carries through, so a distinctive honey makes a distinctive mead and a bland one makes a bland one. Darker honeys give more flavor and more color. There is no reason to use your best-selling honey when your least-salable honey is better suited.

The license is the hard part

Home production limits, permitted quantities and what may be given away all vary. Check before planning anything commercial, not after a batch is made.

The 7 percent line, and what it decides

Two federal numbers do most of the work, and they are worth knowing before you choose a recipe rather than after.

Seven percent alcohol by volume is the jurisdiction line. At or above it, the product is a wine under the Federal Alcohol Administration Act and carries federal wine labeling, including a certificate of label approval before you sell across state lines. Below it, label jurisdiction sits with the Food and Drug Administration instead, which is a different label with different required elements. A session mead formulated at six and a half percent and one at seven and a half are not the same regulatory product.

Fourteen percent is the ceiling for standard honey wine. Above that you are outside the standard and into formula territory. Standard honey wine also has to be derived wholly from honey apart from sugar, water and added alcohol, may not carry coloring or flavoring other than hops, and may not have wine spirits added. A mead with fruit, spices or vanilla in it is a perfectly good product and it is not standard honey wine, which means a TTB formula approval before a label approval.

Underneath both, a meadery needs a federal basic permit as a winery. That is the step people underestimate, and it is measured in months rather than weeks.

Where to start

A one gallon batch from honey you were not going to sell, made for yourself, to find out whether you like doing it. That costs almost nothing, uses equipment you own, and answers the only question that matters before anybody thinks about licenses.

References