General Information Sanitizers Equipment
Bottle Caps Corks Must
Fruit Fruit Juice Leaves

The most important part in mead making is to make sure that anything and everything that comes in contact with your mead during the entire process be sanitized. Sanitizing your equipment and everything else, will keep wild yeast and bacteria from getting into your mead and potentially ruining it. There can be nothing worse than spending all that time and money brewing a batch of mead only to have it turn out foul tasting and/or smelling or becoming a large batch of vinegar.

When preparing a Chlorine solution for sanitation purposes you should use 1 oz. (2 tbsp) bleach per 5 gal. of water. You can use your generic laundry bleach for this purpose, just make sure that it is plain bleach, do not get the scented kind.

A second way to sanitize is to use 1 oz. (2 tbsp) per 1 gal. let soak a minimum of 10 minutes, then rinse. You may rinse with tap water if you like. The idea here being that soaking will kill the infectious organisms. As tap water is clean enough to drink it should not impart anything "nasty" to the equipment being cleaned. If rinsing with tap water worries you, you could always rinse with distilled water, spring water may have minerals in it but you could use that too.

Iodine solutions are also available from your beer supplier. Follow the directions on the label.

You should sanitize any equipment that will come into contact with your mead  when it is not boiling. This includes the starter bottle, the stirring spoons, to the carboys, airlocks, bottles, and anything else that will come into contact with the mead. To sanitize the equipment you should totally immerse it in a bleach solution for about an hour. Before using the equipment be sure to rinse the equipment with water (bottled spring water is good). You can also use B-Brite as a sanitizer.

You can sanitize bottle caps in an Iodine solution (follow the instructions on the bottle).

Corks are generally prepared for insertion by soaking in a strong sulphite solution. A little bit of sulphite will end up in your bottle, but probably only a few ppm (much less than the 50-100 ppm levels normally used in wine).

Corks can also be soaked in boiling water for a few minutes to sanitize/soften the corks before insertion. This is a good alternative if you do not want to use sulphites.

See the chapter on preparing your must: Boiling vs. Pasteurizing vs. Neither.

In order to sanitize fresh or frozen fruit, or plants such as mint leaves, you may sanitize them by soaking them in a solution of crushed Campden tablets (Sodium Metabisulfite). Use one tablet per each gallon of fruit then let sit for 24 hours prior to racking the must onto the fruit.

Example Use of Campden Tablets:
If you add 1 Campden tablet to 1 gallon of fruit, you get an approximate concentration of 25 ppm sulphites. The acid in the fruit rapidly liberates the SO2 which is the active sanitizing compound. The rate of the liberation of the SO2 is proportional to the relative acidity of the must. Assuming a 25% drop in available sodium metabisulphate upon dilution by adding the must (we'll say 5 gallons for the sake of discussion) you end up with an overall level (or addition) of 3.125 ppm sulphites:

25 ppm - 6.25 = 18.75 ppm (after 24 hours)

18.75/6 (total gallons must and fruit) = 3.125 ppm

Fruit may also be sanitized by adding it to the must if you are using the pasteurization method. If you are boiling your must you should not add the fruit to the must while the temperature is still above 170 degrees F, by doing so you run the risk of "setting" any pectin that may be in the fruit which will lead to a cloudy mead.

Fruit juice (grapes, cherries, etc) may be sanitized by one of two methods. First, you may use the pasteruization method. To pasteurize the juice you should put the juice into a pot, raise the temperature to 170 degrees F and hold there for 15-20 minutes. As with the fruit, adding fruit juice to the must while boiling will cause the pectin in the fruit juice to "set" leading to a cloudy mead. An alternative is to crush Campden tablets and add them to the juice and allow the juice to sit for a 24 hours to kill all the bacteria.

Leaves, such as mint, may be sanitized by rinsing them in a solution of crushed Campden tablets.