Blackberry Mead Recipe

The short answer: for one gallon of blackberry mead, dissolve 2.5 pounds of honey in water to make a gallon, ferment it with Lalvin 71B and a little yeast nutrient, then rack it onto about 3 pounds of blackberries once the first burst of fermentation calms down. Leave it on the fruit for three to four weeks, rack off, and let it clear. On paper that is an original gravity of about 1.088 and roughly 12% alcohol if it finishes dry.

A mead made with fruit is called a melomel. Blackberries suit it well: the berries bring tartness and deep color that stand up to the sweetness of honey. If you are new to honey wine, read how to make mead first; this page only covers what changes when the fruit goes in. If you wanted wine made with blackberries and sugar instead, that is our blackberry wine recipe.

Primary or Secondary: When to Add the Fruit

You can put the berries in on day one with the honey or wait until the mead has been fermenting for a couple of weeks. Both work, and they taste different.

Fruit in the primary

Craft A Brew, which sells mead supplies, describes the primary method in its guide to mead with fruit: the fruit goes in with the honey on day one, and its delicate aromas can be pushed out through the airlock, so the flavor is more subtle. Fruit in the primary also foams more and takes up room in the bucket.

Fruit in the secondary

The same guide prefers adding fruit once fermentation calms, after about two weeks, because it keeps a fuller, fresher fruit character. That is the method on the recipe card above. The honey ferments clean first, you rack off the yeast sediment, and the berries then steep in a mead that is already partly finished.

Fresh or frozen berries

Craft A Brew notes that freezing breaks down the cell walls and helps extract flavor and sugar, and that frozen fruit carries less risk of unwanted microbes than fresh. For fresh berries it suggests a short simmer or a crushed Campden tablet in the must 24 hours before the yeast. Frozen is the easy route: buy it, thaw it in the bag and go.

How Much Blackberry per Gallon

Sources do not agree on one number, so start with a middle figure and adjust next time. Craft A Brew says to use about 1 to 4 pounds of fruit per gallon, calls 3 pounds per gallon ideal, and says 1 to 2 pounds gives a milder fruit character. This recipe uses 3 pounds per gallon for that reason.

Two things shift the answer. If you want a drier, more honey-forward mead, start lower and taste before you rack. If you want a jammier, tarter mead, go toward the top of the range and plan for more time on the fruit. The fruit also adds its own sugar, so take a hydrometer reading after the berries have been in for a few days if you want to know the real strength. The mead calculator turns a gravity reading into a pounds-of-honey figure and an alcohol estimate.

How the original gravity is worked out

Honey adds roughly 35 points of gravity for every pound dissolved in a gallon, which is the rule our calculator uses. So 2.5 pounds in 1 gallon gives 1.0875, shown as about 1.088. If the mead ferments dry to 0.995, the standard formula, (OG minus FG) times 131.25, gives about 12% alcohol. Treat that as an estimate from honey alone; the berries will nudge both numbers.

Yeast for Blackberry Mead

Lalvin 71B is the default for fruit meads in this recipe. Lallemand lists it at 14% alcohol tolerance and a 59 to 86°F (15 to 30°C) range, positions it for fresh, fruity wines, and says it softens high-acid musts by partially metabolizing malic acid. Blackberries are tart, so a strain that rounds off some of that acid is a sensible match. Its 14% tolerance also leaves room above the 12% this recipe is aiming for.

Lalvin ICV-D47 is a common alternative sold as a wine and mead yeast. Lallemand lists it at 15% alcohol tolerance and a 59 to 82°F (15 to 28°C) range, so its top temperature is a little lower than 71B’s: keep the jug at the cool end, and still give it the staged nutrient doses, because honey is low in what yeast needs. Our guide to the best wine yeasts compares more strains.

Step by Step

1. Make the honey must and measure it

Warm the honey jar in a bowl of warm water, dissolve it in water until the batch is one gallon, and mix until nothing sits at the bottom. Undissolved honey gives a false hydrometer reading. The American Homebrewers Association mead tutorial skips boiling the must altogether to protect the honey aroma, and so does this recipe.

2. Pitch and feed in stages

The AHA tutorial advises cooling the must to 65 to 75°F (18 to 24°C) before pitching and recommends a staggered nutrient schedule, though it gives no amounts. A simple way to do that with the Fermax label dose of 1 teaspoon per gallon is to split it into three small additions: one at pitching, one a day or two later and one a couple of days after that. Honey is low in the nutrients yeast needs, so feeding in steps helps a clean, steady fermentation.

3. Ferment cool, then add the fruit

Keep the fermenter at 60 to 70°F (15 to 21°C), with cooler being better, as the AHA notes. Primary fermentation typically takes 2 to 3 weeks. When the airlock slows, rack onto the berries as described above. The full process for the honey part is in our how to make mead guide.

4. Rack off the fruit and age

After the fruit stage, lift out the bag and siphon the mead into a clean jug, leaving the sediment behind. Our guide to racking covers the technique. The AHA suggests a few weeks to a few months in secondary as a starting point; fruit meads usually reward more time.

Scaling to 5 Gallons

Multiply everything by five and keep the same gravity target. The recipe card is for a 1 gallon batch; this table is the same recipe at 5 gallons.

At 5 gallons the berries and the bag get heavy, so use two bags instead of one. Check the gravity at each step rather than trusting the multiplication: larger batches can differ because of how well the honey was dissolved. Split the nutrient into the same three doses.

Seeds, Pectin and Haze

Keep the seeds in a bag

Blackberries are full of small seeds. Craft A Brew recommends a nylon straining bag to keep seeds, skins and pulp out of the finished mead, since they account for a lot of the sediment. Crush the berries inside the bag, then lift the whole bag out when the fruit stage ends.

Pectic enzyme

Fruit carries pectin, which can leave a mead cloudy, and pectic enzyme breaks it down. Craft A Brew lists it in its fruit mead recipes. Add it with the berries and use the dose on the package, as brands differ.

If it stays hazy

Time and a cool place do most of the work, with a second or third racking. If it is still cloudy after a few months, read how to clear wine; the fining and time advice applies to mead as well.

Blackberry Mead and Blackberry Wine

The two drinks use the same fruit and different sugar. Blackberry mead gets its alcohol from honey, so you taste the honey through the fruit; blackberry wine is made with table sugar and leans on the berries alone. If you like fruit and honey together, see the strawberry mead recipe for a lighter fruit on the same method.