Homemade Lilac Mead Recipe

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Lilac Mead Recipe

This mead recipe comes to us from award-winning meadmaker Steve Fletty and combines a unique floral flavor of springtime with a traditional orange blossom mead using a lilac simple syrup to back sweeten the mead. For more tasting notes and some video of the process, see this Chop & Brew video. Thanks to Fletty for sharing the recipe. Lilac season is an incredibly short window so plan ahead for this one come spring.

For more mead mayhem with Steve Fletty (including more recipes!), check out our episodes, Mead Masters: Steve Fletty Part 1 &

Part 2.

Base Mead: Orange Blossom Traditional Mead

Volume: 3.75 gallons

OG: 18.2 BRIX / 1.073

FG: 1.002 (before backsweetening)

Ingredients:

  • 8 lbs orange blossom honey, or any good-quality light honey that will complement the lilac
  • 3 gallons water, filtered

Nutrients: 

  • 4 g Fermaid K
  • 1.5 g DAP

Optional Additives:

Yeast:

  • Sensy (rehydrated with GoFerm: 1.25 g of GoFerm per gram of yeast)
    • Note: Sensy is a less common yeast. If you can’t find it, possible yeast substitutes include BA-11 or QA23.

Process

Blend honey and water. O.G. 1.073. Add nutrients, optional additives. Opti-mum White enhances mouthfeel and preserves freshness, and oak cubes add tannin. Aerate, pitch yeast. Ferment to dry. FG: 1.002

Batch volume was approximately 3.75 gallons. The batch was split in half. Each half was back sweetened with different simple syrups: one lilac (see recipe below), one gin botanical (a recipe for another time). 

Lilac Simple Syrup

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups orange blossom honey
  • 1.5 cups water
  • 2 cups lilac blossoms, rinsed, petals plucked and collected. (Do not use whole branch or green stem material)

Heat the combined honey and water to boiling. Kill heat. Add lilac blossoms to syrup. Let steep 30 minutes. Pour into containers and cool.

Back Sweetening

I did this in stages. First, I added 1 cup of the lilac syrup to half of the finished 1.002 base mead. Tasted. It needed more sweetness and lilac. Added another 1.5 cups of the lilac syrup. Tasted good. Final gravity after back sweetening was FG: 1.024. Bottled. 

One last thing to consider. I felt like the overall lilac character could be much higher in the final mead, so if I do this again I will likely increase (perhaps double?) the amount of lilac petals I use for the simple syrup recipe, but keep the volumes of water and honey the same.

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