Ginger & Buckwheat Mead 2025

This is a sparkling session mead built on two bold flavours: dark, malty buckwheat honey and fiery fresh ginger. It’s dry, slightly savoury, and finishes with a clean ginger heat. It’s closer in spirit to a traditional ginger beer than a dessert-style mead — no fruit, no fluff, just raw ingredients doing their thing.

Meads like this take inspiration from both farmhouse brewing and spicy soft drinks, but this one doesn’t quite fit in either camp. It’s its own thing — earthy, spicy, and proudly unfussy.

We brewed a small 5L batch using 100% buckwheat honey and a generous 200g of fresh ginger. After fermentation, it was back-sweetened with erythritol to take the edge off the dryness, but it’s still firmly on the drier side. The mead cleared surprisingly well on its own after cold crashing, and was bottle conditioned for natural sparkle.

The result is a fiery, dark session mead with a savoury backbone and a clean, spicy finish. It’s best served cold — ideally with food or on a warm day where it can cut through anything.

• 900g buckwheat honey

• 200g fresh ginger root (sliced and boiled)

• 42g erythritol (in 110ml water)

• Water to 5L

• Lalvin EC-1118 yeast

• Yeast nutrient

• Malic and citric acid

• OG: 1.043

• FG: 0.998

• ABV: ~5.9%

• Fermented cool (~18°C) with EC-1118

• Cold crashed for clarity

• Back-sweetened with erythritol

• Primed with sugar and bottle conditioned for sparkle

Best enjoyed young while the ginger still kicks, but will mellow slightly over 3–6 months. The savoury depth might develop with time but don’t expect it to sweeten.