Equipment for Small Batch Mead

You can make mead with a bucket and a balloon. You can also build a fermentation lab. Most of us land somewhere in between. This article lists the equipment that actually pays for itself in small-batch (5–20 L) farmhouse-style mead making, and what to skip.

The Minimum Viable Setup

Everything you need to make the base recipe at 12 L:

Primary fermenter — 25 L food-grade plastic bucket with lid and grommeted hole for an airlock. ~€15.
Secondary fermenter — 12–15 L glass carboy or PET demijohn. ~€20–40.
Airlock + bung — three-piece or S-shape, both fine. <€5.
Auto-siphon + tubing — 3 m of food-grade silicone tubing and a plastic auto-siphon. ~€20.
Hydrometer + test tube — for tracking gravity. ~€10.
Thermometer — stick-on LCD on the fermenter is enough. ~€3.
Sanitizer — StarSan or equivalent (see Sanitation Basics). ~€15 for a bottle that lasts a year.
Bottles + closures — reuse cleaned wine bottles; new corks per batch.
Kitchen scale — for weighing honey and nutrient. You probably already own one.

That’s the whole list. Total outlay for everything above: ~€100–150, less if you scavenge bottles.

Worth Adding Early

Things that aren’t strictly necessary but pay for themselves within a few batches:

pH meter — see pH and Acid Management. A €30 meter is fine; calibrate before each use.
Brewing bag (BIAB-style mesh bag) — for whole-fruit batches. Makes removing fruit at the end of maceration a 10-second job instead of a 30-minute filtering exercise.
Bottling wand — a simple spring-loaded tip valve at the end of your siphon tubing. Eliminates 90 % of the mess of bottling.
Refractometer — measures sugar in fruit juice or fresh must. Useful for cysers from variable apple juice.
Carboy brush — long-handled brush for cleaning narrow-necked secondary vessels.
Second secondary fermenter — so you can keep brewing while the previous batch ages.

Worth Adding Once You’re Hooked

For brewers running a few batches a year:

Floor corker — if you’re using natural cork. The handheld kind is technically possible but miserable.
Cold storage — a dedicated fridge or cool cellar. Cold crashing dramatically improves clarity and shortens timelines.
Vacuum racking pump — replaces the auto-siphon for transferring between vessels with less oxygen pickup.
Stainless conical fermenter — overkill for one batch, lovely if you brew often. Only consider if you’re regularly brewing >20 L.
TA test kit — €15, lets you actually measure acid instead of guessing.

What to Skip

A list of things often suggested for mead that, in our experience, don’t earn their place at small-batch scale:

Glass primary fermenter for primary fermentation. Plastic buckets are easier to clean, easier to fit a brewing bag in, and easier to move around. Save the glass for secondary.
CO₂ tank for “just in case” purging. Useful if you bottle frequently from kegs; otherwise a luxury for a few batches per year.
Stir plates for yeast starters. Kveik (which our recipes default to) doesn’t need a stir plate to build a healthy starter.
Custom-blended water salts. Mead is forgiving — see Water in Mead Making.
High-end pH meters. Anything labeled “pool tester” or sold in a wine-shop is enough for mead.

Materials Cheat Sheet

A few materials notes that come up regularly:

Plastic — only use HDPE/PP labeled food-grade. Avoid containers that previously held detergents or non-food liquids; plasticizers leach.
Stainless — 304 or 316 only. Avoid mystery-grade stainless from import marketplaces; it can pit under acid contact.
Copper — fine for short contact during fermentation, but copper taste will accumulate over long aging. Avoid copper racking canes for finished mead.
Wood — only use food-grade barrels and only sanitize with sulfite/peracetic, not StarSan (acid is harder to neutralize from wood).
Glass — basically inert. The default for everything except primary.

A Note on Scaling

The base recipe is designed around 12 L finished volume because that’s a sweet spot:

Big enough to justify the time and cleanup.
Small enough that the fermenter, secondary, and bottles all fit a normal home.
Small enough that an experimental batch isn’t catastrophic if it doesn’t work.

If you find yourself wanting to scale up beyond 25 L, almost everything on the “minimum viable” list needs an upgrade simultaneously — at which point a stainless conical and a kegging system start making sense. Below that, the simple bucket-and-carboy setup is genuinely hard to beat.

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