Recipes and Designer

Recipes & the Recipe Designer

MeadOS ships with 38 built-in recipes and the tools to scale, customise, design and export your own.

The built-in collection

The recipes span the classic mead families:

• Traditional / show meads — honey-forward, nothing to hide behind
• Melomels — fruit meads (strawberry, forest fruits, blueberry, raspberry, cherry, blackcurrant, peach…)
• Cysers — apple
• Pyments — grape
• Metheglins — spiced and herbal (ginger, chai, vanilla, hibiscus, rose, lavender, hopped…)
• Bochets — caramelised honey
• Braggots — honey-and-malt
• Sack & port-style meads — high-gravity, sweet, long-aged
• Acerglyn — honey and maple
• Sparkling / bottle-conditioned meads — five of them (champagne-style traditional, cyser, session hydromel, berry, ginger)

Universal brewing conventions

Every recipe's steps carry the same good-practice conventions automatically, so guidance stays consistent everywhere it appears (recipe page, coach, calendar):

• Water reads "top up to the N L mark", never a fixed pour, so the volume can't overshoot.
• Racking is gated on a finished fermentation (a stable gravity across two readings), not a calendar day.
• Stabilising before backsweetening always calls for potassium sorbate and metabisulfite together — metabisulfite alone won't stop a restart.
• A bottling step is described as the earliest sensible point, not a deadline.

Cross-linked fruit-timing variants

The four most aroma-sensitive melomels — forest fruits, strawberry, raspberry and blueberry — each come in two linked versions: fruit-in-primary (deeper colour and body) and fruit-in-secondary (fresher, brighter aroma). Each version explains the trade-off and links to its sibling.

The recipe page

Open any recipe to find:

• Scale — a slider (with metric / US / imperial readout) that rescales ingredients, nutrient sachet counts, pectic-enzyme doses and the cost estimate live. Sub-gram additions (pectic enzyme, metabisulfite, sorbate) show to two decimals so they never round to "0 g".
• Ingredients — the scaled list.
• Source your honey — see below.
• Recommended yeast and Nutrient strategy — strain picks (top pick / also works / avoid) and a protocol (TOSNA or SNA) with recipe-specific notes.
• Targets — OG, FG, ABV.
• Brew cost estimate — using your configured prices.
• Step by step — the day-by-day schedule.

Every honey, rated for the recipe

The "Source your honey" panel rates every honey in the library for the recipe you're viewing — a hand-curated verdict per pairing:

Badge	Meaning
PRIMARY	The honey the recipe is built around
✓ GREAT FIT	An excellent match
✓ GOOD FIT	Works well
**~ WORKABLE**	Usable, but shifts the character — use with intent
✗ NOT IDEAL / CLASH	Fights this recipe

Each entry includes a note on what that honey specifically does to this mead — flavour, aroma, colour, body, fermentation behaviour, handling and aging. Honeys you currently have in stock are highlighted and pinned to the top of their tier, so you can tell at a glance whether the jar on your shelf is a good choice. On desktop the list is a two-column grid; on a phone it's a single readable column.

Scaling, planning and brewing

From a recipe you can:

• Brew This Recipe — start a live batch at the current scale
• Plan a Batch — queue it onto the Fermenter Schedule and shopping list without occupying a vessel yet
• Brew Session Planner — print a pre-brew checklist (scaled ingredients, equipment, sanitation steps)

Custom recipes & templates

Create your own recipes, fork a built-in one to tweak it, save reusable templates (variations), and mark favourites to pin them to the top.

The Recipe Designer

Don't want to do the honey maths? The Designer wizard asks for a style, batch volume, target ABV and sweetness, then works backwards to propose honey quantity, OG/FG targets, a yeast that can reach the ABV, a nutrient strategy, an ingredient list and a starting step schedule. Everything stays editable before you save or brew it.

Import & export

• BeerXML — import recipes from other brewing software, and export yours.
• PDF — produce a clean, print-ready version of any recipe.

See also

• Libraries — the honey, yeast and nutrient knowledge the ratings draw on
• Batches & Fermentation — what happens after you hit "Brew"