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I think that campden tablets lend an odor to my mead that requires my letting the wine breathe for a while. I get headaches from this too.
Assuming I'm right about this, would pasteurization of the must a viable option? Can I use less than the recommended amount of campden tablets and be safe?
Honey is aseptic. The water content is too low for microorganisms to develop, so there is no need to pasteurize or use campden. Campden is used in winemaking to eliminate the wild yeasts which exist on grape skins, this helps ensure a more consistent product by eliminating the variation introduced by wild yeasts. None of this is necessary with mead and in fact will be detrimental by either driving off volatile aromatics (heat) or by introducing potential off-flavors (sulfites).
The more pedantic will argue that honey can never be perfectly sterile (hence why you aren't supposed to feed honey to infants, for example) and so there's always some tiny, theoretical chance of something nasty being in there. In practice the risk is so minuscule as to be negligible. The alcohol resulting from fermentation should kill off any stray spores that might have been in the original honey.
The general recommendation from award winning meadmakers is to use neither heat nor campden.
Yes, you can make mead without campden tablets. I only use them for stabilizing the mead at the end. 1 campden tablet per gallon to ensure fermentation does not kick back up. I have never added them to the beginning.
Some people will pasteurize/boil their meads, claiming that pasteurization will kill all impurities. That is an old school mentality, as pasturing and boiling strips the honey of many of it's flavors and aromas.
If you keg your meads or consume them quickly, then you don't need to worry about stabilization. Although, I personally will add some stabilizer in at the end, you can never be too careful.
I have made honey mead pasteurizing it and without. There is significant taste in both. The unpasteurized mead has more depth of flavor than the pasteurized mead.
Almost all of us buy honey from the store which has been pasteurized. Unless you are buying raw honey it may be safe to heat it.
For dry mead I never add campden tablets. If I back sweeten the mead with honey I add potassium metabisulfite before I bottle it. Some experts recommend adding potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfites to the honey before you bottle it. But when I read the dangers of potassium sorbate it really scared me. That thing can even catch fire as per the description.
I pasteurize (bring the must to 165 for about 15 minutes). I haven't had a problem.
