Two weeks ago, I set off for the grocery store to buy as much honey as I could drink.

No, I wasn’t fiending for a sugar fix. I was going to buy ingredients for an inspired — some might say “impulsive”  or even “rash” — project, the kind of demon-driven craving I get every couple of weeks to make something fermentable.

Mead was my intention, and to be quite honest, I had little idea of how to go about creating it. I’d read a magazine article and watched a few videos on YouTube while my son napped. Beyond that, I did almost no planning. (Which, in my haste, is how I ended up at the co-op, 30 minutes from home, without spare diapers or wipes and holding a large toddler who smelled like the back end of a Brooklyn garbage truck.)

Nope. Absolutely zero forethought. And yet, despite myself, I have what I believe will be a delicious honey wine fermenting in my closet.

The point being that making a basic mead is almost idiot proof. We’re talking Pop Tarts and paint-by-numbers kind of ease. Heat water, mix in honey, throw it all in a bucket with yeast. Wait.

Now, I realize this is naive. Professionals would take exception to my characterization. After I spoke with Michael Fairbrother at Moonlight Meadery last week, I realized that there were a lot of things I could have done better.

There are all sorts of meads with fruits and spices, using a variety of honey types (yes, it really does matter where the bees got their pollen), and finishes from sweet to semi-sweet and dry. Moonlight, which is in Londonderry, N.H., keeps about 25 different meads on hand at any one time.

This week, in advance of AHA Mead Day on Saturday, we’ll just concentrate on the basics.

A Few Points on Flavor

For a “forgotten” beverage like mead, many people tend to want to compare it to wine or something else with which they are familiar. But you should resist the urge, Fairbrother said.

“When people ask me to compare it to a wine, I can’t,” he told me in a recent phone interview. “That’s like asking, can you make a hot dog taste like a cheese cake. I’m not sure I’d want to.”

Mead is usually packaged in corked wine bottles and it kind of looks like a white wine, which I think is where the comparison usually comes from. The alcoholic strength is also similar to wine, typically ranging from 10-16 % ABV.

A lot of people assume that mead is cloyingly sweet. I have to admit, before my first sip of mead about three years ago, I also expected it to be a syrupy sweet drink. Not so. You can have quite dry meads, just as you would a wine (damn… there’s that comparison again.).

The characteristics are all over the map, from earthy wildflower meads to more delicate tupelo honey or orange blossom. Moonlight’s basic mead, called “Sensual,” uses wildflower honey and some people have said they can taste concord grapes, which would have been in bloom when the bees were gathering nectar, according to Moonlight’s website.

Even suggesting that wildflower honey has a specific flavor, however, is misleading, Fairbrother said. Early season honey is different than late season and is influenced by the conditions under which it is made.

“Each one, it’s like malt, using crystal malt or pale malt,” he said. “It really can range based on geography.”

The Process (What I Did, and What I Should Have Done)

Fairbrother gets his honey from beekeepers all across New Hampshire.

I used clover honey from Waterville, Vt. Why did I choose this? Because that’s what I could buy in bulk from the local food co-op.

Honey being your primary fermentable ingredient, the amount you use will ultimately determine the alcohol level. I decided to go for a mead in the vicinity of 11 percent. This being my first attempt, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on honey when there was a good chance that this would be the worst batch of mead I’d ever make.

If you’re shooting for the middle ground, like I was, a rough calculation would be 2.5 to 3 lbs. of honey per gallon of water to create the “must” — as the water-honey mixture is called prior to fermentation.

Yeast-type also matters. Many recipes I saw recommend Lallvin 71B-122 yeast. As with the honey choice, I went with what was immediately available to me — a 50-cent packet of Red Star Premiere Cuvee wine yeast. It’s supposed to be a neutral yeast that works well at a broad range of temperatures, which was important because I was making this during a heat wave.

The basics of making mead are pretty much as simple as I described earlier — mix honey in water, pitch yeast and ferment. But there are some crucial decisions that I made along the way.

The first was whether to boil. This is a much-debated point among mead makers. The advantages to boiling seem to be all about sanitation — if you’re worried about nasties in the raw honey or water that would affect the outcome, then boiling for 10-15 minutes should take care of them.

But the drawbacks from boiling are deteriorated flavor. It can create a staleness to the mead — think of a roll straight from the bakery versus eating one that’s been on the shelf for a week, Fairbrother said.

“When you heat the honey up, you can clearly see a difference in the texture and aroma,” he said.

Moonlight is a no-boil meadery, and Fairbrother said he has never had a problem with off-flavors from contamination.

Another big influence is not only the choice of yeast, but how you prepare it. When I made my mead, I just dumped the yeast in dry. But again, it seems I made a hasty choice.

You should always rehydrate the yeast. There are nutrients in the water that help “keep it happy,” he said. Think about how you feel after eating a salad with fresh local produce versus eating a hamburger from McDonald’s. If you had to go running afterwards, how do you think you’d perform after either meal?

“If you keep the yeast happy, it will ferment clearly,” he said.

Finally, temperature control matters as much as it does in homebrewing. Fermenting too hot will yield high fusel alcohols that are unpleasant to taste. Fairbrother recommends temperatures below 68-degrees.

How Long Do I Have to Wait?

So, my mead has been going for two weeks now and my big question is how long do I have to wait.

Turns out, not as long as I thought.

I checked the gravity after just six days and it had already dropped to 1.028, which is still pretty sweet but within range. You’ll want to feed it nutrients and oxygenate the must by stirring it vigorously 1-2 times for the first few days. This also releases the CO2. (Stirring the liquid during fermentation runs counter to everything I’ve learned about homebrewing — when making beer, you don’t touch it after you pitch the yeast, and you certainly don’t expose it to oxygen. But mead is different. The yeast will eat up the oxygen. You just don’t want to mess with it after it finishes fermenting.)

Fairbrother’s sweetest mead is around 1.030, though most finish around 1.008, he said. That’s about what I’m shooting for.

It used to be that meads would age for a year or two to mellow out the off flavors, but improved processes now have really shortened the time, Fairbrother said. The meads at Moonlight are in the bottle and ready to serve within 3 months.

This is encouraging to impatient guys like me. But I realize that patience is exactly what I’m going to need if I’m going to get good at this.

Just as with anything, practice will improve your performance. Fairbrother has been making mead for 16 years and produced some award winning batches. (The former software engineer only opened Moonlight Meadery last year, though.)

He said it took him years before he really understood what he was doing, to eliminate some bad habits that eventually led to his becoming a first class professional.

It may be easy to make mead, but to make it well requires work.

“We can go out and play basketball,” he said, “but we’re not going to be Larry Bird right away.”