Unlike many of the games that inspired it, Stardew Valley doesn't shy away from more adult topics like combat PTSD and alcoholism. In fact, you can make several types of alcohol on your farm by throwing a variety of ingredients into a keg and then either selling them, aging them, or gifting them to villagers.
One such alcohol is mead. While wine is easy enough to make (just add any kind of fruit to a keg), it's harder to know how to make mead unless you know what its main ingredient is. This Stardew Valley guide will explain what that ingredient is, which variety is best to use, and what to do with mead once you have some.
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How to Get Mead
Just like in real life, the main ingredient of mead is honey. To get honey, you need to unlock and build a bee house. The bee house unlocks at Farming 3, and each one costs 40 wood, 8 coal, 1 iron bar, and 1 maple syrup.
Every four days, a bee house will produce honey. In most cases, this honey is "wild honey" and sells for 100g. If the bee house is close to a set of fully grown flowers, the honey will be a special flower honey that sells for extra. In particular, poppy honey sells for 380g, and fairy rose honey sells for 680g. All these prices go up by 40 percent if you have the Artisan profession.
To make mead, all you have to do is add honey to a keg. Mead is easily the fastest alcohol you can produce: unlike beer, pale ale, and wine, honey only needs 10 in-game hours to become mead.
Mead sells for 200g. This is twice the price of wild honey, but this value doesn't change when you use flower honey. In other words, you're usually better off selling special honey instead of turning it into mead. The only flower honey that sells for less is tulip honey. On the other hand, you can age mead in a cask for up to a month to double its price to 400g. Only fairy rose honey is worth more than that.
What to Do With Mead
- Mead is a potential requirement for the Brewer's Bundle if you choose the "Remixed" Community Center Bundles when starting a new game.
- You need to ship at least one bottle of mead to complete the "Ship Everything" requirement for True Perfection.
- Willy and Pam both love mead.
- You can buy a bottle of mead from Gus when he's manning the bar at the Ginger Island Resort.
- If you wear a pirate hat, eye patch, or deluxe pirate hat, enter the Pirate Cove while the pirates are present and speak to the bartender; he'll give you a bottle of mead for free. You only get one bottle per night, but you can get a new bottle each time you visit.
- Adding mead (or any form of alcohol) to the sewing machine will get you a Black Leather Jacket.
