My first mead has plenty of sediment but tastes like honey water — has it fermented at all?

Almost certainly impatient, and the sediment is good news rather than a puzzle.

Two weeks is short for a mead. Honey is low in the nutrients yeast need, so mead ferments considerably more slowly than a beer or a wine of similar strength — three to four weeks is normal for the main fermentation and longer is common.

The sediment is yeast that has done work and dropped out, which means fermentation happened. What you are tasting is a mead partway through: some sugar converted, plenty remaining, and not enough alcohol yet to be obvious against a lot of residual sweetness.

The other thing to know is that young mead tastes bad, or at best uninteresting, almost universally. It needs months of ageing to become pleasant. Judging a two week old mead by taste tells you very little.

Stop tasting it and start measuring it, because taste is the least informative tool available here.

A hydrometer is inexpensive and tells you exactly what is happening. Take a reading now, and another in three or four days. If the number is falling, fermentation is proceeding and there is nothing to fix. If it is unchanged over several days at the same temperature, it has finished or stalled — and comparing the reading with your starting gravity tells you which.

If you did not take a starting reading, you can still work forwards: a stable reading over several days means it is done, whatever that number is.

Watch the airlock as a free secondary signal. Any bubbling at all means activity. But the reverse is not reliable — carbon dioxide takes a long time to clear and a lack of visible bubbles does not prove fermentation has stopped.

The things that genuinely cause a stall, worth checking against what you did:

Nutrients. This is the big one for mead. Honey lacks the nitrogen yeast needs, and without added nutrient the yeast struggles, ferments slowly and often stops early. Most mead guidance now recommends staggered nutrient additions during the first days.

Temperature. Too cold and the yeast goes dormant. Check where the vessel is sitting, particularly if it is on a cold floor.

Yeast health. Old yeast, or yeast pitched into liquid still too warm, gives a weak start.

Oxygen at the start. Yeast needs some at the beginning to build a population. Gently aerating the must before pitching helps considerably.

Your honey and water ratio is reasonable. If it has genuinely stalled, adding nutrient and gently rousing the sediment back into suspension restarts many stuck ferments.

One small note on your method: warming honey to 50 degrees is fine for dissolving it, and much hotter would drive off some of the aromatic compounds that make single-flower honey worth using.

Many people now skip heat entirely and simply shake or stir the honey into cool water, which takes longer and preserves more character. Something to try on the next batch — and there should be a next batch, because the first one is mostly for learning what your equipment and your patience are like.