Works fine for me. Pitch some mead base, go about your busines exploring or mining, what ever. Make some more mead base of whatever you need next, pitch it when the other is ready, go about your business, repeat. Same for smelting, farming. Its just part of the routine.

I usually end up with more meads than I can use pretty quickly. Hardly make it through 2 batches of frost resistance mead before I have a wolf cape, then that mead is not really needed.