Why does meringue weep or bead?
Weeping and beading look similar -- a wet meringue -- but they're two different failures with two different causes, and they need opposite fixes.
The kitchen answer
Weeping (a pool of liquid under baked meringue) usually means the protein foam was over-whipped or overbaked. Beading (small syrup droplets on top) usually means the sugar never fully dissolved into the egg whites in the first place. Same symptom category, opposite root causes.
What's actually happening
Meringue's foam is a protein network (see Eggs & Emulsions) holding both air and liquid in place. Weeping happens when that network is stretched past the point where it can still hold onto its water -- from over-whipping, from baking too hot or too fast, or simply from sitting too long after baking, especially somewhere humid. The network doesn't collapse outright, it just slowly squeezes liquid back out, the same underlying idea as syneresis in other protein gels.
Beading is a completely different mechanism: undissolved sugar granules pull moisture out of the meringue by osmosis as it bakes, forming small syrup droplets on the surface. It's a sugar problem, not a protein problem -- the foam itself can be structurally fine.
What does that mean for your recipe
The fix depends entirely on which one you actually have. Beading is solved before baking: dissolve the sugar fully by adding it gradually while whipping, or rub a pinch between your fingers to check it's no longer gritty. Weeping is solved by baking technique: lower and slower rather than hot and fast, and letting meringue cool gradually in a turned-off oven rather than pulling it straight into open, humid air.
What can go wrong
- Sugar dumped in all at once: the classic cause of beading -- too much surface area of undissolved sugar for the whipping to fully dissolve in time.
- Baked too hot: the protein network sets and overshoots before excess moisture has a chance to evaporate out gently, trapping liquid that later weeps out.
- Over-whipped past stiff peaks: the network is stretched thin enough that it can't hold its water even before baking starts.
- Cooling in a humid kitchen: baked meringue is hygroscopic and will reabsorb ambient moisture, which looks like weeping even when the bake itself was fine.
Try it yourself
Same meringue, two deliberate mistakes:
- Whip one batch normally, adding sugar gradually.
- Whip a second batch, dumping all the sugar in at once early.
- Bake both identically and compare the surface after cooling.
Watch for: the dumped-sugar batch developing visible syrup beads on the surface even if the foam whipped up looking totally normal beforehand -- direct proof beading is a sugar-dissolution problem, independent of how well the foam itself formed.
Go deeper
Sugar actually helps meringue stability generally -- it raises the temperature at which egg proteins coagulate and gives the foam a more viscous liquid phase to hold onto, which is why meringues are more forgiving to whip than plain egg whites. The beading failure is really the same sugar-and-water relationship working in reverse: sugar that never got the chance to dissolve into that liquid phase instead pulls water out of it.