Mead Made Easy

You need to sterilize anything that's going to come in contact with the must (honey and water mixture) when it's not boiling. This includes your fermenter, your funnel, and the airlock for the fermenter. I sterilize this kind of stuff with bleach (note that bleach isn't the friendliest household disinfectant, but it's cheap and readily available – the US EPA has a list of registered household disinfectants you may want to look at), but B-Brite works fine, too. Iodophor is also typically used in brewing, but you will need to clean things thoroughly before using it.

About a teaspoon of bleach in 5 gallons of water in the fermenter works. I fill the fermenter with water, add the bleach and let it sit. If there's any crud left from the last batch, this is the time to soak it loose and get everything nice and clean. If you're using a plastic fermenter, you can just toss the lid, the funnel and the airlock into it. This doesn't need to soak long, as bleach will kill any bugs on contact. I usually get the fermenter soaking with the bleach solution and then go start the water heating. It'll take the water a while to come to a boil, during which time I'm finishing the cleaning.

Okay, time to dump out the bleach/water mixture. If you've got a plastic fermenter, just let the funnel and airlock rattle around in your wash-tub or bathtub for now. If you're using a carboy, dump the bleach/water mixture over the parts that haven't yet been sanitized. Rinse everything thoroughly with cold water until you can't smell bleach on anything. Two rinses does the job for me—your mileage may vary. Assemble up the fermenter with a little water in the airlock (most of 'em have a `fill' line on 'em). If you've got a plastic fermenter, you can put the funnel inside it for now. If you've got a carboy, just keep the funnel somewhere clean and away from breezes that might have airborne baddies. You'll be pouring boiling must through the funnel later, so it's not as critical to keep that clean (but when you're not boiling things, you'll want it sanitized, and it's a good habit to get into now).

#howTo #sanitation

Prev Next

Ingredients

• 10 lbs honey
• 1 oz Saaz hops
• 2 lbs frozen blueberries
• 1 gallon apple juice (buy the no-preservatives kind)
• 1 pack champagne yeast (I used Red Star)

Directions

• Bring about 3 gallons of water to a boil.
• Add the honey, stirring until it's dissolved.
• Bring the must back to a boil, being careful not to boil it over. You can do this by stirring it. If it starts to boil over, turn down the heat.
• Add ½ oz Saaz hops.
• Boil for 15 minutes, skimming off any scum that forms (it'll be beeswax, bee parts, and such from the honey, not anything you'll want to drink).
• While it's boiling, you can get the blueberries ready, by putting them in a hop-boiling bag.
• Reduce the heat to keep it at a simmer. It shouldn't boil again from this point on.
• Add the blueberries, mashing the bag around a bit over the pot before you dump it in—you want to break the fruit up, to extract the juice more easily.
• Simmer for 10 more minutes.
• Add the remaining hops (about ½ oz).
• Simmer for 5 more minutes, getting the fermenter ready by putting the apple juice / cider in it.
• Add the hot must to the cider, and bring the fermenter up to 5 gallons total by adding cool water. When you pour the must into the fermenter, it'll splash, which will aerate the must. This gives the yeast the oxygen they need to get started.
• Seal up the fermenter and wait for it to cool (overnight, perhaps).
• When the must in the fermenter has reached about 70 degrees F, toss in the yeast, put the airlock back on the fermenter and wait.
• This recipe will take about a month to ferment at 65 degrees or so. If the area you have set aside for your fermenter is warmer or cooler than that, your time will vary. Warmer temps make for faster fermentation. Cooler temps make for slower. If you've got a hydrometer, you can wait for the specific gravity to drop below 1.0. If not, just wait for it to bubble no more than once every five or ten minutes. If it's bubbling more often than that, let it sit longer. If the airlock goes dry, put more water in it. If you get a real vigorous fermentation and it either fills the airlock with foam or blows it clear off, don't worry. Just find the airlock, clean it up, refill it with water, and pop it back on the fermenter.
• A couple notes here while you're waiting for your melomel to ferment: when I brewed this, the original gravity was 1.075. This is a chance to use your hydrometer if you bought one. If not, don't worry about it.
• When fermentation slows, it's time to bottle.

#recipe #howTo #cyser #melomel

Prev Next

#recipe

Using a hydrometer is pretty easy. The hydrometer will come in a plastic tube. To measure the SG of a liquid: take the hydrometer out of the tube, fill the tube with the liquid, and then (over a sink) put the hydrometer into the tube and splash a little more liquid out after it's done overflowing. When things quit splashing around and the hydrometer quits bobbing up and down, read the number off the scale on the hydrometer where the liquid meets it. There may be multiple scales, but the one you want is the one that goes from about 1000 (or 1.000) at the top to about 1150 (or 1.150) at the bottom. If you've filled the hydrometer tube with water to see how it works, it should be very near 1000. (It won't be exactly 1000, because your water will probably have some gases dissolved in it, won't be the temperature the hydrometer was calibrated for, etc.) When measuring gravities of beer/wort, wine/must or mead/must, you should read the manufacturer's instructions and try and get things near the temperature they specify. Also, if you're measuring a carbonated liquid, let it sit long enough that it's gone entirely flat. Put the cap back on the hydrometer tube and shake it some, even. That's it.

#howTo

Prev Next

First you need to clean the bottles. Again, there're a number of ways to do this. I'll cover a couple of them. The first, and easiest, way to clean the bottles is to use your dishwasher (if you have one). Make sure they're all empty and clean first, and then just run 'em through with dishwasher detergent. Most full-size dishwashers will hold the three cases of bottles you'll need. If you don't have a dishwasher, you can use B-Brite (according to the directions on the bottle) or use chlorine bleach. If you use bleach, just mix up a bucket of sanitizing solution using about a cap-full of bleach for a gallon or so of water. Fill each bottle to the rim with bleach-water, and then rinse it at least twice making sure to get all the bleach out. If the bottles smell of bleach, you haven't rinsed 'em enough. You can reuse the bleach-water that comes out of the bottles, and the rinse water goes down the drain. The plastic tubing you'll be using to siphon your mead around needs to be sanitized at this point, too. I find that siphoning one bottle's worth of bleach-water through it works well. Make sure to rinse the tubing thoroughly. Also sanitize the bottle caps. If you've got a bottling bucket, sanitize the bottles, caps and tubing in the bucket, and then rinse it twice, too.

Okay. Everything's clean now. Siphon the mead into the bottling bucket using some of your plastic tubing, being careful not to splash it around too much. If you don't know how to siphon liquid, ask one of the neighborhood juvenile delinquents, or check out the Appendix 3 – Siphoning. Also try to avoid getting any of the sediment from the fermenter into the bottling bucket. You'll want to add about a half-cup of sugar of some kind to the mead—either corn-sugar from your homebrew supply store or honey will work. Dissolve it in a couple cups of boiling water and add it to the bottling bucket.

Now fill the bottles. Siphon the mead into the bottles one at a time, leaving about an inch or so of head-space in the bottle. This is to allow room for the carbon dioxide to expand into and not blow up your bottle. If you're using a bottle-filler, it'll leave about the right amount of room in the bottle for you. As each bottle is filled, cap it. When you've got them all filled and capped, sit back and relax. In about a month it'll be ready to taste and check for carbonation. If it's still too flat, don't worry, just let it sit a little longer. It'll get there.

#howTo

Prev Next

First you'll need to chill it some. Treat this mead the same way you would a light imported beer, chilling it to about 40 or 45 degrees Fahrenheit or roughly 5 degrees C. When you open each bottle, you'll notice a little sediment in the bottom of it. This is the yeast that gave its life for the carbonation. Just pour slowly from the bottle into a chilled glass, and leave about the last half-inch or so in the bottle. Lift the glass to your lips and enjoy.

#howTo

Prev Next

Mead can be brewed just like beer, except it uses honey instead of barley malt, and is often unhopped. There are a couple differences to note, though.

Fruits should never be boiled. Doing so will set the pectin, and you're apt to get something more closely resembling jelly than mead. Also, boiling will drive off some of the more delicate flavors present in the honey, so you want to keep it short. Undiluted honey won't support bacterial growth the way barley malts will, as it's a super-saturated solution of sugar, so it doesn't need to be boiled. Although there are some bacteria in natural honey, they won't usually cause problems. Boiling just makes it easier to dissolve, and drives off the chlorine that you'll find in city-water. Heck, if you pay attention to sanitation, you can mix up a mead without even heating the water (you should either use spring water or well water if you're not going to boil the water to drive off the chlorine, though). The important things to remember are sanitation and aeration. The must needs to be aerated so the yeast can be fruitful and multiply during their aerobic stage. Not aerating your must enough gives anaerobic bacteria an advantage over the yeast. Lack of sanitation lets the little buggers into your brew in the first place.

Another big difference from beermaking is that honey doesn't contain many of the nutrients that barley does, which yeast need in order to survive and make alcohol. In many cases, recipes will call for yeast nutrient, which supplies what the yeast need. These nutrients are also present in fruits.

Next is a recipe that does include boiling and hops, but only a minimal amount of each.

#howTo

Prev Next

(properly, a melomel)

Ingredients

• 10 pounds light clover honey
• 4 pounds frozen blueberries
• 1 oz Saaz hops (½ bitter, ½ finish)
• 1 pkg WyYeast champagne yeast

Directions

• Add honey to boiling water.
• Bring back to a boil, skimming any scum that forms.
• Add bittering hops.
• Boil 15 minutes.
• Reduce heat to a low simmer.
• Add fruit. Simmer 10 minutes.
• Add finishing hops. Simmer 5 minutes.
• Into the fermenter with it.

OG 1.080, FG 0.995.

Notes

Make it just like you would a beer. Rack into a secondary fermenter after about a week or so, and leave it in there for about a month. Leave it in the bottles for a month or so. Prime with ½ cup honey. No need for yeast nutrient as there's plenty of fruit that'll supply what it needs.

#recipe #howTo #melomel

Prev Next

#recipe

Honey doesn't contain many of the nutrients that yeast need that are present in most fruits. I've found that when I use more than about 30% fruit for the fermentables, everything is fine, but less than that, and I need to add yeast nutrient.

Other than that, making mead is much like making wine. You don't want to boil most of the ingredients, but warming the water makes it easier to dissolve the honey and helps bring the things you don't want to the surface. These things include beeswax and little-bitty-bee-parts.

Beyond that, I don't have much winemaking experience, so this is a short section.

#howTo

Prev Next

This is the more traditional (pre-1600s) way to make mead. The only thing that's changed since then is that we're (at least most of us) not living in the Old World where the wild yeasts are friendlier. New World wild yeasts haven't had as many years of coexisting with humans brewing stuff. In general, good sanitation, getting any chlorine out of the water, and proper aeration will make for good mead.

Raspberry Cooler

Ingredients

• 8 lbs dark wildflower honey
• 4 oz raspberry extract
• 1 lb frozen raspberries
• ½ oz Saaz hops
• 2 pkgs Red Star champagne yeast

Directions

• Mix 8 lbs dark wildflower honey in 4 gallons cold water, stirring until the honey's all dissolved. Splashing it around is good, as you want to make sure the must is well-aerated.
• Add 4 oz raspberry extract.
• Mush up the fruit, and throw that in the fermenter, too.
• Toss in ½ oz Saaz hops. This is dry-hopping, and they'll spend their life in the fermenter.
• Add 2 pkgs Red Star champagne yeast, sit back, and wait.

Notes

The dark honey and the raspberry extract make an interesting combination. I'm not sure if I'd use the whole 4 oz bottle of extract again, but it's about right to balance the strong flavor of the dark honey. If you use a lighter honey, use a little less extract. Over time, the raspberry flavor kind of gives out, so this is a mead that's better without too much aging. Three to six months was good, but bottles saved longer than that were missing the raspberry flavor.

#recipe #howTo #melomel

Prev Next

#recipe

Just like other meads, except more so. When I speak of high-gravity meads, I mean mead in the 4-lbs-honey-per-gallon-of-water range. The added sugar means it'll take longer to ferment. It also makes it very likely that you'll need a yeast nutrient.

Another issue to consider is that most yeasts don't do well under high-sugar conditions. The things to remember are the same as for other meads, but you'll need to expect longer fermentations (having to wait three or more months for fermentation to slow is typical), and once the fermentation is done, these meads typically take longer to age. Given enough patience, you can make some very tasty, very strong meads of a traditional style.

Meads of this style were traditionally started in the summer for consumption in the winter or spring. This will work out nicely from a temperature standpoint, as you'll have warm temps to start the yeast off quickly, and then cooler temps to age the mead once it's mostly fermented. However, these meads are not for everyone. With this type of mead, you'll probably want to rack the mead (transfer it from a primary to a secondary fermenter) twice, as having the mead sitting for prolonged periods on the dead yeast will add off flavors to it. The results are typically worth the wait, though.

A way to speed the process is to add the honey in smaller batches. For example, if your recipe calls for 20 lbs of honey in a five-gallon batch, start out with 10 lbs initially. Once the fermentation starts to slow down, rack the mead into another fermenter and add 5 more lbs of honey. Wait for the fermentation to slow, rack again, and add the last 5 lbs. If you take this approach, make sure to leave some room in the fermenter for the added volume of honey. Adding the honey a little at a time like this will keep from hitting the yeast with high-sugar conditions which aren't good for them. The yeast will repay you by doing their job more quickly, and you won't have to wait as long for a finished product.

This is a good area to get into once you've made a few lighter gravity meads and have gotten some extra equipment, since you'll be tying up a carboy for at least six months.

#howTo

Prev Next