Mead Made Easy

Source: John (The Coyote) Wyllie

Ingredients:

• 6 lb fresh picked mulberries
• 5 lb snowberry honey
• 3 lb corn sugar
• 2 cups raisins- chopped
• 2 tsp sodium-bisulfate
• Pris-de-Mouse yeast

Directions:

• Pick through berries, remove leaves, grubs...etc.
• Process berries.
• Add hot water to honey to dissolve.
• Add sugar and processed raisins.
• Mix processed berries and sugar mix.
• Add sodium-bisulfate (campden), mix well and leave overnight.
• Next day, add water to bring up to 5 gallons.
• Pitch yeast (7/1/93).
• Racked a couple of times.
• Bottled on 9/2/93 with ¾ cup corn and demererra sugar (mixed).

Notes:

My girlfriend has a tree outside her house. Birds eat the fallen berries, become intoxicated and get hit in the road. So I thought I should remove some of the berries, save a couple birds. They were deep purple to red. The mead tasted good at bottling. It slowly became sparkling, and now is like a light sparkling burgundy. Quite fruity, but has a wine-like quality. It is fairly dry, but does have a berry-sweetness I find very enjoyable. It cleared beautifully, and has a deep red color, but easy to see through. The thing that surprised me was how good it was young. I rarely have meads taste good young (see grapefruit recipe!), but this one did!

Specifics:

• OG: 1.070
• FG: 0.990

#recipe #morat #melomel

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Source: Dave Suda

Ingredients (for 7 gallons):

• 19 lbs alfalfa or other lightly flavored honey
• 10 pints blueberries
• 4 oz lemon juice
• 10 g Flor sherry yeast

Directions:

• Heat 5 gal of water to 160 F (70 C)
• Add the honey, mashed blueberries, and lemon juice.
• Raise the must to 180 F (80 C), hold for 15 min, then chill.
• Rehydrate the yeast in 1 cup of 90 F (35 C) water for 5 min.
• Divide the must into two 4-gallon food grade plastic buckets and pitch half the yeast in each.
• Ferment for one week and rack off the fruit into a 5 gal carboy and two 1-gallon jugs.
• Allow to ferment to completion and clear (in my case this took eight months), racking every four months.
• Bottle with ½ cup corn sugar per 5 gallons.

Notes:

This is a semi-dry blueberry melomel that took a first place at the 1992 Mazer Cup. The mead is a beautiful purple with an intense blueberry aroma when young. As it ages, the fruit aroma becomes more brandy-like.

Specifics:

• OG: 1.099
• FG: 1.009

#recipe #melomel

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Source: Dick Dunn

Mead Lover's Digest #171, 10 July, 1993

Ingredients:

• 6 lbs clover honey
• 4 lbs alfalfa honey
• 12 lbs strawberries
• Red Star Prise de Mousse yeast
• 4 oz dextrose (bottling)

Directions:

• Start the yeast in about a pint of water with a few tablespoons of dextrose. Be sure the starter solution and jar are sterile, and at 70-80 F before adding yeast. This yeast should start quickly—a few hours at most.
• Clean and hull the strawberries; chop into a few pieces. (Don't crush them or you'll have an impossible mess at racking.) Put them into a sanitized plastic-pail primary.
• Bring 4 gallons of water to a full boil. Remove from heat and immediately add the honey; stir thoroughly. (This will sterilize the honey without cooking the flavor out of it.) Cool to about 150-160 F, pour over the berries in the primary fermenter. Cool to pitching temperature (below 80 F) and add yeast starter. Stir thoroughly to mix and aerate.
• Every day or two, push the floating mass of strawberries down into the fermenting mead (the equivalent of a winemaker's punching down the cap).
• After the strawberries have become very pale—probably ten days or more—strain out as much of the strawberry mass as possible, then rack into a glass carboy. Be prepared for the racking tube to clog. (A stainless Chore Boy over the bottom end of the tube will help.)
• Ferment to completion. If necessary, fine with gelatin. Prime with the 4 oz (by weight) of dextrose dissolved in water; bottle using crown caps.

Notes:

• 12 lbs strawberries in a 5-gallon batch seemed like a lot at first, but it has worked out right. This gives a pronounced strawberry nose and taste, nothing subtle about it. You could use as much as 15 lbs (3 lbs/gallon) of fruit. I used frozen strawberries...naturally, these are mushier and more likely to create pulp that's hard to manage in the primary, but they also release juice more readily.
• The blend of honey was intended to not to mask the strawberry flavor. This turned out not to be an issue; you could shift the balance more toward the alfalfa or other stronger honey. Keep in mind that strawberries don't have a lot of sugar in them. They contribute flavor but not much fermentable.
• The mead fermented out in about eight weeks. I have no real idea what the true starting gravity was; it's just not possible to get a useful number with the fruit in it. It finished at 0.991.
• We were serving the mead and getting good reviews at sixteen weeks from the start of fermentation (eight weeks after bottling). After almost a year from start, the strawberry character is still holding true.

Dave's Note:

• After some discussion on the Mead Lover's Digest, Micah Millspaw suggested adding a small amount of vanilla extract, and his mead did extremely well in the competition it was entered into. He suggests about 1 Tbs vanilla extract per gallon of mead. He also suggested using ale yeast, which is a suggestion I agree with.

#recipe #melomel

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Source: Daniel F. McConnell

Ingredients:

• 5 gal Riesling juice (TA=1.10, Bx=19, pH=2.99)
• 7 lbs clover honey
• Yeast Lab dry mead yeast (M61), 1-liter starter

Directions:

• Add the honey to the sulfited grape juice to raise the OG to 29 Bx.
• Adjust the acid if needed with acid blend.
• The following day pitch the yeast starter and let it ferment at ambient basement temperature leaving in primary twelve months.
• Rack off the sediment and bottle when completely clear.

Notes:

Wonderful sweet/sour balance with a tremendous honey/sweet Riesling aroma. Should be stunning after a few years of bottle age. Taste is reminiscent of a late harvest Riesling with honey flavors and aroma very evident.

Specifics:

• OG: 1.120 (29 Bx)
• FG: 1.019 (5 Bx)

#recipe #pyment #melomel

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Source: John (The Coyote) Wyllie

Ingredients:

• 4 gal fresh pressed cider (from an orchard)
• 5 lbs honey (used local clover/alfalfa)
• 1 tsp acid blend
• Handful chopped raisins, or ¼ tsp grape tannin
• 1 tbsp yeast nutrient
• Irish moss (or other clarifier)
• 2 tsp pectic enzyme
• 4 campden tablets (sodium metabisulfite)
• Epernay yeast (or champagne)

Directions:

• Pour the cider into a sterilized 5-gallon carboy. Allow it to splash to aerate.
• Treat overnight with campden tablets. Crush and predissolve.
• Add the raisins to the carboy.
• Next day heat the honey in < 1 gallon of water (160 deg 1 hr, or boil if you choose).
• Add all other ingredients to the syrup and then add to the fermenter.
• Use some of the treated juice to hydrate the yeast, and pitch the starter after it bubbles.
• After a few weeks, rack to a secondary.
• Add more finings if needed (isinglass is good) and top up with juice or honey syrup.
• I've generally liked to let cysers, and ciders, age for a pretty long time. Most have been in fermenters for at least four months.
• You can bottle still, or sparkling. Use ½ to ¾ cup corn sugar and champagne bottles for a nice sparkle. These have taken a long time to gain a good bubble level. They have been stored cold (55). But well worth the wait!

Notes:

A potent and pleasing fruity wine. Once mature, a clear, bubbly champagne-like mead. My dad really enjoyed this one, and he usually drinks nicer wines. I was flattered. He kept grabbing the bottle at dinner!

If you rack several times you can eliminate most of the sediment, and only have a fine layer in the bottle. I prefer to keep the priming down, because they seem to continue fermenting slowly for a long time. I've had a batch carbonate without priming! So much for a still wine! You could stabilize and sweeten to taste if you choose. Bottling with teas is a nice addition. I've used cinnamon, but I'd bet ginger, or a tad of clove would be nice.

Specifics:

• OG: ~1.070 Will vary depending on source of cider.
• FG: 1.000.

Dave's Notes:

As I've commented elsewhere in the recipes, with what I've learned over the years, I would add the acid blend to this recipe after the first or second racking, rather than at the beginning. As this recipe can ferment quite dry, very little acid is needed to balance it, so taste first, and only add what's needed.

#recipe #cyser

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Source: Joseph Nathan Hall

Mead Lover's Digest #7, 3 October, 1992

Ingredients (for 2 gallons):

• 2 quarts maple syrup (that hurt$, as Charlie Papazian says)
• 2 to 2-½ lbs light honey (I used clover)
• Acid to taste—I think I used a little less than 1 tsp of acid blend for this batch.
• Pasteur champagne yeast

Directions:

• Bring honey and maple syrup to boil in enough water to liquefy.
• Add acid and a bit of nutrient if desired. (I don't think you need yeast nutrient—the maple syrup seems to have the necessary stuff in it.)
• Skim for a minute or two, enjoying the flavor of the yummy foamy stuff.
• Cool.
• Then add water to make a 1.120 SG must.
• Pitch with working Pasteur Champagne yeast. Prepare for a moderately vigorous fermentation.
• Rack off after primary fermentation, and once again if it isn't clear in a few more weeks. I topped off the gallon jugs with boiled water after the first racking—that seemed to help settle the yeast.

Notes:

Both batches I made this summer (the first with about half this much syrup) fermented out to almost exactly 1.000. They fermented and cleared at 70-72 F in six to eight weeks.

The result (that's what you've been waiting for): a beautiful, crystal-clear brilliant straw-colored liquid, slightly sweet, with a monster alcohol palate and strong bourbon notes. Smoooooth.

Then, for a stellar, absolutely world-class result, take the three month old young mead and prime with a small quantity of fresh yeast (¼ pack or less) and about 1.25 times (or perhaps a little more) what you consider a normal dose of sugar for beer. Bottle quickly and carefully, and let age for at least six months, turning and shaking gently a few times during the first weeks.

The sparkling honey-maple mead will wow absolutely anyone. Serve it ice cold in your best champagne flutes. I rather like the still mead on the rocks. Is this heresy?

Note from Dave

Not heresy. Tasty!

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While this isn't a mead, and doesn't use any honey, I figured I'd put it in anyhow. Traditionally, it probably did use honey, but this is the modern recipe.

Source: Gary Shea

Mead Lover's Digest #241, 7 December, 1993

Ingredients (1 gallon):

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• Water to make a gallon
• Two lemons
• Yeast

Directions:

• Combine sugars, add water to make 1 gallon, and boil.
• Squeeze two lemons into the mix and throw them in, quartered.
• When it's cooled enough add 1/8 tsp of yeast (I used bread yeast).
• Allow to ferment for a day or two at ~65-70 F.
• Bottle, adding a few raisins and a tsp of sugar to each bottle.
• Allow to sit at ~65-70 F until the raisins are sitting at the top (< 1 day).
• Refrigerate or place in quite cool place.

Notes:

Drink in a couple weeks. So far I have only done one batch and I drank it over the course of two weeks. It keeps getting better and better. Plastic Calistoga bottles are what I've been using, they work great and seem to have no flavor.

This is a Finnish drink called sima or maybe simha, made only for May Day celebrations. The recipes for it that I've seen (and made) are all pretty much like this.

Dave's Notes:

I made a batch of this, and it was pretty tasty while young. If you let it sit too long, though, you'll be back to the vomit-smell problem mentioned in the Grapefruit Melomel recipe. Since I'd bottled in grolsch bottles, when that smell hit me, I just slammed the bottle back shut, and put it in the back of the fridge, hoping my roommate would drink it. Found it about six-months later, and the offensive smell had gone, and it was tasty, but bone-dry. The ideal way to drink this is very young, while it's still fermenting, but if you do like I did and forget a bottle, let it age plenty, and it'll be drinkable.

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This is an all-grain recipe. If you're not familiar with all-grain brewing, or not up to the effort, check out Dave's Bracket instead, which is an extract recipe.

Source: Richard B. Webb

Mead Lover's Digest #313, 30 May, 1994

Ingredients (for 8 gallons):

• 25 lbs honey malt
• 39 grams Saaz hop flowers
• 130 grams shredded ginger root
• 1 tbsp Irish moss
• 12 lbs blackberry honey
• 1 tbsp acid blend
• Red Star Montrachet dry yeast

Directions:

It was a dark and stormy New Year's Eve. 25 lbs of honey malt (17 degrees Lovibond) were mashed at 156 degrees until starch test showed complete saccrification. The mash was sparged at 164 degrees. This wort was brought to a boil. The color contribution of this malt was estimated at approximately 60 degrees SRM. 39 grams of Saaz hop flowers (at 6.0% acid) were added for a proposed 60 minute boil. 130 grams of shredded ginger root were added for a proposed 15 minute boil. 1 tbsp of Irish moss was added for a proposed 10 minute boil.

At the end of the 60 minutes, I added 12 lbs of Schneider's blackberry honey. Heat continued, even though the wort wasn't boiling. After 25 minutes, the boil resumed, and I added 1 tbsp of acid blend. After another 10 minutes of boil, the heat was turned off, the immersion cooler was inserted, and cooling was begun.

I used Red Star Montrachet dry yeast in this batch. The first package was added when the wort was still too hot (oops!), so another package was added later, before obvious signs of fermentation had begun.

All of the above yielded about 8 gallons of wort, which had a specific gravity of 1.112. The actual hopping rate was estimated at 22 IBU, not including the acid added. The final gravity reading was 1.052, with the resulting alcohol at approximately 6.4%.

Racking occurred on 13 Jan 94. Bottling took place on 25 Jan 94, giving just under one month of fermenting. Priming sugar consisted of ½ cup corn sugar, 2 cups of water, and 1 tsp ascorbic acid.

Never having had a bracket/braggot before, the taste was rather interesting. It is an exceedingly sweet beer, not mead-ish at all!

Because I used honey malt, I called this brew Honey Bucket Bracket. Dark as the night, and thicker than sin!

Notes:

Michael Hall, who was one of the judges at the Duke's of Ale Spring Thing competition held recently in Albuquerque, New Mexico, wanted the recipe of the mead that I had entered. It took honors for the best mead of the competition. This is my attempt at supplying the recipe.

It's not actually a mead, but something called a bracket or braggot. The American Mead Association is of very little use in supplying a definition of the style, only saying that the mix has to have at least half of its fermentables coming from the added honey.

The idea was to make a batch of beer and a batch of mead and slam the two together. Thus a beer was made (at a very low hopping rate), and a lot of honey was added to it.

Judges' comments:

• Michael Hall gave it 42 points. > Good honey expression! Roasted malt comes through too! Fairly clear, good head retention. Good honey taste. Good roasted malt taste. Nice complex taste. This is the most interesting mead we've tasted! Nice balance of mead and beer. Very good idea! I could drink a lot of this (slowly...) on a winter night.
• Bill Terborg gave it 45 points. > Complex nose. Very nice. Great color and very clear. Very nice—complex, malt strong, yet honey in background. Good balance—sweet & acid. Great mead! Publish the recipe so we can all enjoy!
• William deVries gave it 37 points. > Good solid honey/malt aroma. Nicely balanced, almost smoky. Honey exudes throughout, bitter component masks the modifying sweetness, but not too badly. Malt flavor aids the complexity. Nice even flavors cause a pleasant and lasting impression.

#recipe #braggot #allGrain

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Source: Dave Polaschek

Previously unpublished.

Ingredients:

• 6 lbs light clover honey
• 6 lbs light dry malt extract
• 1 oz Chinook hops (boil)
• 1.5 oz Saaz hops (finish)
• Edme Ale Yeast
• YeastLab Sweet Mead yeast (optional)
• 5-10 lbs light clover honey in reserve

Directions:

• Brew a standard light ale with dry malt extract and hops.
• Have honey in bottom of primary fermenter.
• Pour hot wort onto honey, stirring gently to dissolve honey in wort, but not so much as to aerate hot wort.
• Add cold water to make 5 gallons.
• When temperature reaches 80F, shake like the dickens and pitch ale yeast.
• Let ferment for a week.
• Rack into secondary fermenter
• Add 2 lbs of honey, dissolved in as little water as possible.
• Wait for fermentation to slow
• From this point on, a lot is going to depend on your fermentation conditions, and what you want for a finished product. The basic idea is to keep adding honey until the yeast have given up the ghost, and then add just enough more honey to sweeten to the desired level.
• Add honey, 2 lbs at a time, until the yeast are Just Plain Done. If your yeast poop out before you're done with them, add a different, more alcohol tolerant strain, but Edme Ale Yeast has multiple strains, it seems, and at least one of them is a real trouper.
• If a still beverage is desired, bottle.
• If a carbonated beverage is desired, there are a few possibilities:
  • prime with about a pound of honey, and hope there's a little life left in the yeast.
  • keg and force-carbonate (my method)
  • bottle in 2-litre pop bottles, and force carbonate using “The Carbonater”

Notes:

• The final result I got had 12 lbs of honey and 6 lbs of malt extract in a five-gallon batch. There was little residual sweetness, since the yeast did finish off the last of the honey while in the keg (I had to vent pressure a few times – careful if you've bottled so you don't get glass grenades).
• Somewhere along the way, the brew picked up an anise aroma. I couldn't smell it in the honey, and it's certainly not an aroma that was present in any beer I've brewed before this. I think it might have been an artifact of the YeastLab yeast, or one of the strains present in the Edme Ale Yeast. If you've got an idea, drop me a note.
• For a high-alcohol brew, this was pretty appealing. The combination of a little bit of hop bite, with plenty of alcohol, and the mystery anise smell combined nicely. About the only thing I would change would be to hop a little more heavily, both for the boiling and finishing hops. Maybe an additional half-ounce at each stage.
• I wasn't really sure how strong this was going to end up being. I was trying to use the inexact methods that might well have been used in earlier times: “Keep putting in honey until it's done.” I was pleased with the results, though, and I was surprised at how long the ale yeast lasted before being killed by the rising alcohol level. The other thing I was experimenting with was keeping the sugar level from ever being too high at one time, thus the repeated additions of honey. Too much sugar in solution is hard on the yeast, so I avoided that.

#recipe #braggot

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This is called Hangover Cyser because I'm usually making it while hungover, not because of any particularly ill effects it has.

Source: Dave Polaschek

Ingredients:

• Gallon glass jug of apple juice (plastic is no good, since you're going to be fermenting in this jug)
• Pint jar of honey (1.5 lbs)
• 12 oz can of fruit juice concentrate (no preservatives). Grape and Cranberry are among my favorites. I've avoided citrusy things so far.
• Heaping tablespoon yeast energizer
• Red Star Champagne yeast

Directions:

• Pour 48 oz of apple juice out of the bottle. This is about enough to ease the hangovers of two people.
• Drink some of the apple juice you've poured off.
• Pour the honey into the apple-juice jug along with the yeast energizer.
• Drink some more apple juice.
• Shake like the dickens until honey is dissolved, or head spins too much. Repeat until the honey is completely dissolved.
• Drink some more apple juice.
• Add the can of juice-concentrate.
• Shake the jug again. This time should be easier.
• Finish the apple juice you've poured off, and add yeast to the shaken mix, which should be about at the shoulder of the gallon jug. Attach airlock, and get on with your life.
• Between a month and three later, the fermentation will be done, and you can bottle. If fermentation stops early, rack and add more yeast energizer and yeast.

Notes:

• We first made this while we were writing this book initially. The recipe didn't make the first (paper) edition of the book, but the result turned out good enough that I had to write the recipe down. It's also an easy enough recipe that when he saw me make this, Tim Mitchell said “Hey! Even I can make mead like that!”
• There are only a few things you can do wrong with this. One is to add too much honey. The recipe as listed above makes for a starting gravity of about 1.120, which is about as high of an initial gravity as you want to use. If you're going to add more honey than that, do it in stages.
• The result of this recipe is a fairly strong, fairly smooth drink. Cranberry juice concentrate makes for a tasty holiday wine. Grape and apple flavors mix nicely, too. Just remember that whatever kind of juice you add needs to blend with apple, and you'll be fine.

#recipe #cyser

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