I had an out-of-town friend bring some of his homebrew mead for me to try. I've never liked beer and I'm not really a fan of wine so I was excited to try the mead but I wasn't expecting to like it all that much.
It only took one sip for me to tell him we had to go to the homebrew store the next morning so I could start a batch of my own. We used all the honey I had in the house to make a 1 gallon batch. Now I've got to meet and make friends with some local hobby beekeepers before the end of summer. If the mead goes well, Beekeeping will be pushed a little higher in my queue of future hobbies.
The mead is "Ancient Orange Cinnamon Clove Mead" and evidently is much easier to make than modern meads. The recipe can be found at http://www.gotmead.com onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow. Anyone who has 3 lbs of honey and an empty 1 gal jug with an airlock sitting around should start a batch tonight. It will take at least 2 months to ferment and another 3 months to taste as good as the bottle I drank. If you don't, you'll be sorry in 5 months when I'm raving about how good it is.
this good stuff and is super easy....... from "got mead" forum: Ancient Spiced Orange Mead
It is so simple to make and you can make it without much equipment and with a multitude of variations. This could be a first Mead for the novice as it is almost fool proof. It is a bit unorthodox but it has never failed me or the friends I have shared it with. Wikdwaze, you might like this one better than your Chaucer’s since it will be sweet, complex and tasty.
1 gallon batch
3 1/2 lbs Clover or your choice honey or blend (will finish sweet)
1 Large orange (later cut in eights or smaller rind and all)
1 small handful of raisins (25 if you count but more or less ok)
1 stick of cinnamon
1 whole clove ( or 2 if you like - these are potent critters)
optional (a pinch of nutmeg and allspice )( very small )
1 teaspoon of Fleishmann’s bread yeast ( now don't get holy on me--- after all this is an ancient mead and that's all we had back then)
Balance water to one gallon
Process:
Use a clean 1 gallon carboy
Dissolve honey in some warm water and put in carboy
Wash orange well to remove any pesticides and slice in eights --add orange (you can push em through opening big boy -- rinds included -- its ok for this mead -- take my word for it -- ignore the experts)
Put in raisins, clove, cinnamon stick, any optional ingredients and fill to 3 inches from the top with cold water. ( need room for some foam -- you can top off with more water after the first few day frenzy)
Shake the heck out of the jug with top on, of course. This is your sophisticated aeration process.
When at room temperature in your kitchen, put in 1 teaspoon of bread yeast. ( No you don't have to rehydrate it first-- the ancients didn't even have that word in their vocabulary-- just put it in and give it a gentle swirl or not)(The yeast can fight for their own territory)
Install water airlock. Put in dark place. It will start working immediately or in an hour. (Don't use grandma's bread yeast she bought years before she passed away in the 90's)( Wait 3 hours before you panic or call me) After major foaming stops in a few days add some water and then keep your hands off of it. (Don't shake it! Don't mess with them yeastees! Let them alone except its okay to open your cabinet to smell every once in a while.
Racking --- Don't you dare
additional feeding --- NO NO
More stirring or shaking -- Your not listening, don't touch
After 2 months and maybe a few days it will slow down to a stop and clear all by itself. (How about that) (You are not so important after all) Then you can put a hose in with a small cloth filter on the end into the clear part and siphon off the golden nectar. If you wait long enough even the oranges will sink to the bottom but I never waited that long. If it is clear it is ready. You don't need a cold basement. It does better in a kitchen in the dark. (Like in a cabinet) likes a little heat (70-80). If it didn't work out... you screwed up and didn't read my instructions (or used grandma's bread yeast she bought years before she passed away) . If it didn't work out then take up another hobby. Mead is not for you. It is too complicated.
If you were successful, which I am 99% certain you will be, then enjoy your mead. When you get ready to make different mead you will probably have to unlearn some of these practices I have taught you, but hey--- This recipe and procedure works with these ingredients so don't knock it. It was your first mead. It was my tenth. Sometimes, even the experts can forget all they know and make good ancient mead.
I believe a batch of mead is in order. That's a good-sized recipe, too. The kind of thing I can put in a dark place and just leave for a while.
Incidentally, how much is a pound of honey in terms of volume? I'm not fortunate enough to live in an area where I can buy honey raw from beekeepers, so I buy all my honey from the grocery store in jars. They're usually marked according to volume, not weight.
I am thinking about making some mead,myself.I met a bee-keeper a couple days ago, and he sells his honey for $7.00 a quart. I would like to find a few more recipes using honey(to distill and to drink without distilling).
I am curious about the conversion to volume, too. I know that a gallon of molasses is around 12 pounds(i think). I wonder how close honey is to that. Maybe I'll just go buy a gallon and find out.
"Be nice to America, or we'll bring democracy to your country."
"The best things in life aren't things."
"Imagination is more important than Knowledge"-Albert Einstein
One is a 5lb (2.3kg) bottle with 108, 1 Tbsp servings = 16g of sugar per serving (nutrition facts on back), by my math, total of 1728g of sugar per 5lb of honey.
Dont know if this is what your after or not. Its all the jars I have say on them.
Salus populi suprema est lex. [L.] The safety of the people is the highest law.
Good luck guys. Mine is doing fine. I've got another 3 or 4 gallons to start tonight. This time, I've got agave nectar to add. I'm excited.
Koto, Sam's club has the best prices on grocery store honey. They are cheaper than the supermarkets, and even Aldi and GFS. You'll need a little over a qt of honey per gal of mead.
I'm hoping I can find a beekeeper before this fall.
Thorin: great minds think alike. My initial thought after I read this thread was, "I wonder how honey brandy would taste." Maybe it's not great minds so much as it is similarly obsessed minds.
I just started my batch tonight. Two gallons, one with orange and cinnamon, one with just the cinnamon. They're bubbling happily away in my cabinet right now. I mean, I assume they're happy. I'll let you know how they've turned out in, say, five months.
So I started two batches of this mead. In one, I followed the recipe exactly. In the other, I left out the oranges. I noticed today that the batch that followed the recipe exactly appears to be fermenting much slower than the batch that left out the oranges. Its bubbler either isn't bubbling or is bubbling very slowly (while the other is still audibly bubbling). It does appear to be fermenting still--at close inspection, I can see bubbles--but it's going really slow. Is this normal?
KatoFong wrote:So I started two batches of this mead. In one, I followed the recipe exactly. In the other, I left out the oranges. I noticed today that the batch that followed the recipe exactly appears to be fermenting much slower than the batch that left out the oranges. Its bubbler either isn't bubbling or is bubbling very slowly (while the other is still audibly bubbling). It does appear to be fermenting still--at close inspection, I can see bubbles--but it's going really slow. Is this normal?
It may be the opposite. The one with the oranges could have gone much faster and is now slowing because the abv is getting too high for the yeast. You could drop a hydrometer in to test each one.
I've got 8 gal in process now using 7 different recepies and 4 differnt yeasts. They all bubble at different rates.
I hadn't thought about that. I did give the orange batch a night near a radiator last night, just to see if maybe my yeasts were a little cold, but it didn't seem to make any difference, so I figured I'd let it be. And they're both still plenty cloudy, so I'm just going to try to relax and let the yeasts do their thing. If they don't make a successful mead, so be it.
KatoFong wrote:I hadn't thought about that. I did give the orange batch a night near a radiator last night, just to see if maybe my yeasts were a little cold, but it didn't seem to make any difference, so I figured I'd let it be. And they're both still plenty cloudy, so I'm just going to try to relax and let the yeasts do their thing. If they don't make a successful mead, so be it.
But I do so worry about my yeast colonies.
With honey, a slow ferment is the yeast of your worries.
KatoFong wrote:So I started two batches of this mead. In one, I followed the recipe exactly. In the other, I left out the oranges. I noticed today that the batch that followed the recipe exactly appears to be fermenting much slower than the batch that left out the oranges. Its bubbler either isn't bubbling or is bubbling very slowly (while the other is still audibly bubbling). It does appear to be fermenting still--at close inspection, I can see bubbles--but it's going really slow. Is this normal?
my simple mead has been going for a month now, still popin' the airlock.
just very slowly.
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I want my last words to be:
"Hey, this is kind of fun!!"
Man, do you guys put me in the mood for meade. I produce wild flower honey, which is mostly blackberry, locust and tulip poplar, and and have lots of bees but I never have any honey.
absinthe: the problem is its so dam expensive...
You got that right. Because of 2005 drought in the USA, a pound of honey here has been going for more than $5 USD. I sold everything I produced and even bought from my neighbor to fill orders.
At $60 a gallon(12 lbs) I legally sell honey for much more than I would ever get for meade.
By the way, the water content for honey should be less than 19% or it will ferment in the bottle. Most store bought honey is normalized to 18% water. At that amount of water the sg is about 1.414. So in the USA I only have to pack 12 fl.oz. to get a pound of honey.
there seems to be increased interest in mead recently
i too started a batch on 28 Nov (keeping a diary about all alc) and racket it three days ago, cause it didn't bubble anymore. Stupid yeasties, i checked the bottles. Pressurized. Yeast is fermenting. Little bastards, probably only wanted me to put them in another place. How dare they?
I used 1,8kg of honey (around here it's sold by weight) half from meadows, the other half forrest honey (very dark)
put in the yesties and enough water to get it to about 4,5 litres.
nothing else.
right now it tastes fruity, if that's the right word. strange as i put in only honey. Im looking forward to see what it will be like in a month.
almost a month has passed now, I've racked my mead again and it's way clearer than it was in the beginning. It also doesn't taste as fruity anymore, now it's more what you would expect of mead. I've tried adding a little bit of hops, the result's nice
George McKree wrote:almost a month has passed now, I've racked my mead again and it's way clearer than it was in the beginning. It also doesn't taste as fruity anymore, now it's more what you would expect of mead. I've tried adding a little bit of hops, the result's nice
did you add hops when racking? I just racked my batch into secondary, and wanted to add something, but didn't know what!
---
I want my last words to be:
"Hey, this is kind of fun!!"
Ancient orange and other Meads make some pretty good brandy...the Meads usually take longer to ferment and clear tho. Try using D-47 yeast instead of bread yeast.
This all sounds very interesting but I have a very silly question...
How do you drink mead?
By the gallon obviously
But being just a lowly beer and rum drinker, I don't know these things.
I assume you drink it straight (like wine?), but do you drink it cold or room temperature? Do you drink it with certain types of food or what? What sort of glassware - wine glass, shot glass, jug or something else?
Since I've got most of the equipment I think I should try Joe Tasty's recipe. I like having things bubble away in dark places making stuff to drink!
Mead is simply a wine made from honey instead of fruit. It is actually the oldest alcoholic beverage known to man ... starting off in the ancient Egyptian times and all.
I've been making mead for 15 years or so. The trick with mead is letting it mature. What tastes like a harsh drink after fermentation will age beautifully like a big red wine.
Each different type of honey makes a different tasting mead. Experimentation is the key.
I use 15 pounds of honey in a 5 gal batch and a vial of White Labs Sweet Mead yeast, made into slurry and brought up to about a quart.
My primary goes about 2 weeks, then rack off lees and into glass for 6 months, then into glass for tertiary fermentation another 6 months and then into bottles.
There are lots of other things I've learned over the years, but it would take up too much board space, lol.
