Brew Your Own Mead?

[Prof. Brockworth]

The boil is to kill the bugs in the *water*, surely?  Even so, my last batch turned in the bottles.  Must have been grubby  

What's the tea for?

I must share two things here:  Herbal mead and Spearman's Lament. 

Herbal mead is exactly what it suggests - steep some sweet flavoursome herbs in the brew-mix.  Hyssop, sweet thyme, balm, that sort of thing.  You end up with a subtle, aromatic astringence that's a bit special.  If you do a boil, pop the herbs in after it comes off the heat and let them steep until it has cooled, then remove.

Spearman's Lament, ah, now that's a thing.  It is a cocktail invented by Regia Anglorum's Whippy, a hard-drinking, hard-brewing spearman.  Take half a pint of rough cider - cloudy stuff with the lumps.  Add half a pint of rough mead - the stuff that didn't quite come out well enough to offer to anyone except overly hairy male friends.  And sink a small pickled onion in it.  We never were quite sure if the onion was a garnish, a flavouring, or class warfare, but by the gods, it was a rough, foul, magnificent drink.

[Mercy]

Last time my Dad attempted to make his own blackberry wine it exploded all over the white kitchen.

He was left desperately trying to clean up before Mum got back from work.

[Sir Nikolas Vendigroth]

My dad used to make wine....Now i'm thinking of doing it, on the uber-cheap.

[Prof. Brockworth]

Bubble locks are your friends.

Explosions are good but not when they prevent you from getting to the BOOZE!

[Argentee]

The boil is to kill the bugs in the *water*, surely?  Even so, my last batch turned in the bottles.  Must have been grubby  

What's the tea for?

It's to kill bugs in the water, and any contaminates in the honey. Botulism spores, for example, can exist in honey. That's why you never give honey to a child younger than 1 year old, their stomachs aren't acid enough to destroy the spores. There are tabs you can use to help fight things growing in the honey, but I don't use them. I just boil the heck out of everything before using it.

The tea and the lemon, I was told, give a touch of acidity and micronutrients that the yeast likes. I learned by word of mouth and by-guess-and-g'dmn, so I'm not sure WHY just what works for me.

[Ben Franklin's Electric Kite]

The boil is to kill the bugs in the *water*, surely?  Even so, my last batch turned in the bottles.  Must have been grubby  

The mead recipes in A.I. Root's book say to use campden tablets (as for wine-making) to kill 'hostile yeasts' and bacteria in your honey-water solution.

Boiling the water first, or boiling the solution of honey and water, does make sense. Nothing will live in honey itself, it is acidic and has hydrogen peroxide in it, and is so hydroscopic that it sucks the life right out of microorganisms. But dormant spoors of interesting things like Clostridium botulinum (botulism) can get dragged into the the honey on the filthy little feet of bees, which is why you mustn't feed honey to babies -- your ferocious adult digestive system will obliterate these spoors, but they can actually germinate in infant innards. And, in theory, in your mead.

What doesn't make sense is to use raw honey (which commands a higher price) to make your mead if you're going to boil it anyway. The better flavour of raw honey comes from 'volitile floral essences' which are alcohols. They (and some other nice things in honey) are destroyed by heat. And will evaporate in the air, which is why comb-honey still sealed in its wax tastes best.

Most honey you buy commercially is heated past the point that destroys that stuff anyway, though, because heating it makes it runny enough to force it through a diatom-filter and thus improve its clarity and slow its habit of crystalizing by filtering out the tiny particles around which the sugars will crystalize. "Cold filtered" honey like mine is just run through a fine silk screen in a warm room and often turns out cloudy, though it will go as clear as hot-filtered honey if I let it sit in a bucket for a year so all the tiny air-bubbles rise out and many of the solid particles sink to the bottom.

[Argentee]

What doesn't make sense is to use raw honey (which commands a higher price) to make your mead if you're going to boil it anyway. The better flavour of raw honey comes from 'volitile floral essences' which are alcohols. They (and some other nice things in honey) are destroyed by heat. And will evaporate in the air, which is why comb-honey still sealed in its wax tastes best.

Most honey you buy commercially is heated past the point that destroys that stuff anyway, though, because heating it makes it runny enough to force it through a diatom-filter and thus improve its clarity and slow its habit of crystalizing by filtering out the tiny particles around which the sugars will crystalize. "Cold filtered" honey like mine is just run through a fine silk screen in a warm room and often turns out cloudy, though it will go as clear as hot-filtered honey if I let it sit in a bucket for a year so all the tiny air-bubbles rise out and many of the solid particles sink to the bottom.

Well, like I said I learned by word of mouth. What I was told was the more processing the honey has, the less flavor it will have. That by starting with commercially processed, pasturized honey you start with less flavor so end up with less flavor.

And I'm not sure that I am paying more for Raw honey... Then again, I get my honey at flea markets and feed stores, by the gallon or more. Your mileage may vary.

[dman762000]

We have a guy who raises bees on the many garden that sprout up every summer in my rural southern town. His honey is organic and as fresh as it gets and has quite a wonderful flavor. It also has the benefit of not being commercially processed and is good for allergies.

[elShoggotho]

The whole tainting business is why I give the yeast a good headstart before adding honey and water. A good wine yeast and proper sealing keep the germs at bay.

[bluestocking]

I'm of the sterilize-everything-in-sight school (carboy, airlock, bottles, self, cat...). We bring the wort to pasteurization temperature (180F for 10 minutes, I believe?) by heating the water and adding honey, pour it into the carboy and stopper it, then add the kicked yeast and airlock once it's cool. If nothing else, the hot water helps get crystallized honey out of the jar

[Maggoty Anne]

That label looks more aproppriate for a bottle of absinthe. 

[Great Bizarro]

3lbs of honey per gallon of water, add a dash of lemon juice to changed the ph add some champaign yeast, wait about a month rack it off into another bottle and wait 1 year, drink , get drunk, fall down repeat. Use an airlock to prevent wild yeast from turning your honey into vinegar. I had the amount of honey wrong on my 1st post.

To help your yeast, I use 1/2cup dry malt extract, boil it in about 2 cups water let it cool, put it in the 5gl glass carboy add the yeast wait about 2 days then brew up my mead and add it. Gets it off to a great start and doesn't cause a change of flavor.

[Prof. Brockworth]

We have a guy who raises bees

For a moment there, I thought you meant he takes in injured, flightless bees and lifts them to feeding altitude on tiny bee winches.

[Watson]

I applaud your adventurous nature, but please do be careful if you choose to distill anything, the distilling process if done incorrectly can render a man blind.

~Watson

[Dusza Beben]

I applaud your adventurous nature, but please do be careful if you choose to distill anything, the distilling process if done incorrectly can render a man blind.

~Watson

I thought that only applied to wood alcohol?

DB

[bluestocking]

Additionally, in the U.S. (I'm not sure about other countries' regulations), home distillery is strictly illegal. Up to 200 gallons per adult household member of fermented beverage (beer, wine, mead, etc.) may be produced per year without licensure, but any amount of distillate is forbidden.

Any type of alcohol can do serious damage to you in sufficient concentration. It's hard to tell with a distilled alcohol exactly what the percentage of alcohol is, at least without some specialized equipment (and even with fermented stuff, we just guesstimate; most home brewers/mazers use a hygrometer to find specific gravity at start and finish, and do the math from there). I'm not saying that this is the only reason the U.S. government forbids home distillation, but it's part of it.

[Watson]

I applaud your adventurous nature, but please do be careful if you choose to distill anything, the distilling process if done incorrectly can render a man blind.

~Watson

I thought that only applied to wood alcohol?

DB

Nope; down here in the south my father a doctor has had quite a number of people with temporary or full blindness from home distilleries.

So be careful!!

~Watson

[Sir Nikolas Vendigroth]

http://members.cox.net/spursley/

Found that.

[Dr cornelius quack]

Additionally, in the U.S. (I'm not sure about other countries' regulations), home distillery is strictly illegal. Up to 200 gallons per adult household member of fermented beverage (beer, wine, mead, etc.) may be produced per year without licensure, but any amount of distillate is forbidden.

Any type of alcohol can do serious damage to you in sufficient concentration. It's hard to tell with a distilled alcohol exactly what the percentage of alcohol is, at least without some specialized equipment (and even with fermented stuff, we just guesstimate; most home brewers/mazers use a hygrometer to find specific gravity at start and finish, and do the math from there). I'm not saying that this is the only reason the U.S. government forbids home distillation, but it's part of it.

Fire up the "General Lee" Rosco's on our tail.  Yee Ha!!

[Dr.Anton Wigglesworth]

seriously the hardest part of making mead... waiting for the fermentation to fully finish.
6 months and its still really young a year is good 2 is better my oldest 12 years still have 10 bottles left had one at christmas .. the stuff is still getting better it is a lovely pacific mt huckelberry  the color is dreamy and the taste truely ambrosia . looking in my log it was 18lbs of honey to 5 gallons of water 10lbs of berry made a triple batch alch content 18%
 

[Orlando]

Fire up the "General Lee" Rosco's on our tail.  Yee Ha!!

Hills Of Connemara

Chorus
Gather up the pots and the old tin cans
The mash, the corn, the barley and the bran.
Run like the devil from the excise man
Keep the smoke from rising, Barney.

Keep your eyes well peeled today
The excise men are on their way
Searching for the mountain tay
In the hills of Connemara.

Swinging to the left, swinging to the right
The excise men will dance all night
Drinkin' up the tay till the broad daylight
In the hills of Connemara.

A gallon for the butcher and a quart for John
And a bottle for poor old Father Tom
Just to help the poor old dear along
In the hills of Connemara.

Stand your ground, for it's too late
The excise men are at the gate.
Glory be to Paddy, but they're drinkin' it straight
In the hills of Connemara.


Orlando.

[hexidecima]

hello everyone, just found this thread.  My husband and I make mead fairly often.  You can find our recipe here: http://home.comcast.net/~velkyn/recipes/mead_recipe.htm  Yes, there appears to be a lot of steps but it makes a consistently good mead everytime and we've been doing this for about a decade now.  Also, left to age a year or more, it tastes like a good sherry.  I've also made pyment (honey and grapes fermented together) since I have a concord grape vine in my garden and it turned out quite nicely.  We use champagne yeast in both.  For labels we call our brews Bad Bee Mead.  We once were given 5 pounds of buckwheat honey.  The resultant mead was about the color of root beer.  It was very good though.

A friend of mine had one of those little stills made from labware for "looks" and we did run some wine through it to get the alcohol off.  It was rather curious taking a sip of what probably amounted to 100% ethanol. 

My brother is just started into beekeeping.  He's about to get his first hive in a month or so.   

[Lady Penelope]

Pasturizing honey is ridiculous anyway, it is in itself an antibacterial and antifungal agent.

The only thing I know about mead is that I love the stuff....   

However, honey...honey has some surprising uses.   There are all sorts of personal care recipes (facial masks, conditioners, bath products) that have honey as an ingredient because it's a humectant, so it has natural moisturizing properties.  But my favorite non-standard use for it, as a pet owner who has kept the same three hermit crabs alive and very healthy for going on four years, is as a crab antibiotic.  Odd as it may sound, experienced crabbers have figured out that if a crab is injured or ailing, and there isn't anything wrong with the crabitat set-up itself (which would be the main cause for most crab deaths, given that most pet stores give new crab owners the impression that it's OK to keep them in a tiny fishbowl and feed them Cheerios, and that a few weeks is a normal life expectancy...*sigh*), honey will often help with whatever's ailing the critters, and at worst, it won't hurt them.  Plus, the little beggars love the stuff!

I love honey, therefore I love bees, although I do keep a respectful distance from them whenever possible because I don't love bee stings.

[bluestocking]

It's not surprising that honey works as a crab antibiotic; it contains hydrogen peroxide!

[elShoggotho]

Oh, my new batch of mead is bubbling like a mad scientist's lab by now. I need to change the airlock water every week due to drowned fruit flies.