Making Mead

A couple weeks ago I started a brew of Mead. This is my first attempt at brewing Mead - I generally brew up a couple large batches of hard cider in the fall each year, but that's about it. For those of you unfamilliar, Mead is simply fermented honey water.

For my brew I started with 6.5 lbs (about .6 gallons) of honey mixed with 2.5 gallons of filtered water. I them brought the mixture to boiling and then skimmed the top after about 15 minutes. I made sure to keep the mixture stirred while boiling so as to not burn the honey.

While the mixture was cooling, I sterilized my fermenting containers using a mixture of bleach and hot water then rinsed throughly to ensure no bleach was left behind.

After cooling the mixture to room temp (~75 F) I poured it into my 6 gallon container that had 2 teaspoons each of citric acid and yeast energizer. I then added a vial of While Labe Sweet Mead / Wine Yeast (WLP720), aerated, then covered the pail with the lid and an airlock to ensure no bacterial would enter. For the first 5 days I opened the container each morning and stirred vigorously for about a minute. The first stage of fermentation was very rapid and resulted in a lot of foaming - this is the reason for a 6 gallon container for only 3 gallons of mixture (referred to as "must" during this stage).

Approximately 4 days into the fermentation I juiced enough cherries to make about 1.5 cups of fresh juice using my Mr. Juiceman (that I bought years ago and have hardly used). This was a great way to juice with as I did not have to pit the cherries first - just put them in whole and the machine took care of the rest. Adding this juice to my 3 gallons of must caused a surge in fermentation over the next 3 days.

I have now transferred (racked) the micture to a 3 gallon glass bottle to continue the fermentation process. Siphoning the liquid from one container to another helps to remove sediment from the liquid. This results in throwing out a small amount ot the liquid. Once the must had been transferred to the glass bottle there was about .5 gallons of space left - I topped this off with some more honey water mixture and sealed the bottle with an airlock.

I am now waiting for the mixture to slow down on fermentation, but not stop. I will then transfer it to yet another bottle to remove more sediment. Once the mixture starts to clear I plan to bottle 1 gallon of the misture , priming each bottle with a little corn sugar or honey to cause just a little more fermentation which will produce a sparkling mixture. The remaining mixture will be allowed to complete the fermentation and will be racked a couple more times yiled a clear liquid. Once I reach the desired clarity, I will bottle 1 more gallon and put the remaining mixture into a 5 litre oak barrel to season on the oak. I will check the mix weekly until the desired plavor is attained, then bottle the remaining gallon.

While I am taking this further than most new to making Mead will, I think you can see how easy it is to make, not to mention cost effective. Not including the equipment (buckets, pans, bottles, etc.) it costs about $2 for a good wine bottle of mead. This is a skill no survivalist should be without...


John
http://www.redbarnworkshop.com/