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How to Make Mead |
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Written by Glider Onair
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Tuesday, 21 December 1999 |
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Page 2 of 3
Warm the honey by placing the honey jar/bottle in a pan of warm water. Place the pan on the stove, set on low for 10-15 minutes. If the honey is still thick, go for 30 minutes. Something that is a pain do, but makes for a prettier product is to mix the honey 1/2 and 1/2 with water before mixing it in with everything else and boil it for an hour. A good way to get the right amount of water, and get all the honey out of the jars, is to fill them with hot water after removing the honey, and mixing this in with the honey to be boiled. As it boils, skim off any foam as it forms. This is protein from the honey. It is very nutritious, and quite sweet eaten by itself (on toast, straight up, whatever). The reason to remove it though, is that it can make the mead cloudy if left in. Nothing wrong with this, other than crystal clear wine/mead is considered by the connoisseurs to be the ideal. I don't bother, but if you are going for aesthetics, go ahead and boil it. A pound of honey should be about a pint or so. You're looking at boiling around 5 quarts of liquid. Doesn't have to be a strong boil, so long as it is bubbling a little. Skim every so often or the foam will sink, forming a precipitate on the bottom. Place the honey in the carboy. Fill the carboy half way with hot water and dissolve everything well. Add your yeast nutrient, and fruit acid, and mix well. This should ferment vigorously, so you may not want to fill to the 5 gallon mark at this time. Leave 20% of the space empty so it has room to foam up.
This is the point in time when you may wish to add any extras to the must. Traditional mead is made from honey and water alone. Addition of the orange juice concentrate will make the mead into a melomel, which is just mead with fruit juice. Melomel made with grape juice would be referred to as pyment, and apple juice mead is cyser. The addition of herbs such as ginger, cloves, nutmeg, dried mushrooms or fruit, or rosemary result in a beverage called metheglin. Hippocras is mead made with honey, grape juice, and some of the fore mentioned herbs. Generally juice concentrates are the easiest to add, though crushed fruit would work also. If crushed fruit is used, the juice should either be well strained before hand, or the mead should be racked within the first 7 to 10 days after starting the ferment. This will prevent any fruit matter from spoiling along the bottom of the vessel, tainting the mead.
I'll take a moment to mention that five pounds of sugar. It needs to be well dissolved, with no free crystals sitting in the bottom of the fermenting container. Some people add all the sugar right in the beginning. Other add it a pound or so at a time as the yeast ferment it. The reason for this is that a high sugar content can inhibit the yeast to a certain extent. I personally find it simpler, and no less effective, to add all the sugar at one time.
Mix in 4-5 campden tablets, or 4-5 tsp. of sulphite. Stir well again. This will sterilize the whole mix rather nicely. Let this sit over night, and the sulphite will tend to oxidize out somewhat. Meanwhile, mix the yeast into a warm, not hot, (remember that while yeast can stand more acid than bacteria, our fungal friends all tend to be heat sensitive) mix of water, and OJ. The next morning (12-24 hours later at any rate) combine the yeast solution with the must. Make sure your air lock is working.
Did I tell you what happened when I tried to do without an air lock? I placed the screw type cap loosely on the top of a gallon jug. Everything went well for perhaps 24 hours. Then pulp (this was an orange fruit wine) built up in the cap and stopped the escape of the gas. Four weeks later I was still finding glass shards in that room. Some of them embedded in the walls.
The most vigorous fermentation will occur within 3-4 days after adding yeast. After this you can add boiled and cooled water to the 5 gallon mark. Keep in mind that most yeast have a thermal death limit somewhere around 100 deg F, and can be permanently damaged by temps around 95. Shake the carboy twice a day for the first few days, then leave it alone after that.
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