Skip to main content

Brew #3: Semi-Sweet Mead

Mead is one of those things that everyone knows about but only a few have tried.  The local homebrew club has an award winning mead maker who brings his good stuff to some of our functions.  Tasting his a couple of times completes the catalog of my mead experience (not including a bad experience with Ethiopian Honey Wine).  At the club holiday party my friend and I tasted a sweet mead that was really enjoyable and we figured why not give it a try.

If this mead turns out well we will go through it quickly and if its bad we can probably dose our tea with it (3 gallons of mead would dose quite a bit of tea!).  Without doing much research I went and bought some honey, 6 lbs of the orange blossom variety.  The man at the farmers market told me that most mead makers are using his orange blossom or his avocado honey, but orange blossom sounded safer.

After taking the honey home I conducted some research and realized that my local homebrew shops don't  carry any mead specific nutrients or supplies.  It seems that this time we'd be screwed since we had to make the mead in the next couple of days.  We decided that for our first mead we would just use some regular yeast nutrient and hope all goes well.

On brew day (is it brew day?) the process brought back memories of making my first beer about four years ago.  It seems like every step forward was two steps back.  We started by slapping the Wyeast Sweet Mead yeast in the morning and cleaning all the equipment.  We poured the 6 lbs of honey into the 3 gallon carboy then added 2 gallons of cold water.  We figured since we only needed 2 gallons that it would be easy to get some from the store but I didn't realize that my friend grabbed the water jugs from the fridge instead of off the shelf.  After adding the cold water we had 2 gallons of water sitting on top of a 6lb blob of honey.

After realizing that cold water wasn't going to help dissolve the honey we attempted to stir the must.  We soon discovered that we had nothing that was long enough or narrow enough to fit through the mouth of the carboy.  After several attempts at stirring with random objects we put the carboy in a hot water bath and shook it until it all mixed together.  After all this we pitched the yeast and hoped for the best.

The brew day was Monday and the first signs of fermentation (airlock activity) started to show on Thursday.  I was sort of nervous since this has never happened to me with beer.  Maybe it's because I make starters or maybe it's because the Smack Pack was left on top of metal shed roof for an hour on an 80 degree day.  By Friday morning the fermentation looked to be full blown with a 1/2 thick layer of krausen on top.  By Friday night it had all dropped.  I'm curious to see how this will turn out.

Recipe
Semi-Sweet Mead

6 lbs Orange Blossom Honey
2 Gallons Water
1 Wyeast Sweet Mead Smack Pack

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brew #5: Meyer Lemon Berliner Weisse

My body craves whatever is not in season so it led me to a nice refreshing Berliner Weisse in the middle of winter. After a previous attempt I did some internet research and talked to some other homebrewers that have had success with the style.  It seemed that the quickest way to get a nice balance of sour was to sour mash.  The problem with sour mashing is that introducing oxygen into the mash can result in some unappetizing vomit flavors.  I read that someone had great success mashing in a corny keg and purging with carbon dioxide but I didn't want to introduce any bacteria in my kegs (not yet at least!). It struck me one night while reading a cookbook that I should mash in a sous vide sort of way.  After brainstorming I figured out that I could get a big ziploc bag (5 gallon) and put the wort in it at 110 degrees F with a handful of unmilled pilsner malt to introduce the Lactobacillus.  I put the ziploc bag into an igloo cooler filled with 110F water (filled from my tankless w

Brew 8 & 9 - Big Brews: Barley Wine & Wee Heavy

Having little kids around can make it difficult to get to the local hombrew shop so I devised a plan to have my wife pick up ingredients for me while she runs errands.  The first time  I kept it simple and asked for some yeast, hops and an airlock and she succeeded.  The second time I threw in a grain bill for my Export Stout and and a Witbier.  When she arrived home I asked why she only had one small bag (remember these are 1 gallon batches) of grain, she said the other was to big to carry.  This had me worried since it contained only slightly more than a pound of grain. When I went to the car there was a huge (five gallon batch size) bag of milled grain.  I checked the receipt and found that she purchased 13 lbs of base malt instead of 13 oz for the Witbier.  Since the goal for this year is to experiment I figured this was chance to brew some really big beers. The big sack of grain included: 13 lbs Two Row Malt 10 oz Flaked Wheat 7 oz   White Wheat 1 oz   Acidulated malt F

Brew #6: Pale Stout

Back in around August '13 I began thinking of finding new ways to extract flavor from brewing ingredients.  An interesting thought came to me and I was obsessed with finding a way to get the flavor from something without taking its color.  Immediately the thought of a pale stout was bouncing excitedly in my skull. After some internet research about pale stouts it appeared that it wasn't a new thing but it seemed like nobody had done one using the same ingredients as a true dark stout.  It looked as if everybody was using coffee as a substitute for the roasted grain.  This led me to start looking for ways to clarify coffee.  I figured if coffee could be clarified then grains could be too, especially since the process of steeping grains is similar to brewing coffee.  This blog post from super barista James Hoffman about clarifying coffee using iced gelatin filtration made me believe that a pale roasted stout could happen. For my first attempt I used the recipe for the milk s