Mead Made Easy: Introduction This book is intended for anyone who wants to make mead. If you have experience making beer or wine, you can skip the chapters on the history of mead and brewing basics. There are complete directions on making mead quickly and easily, followed by sections of Notes for Beermakers and Notes for Winemakers. Each section will have at least one recipe with complete directions. Assorted advanced subjects get a chapter of their own and include meads which will take longer to age and require more patience. These are what many people think of when they think of mead, and are closer in character to what is commercially available. Towards the end of the book there will be a bunch of recipes gathered from various sources. Making mead should be fun and easy. If it's not enjoyable, why do it? I've tried to write this book with that in mind. Most of the recipes presented here are ones I've tried, and I'm a lazy brewer. I enjoy making good beers and meads, but believe that it shouldn't be hard work. I've been making mead for more than five years now, and haven't had a batch turn out badly. The biggest problem is waiting long enough for the drink to reach its peak flavor. With that in mind, let's get on to mead. History of Mead First, some mead history to get us started and tell you a little about how mead works. Mead has been around for thousands of years. Honey was one of the first things to be fermented into alcoholic beverages, and mead is mentioned in the Bible, the Rig-Veda, the Aeneid and Beowulf. Mead was sacred to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. The Norse god Thor was once challenged to drink from a bottomless mead- horn, although for some reason they left this out of the comic books, along with the gory details of the dwarves forging horseshoes inside his head the next morning. Mead is also made in other parts of the world. Global brewers and consumers of mead include the Australian Aborigines. Mead is one of many drinks historically made in Africa, and was brewed as a ceremonial liquor in the pre-Columbian Americas. Honey has traditionally had life-giving and aphrodisiacal qualities. Aeneas' wounds were doused with mead in the Aeneid. (That had to sting.) The reward of a fallen Norse warrior was Valhalla, where his time was spent in mead-drinking and battle. And a `honeymoon' was initially a month when the young couple drank mead in order to be fruitful. Early meads were simply honey and water, with spices or fruits added for variety. The mixture was left open to the air, and wild yeast would start the fermentation going. Here in the new world, that's not really possible due to the different varieties of wild yeast. Other than that, it's possible to make meads in a very traditional style. Mead Styles Mead and other honey brews are classified as follows: * Traditional Mead - Honey, water and yeast. Nothing else. About 2.5 - 3 lbs honey per gallon of water. * Sack Mead - Same as a traditional mead, but with about 25% more honey, though not enough that it will smell like mead when opened. This makes for an upper limit of about 3.5 lbs of honey per gallon, and requires alcohol tolerant yeast. * Small Meads - Again, similar to a traditional mead, but these were made with much less honey, and as a result fermented and aged much more quickly. These meads were traditionally brewed by the peasantry. This is the easiest style of mead to brew, and many of the recipes in this book will be small meads. * Metheglin - A mead made with a mixture of herbs and spices called a gruit. The exact composition of a given gruit was a carefully guarded secret. The recipes were mostly held by brewers who were either members of the clergy or affiliated with the church. Gruits were also used in early beer-making before the introduction of hops, and few gruit recipes have survived to modern times. * Braggot or Bracket - Beer made with honey, or mead made with barley-malt. It has more honey than beer, and may be have either hops, a gruit or nothing added. * Clarre or Pyment - Made with a mixture of honey and grape juice. This may have evolved into claret. * Hippocras - A pyment with spices added. * Cyser - Honey and apple juice. This evolved into hard cider, and was likely the `strong drink' referred to in the Bible. It can vary from a cider-like taste to a taste almost like a sherry wine. * Mulsum or Melomel - Honey and fruits other than apples or grapes. Popular in Roman times. * Morat - A type of melomel made with mulberries. * Rhodomel - A mead made with rose petals. * Mead Brandy - A traditional mead was brewed and then distilled into a brandy- like liquor. Variations of this may well have included adding honey to other distilled spirits to sweeten the drink, as with Drambuie. Throughout the rest of this book, I'll be lumping most of these styles together as meads, although a few recipes will be identified more exactly. Few of these styles have survived into modern times, due to the rise in popularity of beer. The chief factor in the ascent of beer and the decline of mead was that the ingredients for beer could be cheaply and easily grown and combined. In contrast, the herbs and spices in gruits were comparatively expensive, and, as stated above, the recipes for gruits were often kept secret. Also, the cost of keeping bees and collecting honey compared unfavorably with that of producing barley malt or grapes. (A decline in the amount of forested areas for producing honey further contributed to its drop in production.) The honey meads that you find in stores today are most likely overly sweet drinks, many of which are made by the addition of honey to neutral grain spirits. There are a few brands of true mead available, but for the most part, the only way to have a good mead is to make it yourself. Enough history for now. On to brewing mead. Essential Equipment First we'll go over the hardware you'll need in order to brew. Everything you need can be purchased at your local homebrewing store as a kit, or you can assemble most of it yourself, if you'd rather. Everything will be described in enough detail so that you should be able to figure out how to fashion all the equipment you'll need. * Fermenter - An airtight vessel with a hole where an airlock can be inserted. Typical fermenters are either glass bottles (bottled-water bottles are good for 5 gallon batches and are also known as carboys. 1-gallon jugs, of the type apple cider is typically sold in, are good for smaller batches,) or large plastic buckets with tight-fitting lids. The important thing to remember is that it needs to keep any wild yeast or bacteria that are floating around the atmosphere out of the brew you're making. * Airlock - Seals the fermenter and allows the gases produced during fermentation to escape. Relatively cheap airlocks (with a stopper to fit your fermenter) can be purchased at your local homebrew store, or you can make one yourself using a piece of plastic tubing and another jar filled with water. Types of airlocks * Bottles - For a 5 gallon batch, 3 cases of returnable beer bottles is enough. (Non-returnables won't stand up to repeated handling and you'll end up with broken bottles.) You can also use champagne bottles (you'll need 30 or so). Grolsch-style bottles work well, too, and don't require a bottle capper. Some people have successfully used plastic 2-liter pop bottles, but the plastic will let some gases through, and the screw-on caps don't seal very well after the first time. For those reasons, I wouldn't recommend going that route. * Bottle-capper - This can be bought at a homebrew store near you. * Bottle caps - Gotta have something to keep the mead in the bottles. * Brewing pot - If you're going to be making a mead with fruits or spices in it, you'll want a pot to boil stuff in. I use a 3-gallon stew-pot, which works well for 5-gallon batches. You won't need anything much larger than 3 gallons initially. If you're not using fruits or spices, this'll still be handy for mixing things in. * Funnel - One with a filter or screen built into it is best, but any kitchen funnel will do. You'll be pouring into this from your brewpot, so that should give you an idea of how big it should be. * Tubing - You'll also want a supply of plastic tubing for transferring liquids about. I'd recommend having a couple 3-to-5 foot lengths of plastic tubing (if you discover you've bought a piece that's too long, cutting it shorter is easy. Making it longer, on the other hand, is a real bitch). One piece should be the same size as the hole in the stopper you're using in your fermenter (3/8" outside diameter), and the other piece should be larger (1/2" inside diameter or so) for siphoning the mead from the fermenter into bottles. Optional Equipment * Boiling bags - Another thing you may want to invest in is some kind of boiling bag for fruits, herbs and spices. Cheesecloth will work well, or you can buy `hop-boiling bags' from your homebrew supplier. These make separating out any fruit-pulp or herbs much easier. Disposable boiling bags work great, and you can just toss them like used teabags when you're done. Most of the reusable ones I've seen are made of nylon or some other synthetic so they won't hold flavors from one batch to the next. * Bottling bucket - You may also want a bottling bucket, which will make filling the bottles without getting sediment (trub) from the fermenter into the bottles easier. * Bottle filler - This is a little gizmo that slips into your plastic tubing and has a valve on the end of it. When you press it down into an empty bottle, liquid flows in. When you lift it, liquid stops flowing. This isn't essential, but bottling will be less messy with it. * Hydrometer Usage - This is highly optional for the beginner. A hydrometer is a device used for measuring the density (specific gravity) of a must (fermentables and water mixture) before and after it ferments. The specific gravity is simply the ratio of how many times heavier than water a given volume of the liquid you're measuring is. This, and a little math, will tell you how much alcohol was produced in the fermentation. Brewing Basics The goal is to make mead. In order to do this, you need to dissolve honey, and any other ingredients, in water. When starting out I boiled everything, as this is the way it's done in the beer-brewing world. We'll start out with a recipe for one of the first meads I made. This is a very tasty melomel, and is relatively trouble-free. The only downside is that it takes a relatively long time to reach the best flavor. I was drinking it about two months after brewing, but it didn't come into it's full flavor until about six months later. I present it here because it does taste pretty good initially. If you can brew up a batch and taste it quickly, you can get an idea of what meads are like. If you can hold onto some of it for more than six months, you'll have a pleasant surprise, and a reason to try and hold aside more meads for longer periods of time. Also, it includes some hops. Hops help in the fight against bacteria, so there's less risk of anything going wrong, even if you're a little sloppy your first time. Before You Start - Clean Up You need to sterilize anything that's going to come in contact with the must (honey and water mixture) when it's not boiling. This includes your fermenter, your funnel, and the airlock for the fermenter. I sterilize this kind of stuff with bleach, but B-Brite works fine, too. Also, Electrosol dishwashing detergent is sodium phosphates, which are good for sanitizing, but try and get the stuff without the lemon scent, if you can. About a teaspoon of bleach in 5 gallons of water in the fermenter works. I fill the fermenter with water, add the bleach and let it sit. If there's any crud left from the last batch, this is the time to soak it loose and get everything nice and clean. If you're using a plastic fermenter, you can just toss the lid, the funnel and the airlock into it. This doesn't need to soak long, as bleach will kill any bugs on contact. I usually get the fermenter soaking with the bleach solution and then go start the water heating. It'll take the water a while to come to a boil, during which time I'm finishing the cleaning. Okay, time to dump out the bleach/water mixture. If you've got a plastic fermenter, just let the funnel and airlock rattle around in your wash-tub or bathtub for now. If you're using a carboy, dump the bleach/water mixture over the parts that haven't yet been sanitized. Rinse everything thoroughly with cold water until you can't smell bleach on anything. Two rinses does the job for me-- your mileage may vary. Assemble up the fermenter with a little water in the airlock (most of 'em have a `fill' line on 'em). If you've got a plastic fermenter, you can put the funnel inside it for now. If you've got a carboy, just keep the funnel somewhere clean and away from breezes that might have airborne baddies. You'll be pouring boiling must through the funnel later, so it's not as critical to keep that clean (but when you're not boiling things, you'll want it sanitized, and it's a good habit to get into now). Crazy-Good Mead - The recipe Ingredients: * 10 lbs honey * 1 oz Saaz hops * 2 lbs frozen blueberries * 1 gallon apple juice (buy the no-preservatives kind) * 1 pack champagne yeast (I used Red Star) Directions: * Bring about 3 gallons of water to a boil. * Add the honey, stirring until it's dissolved. * Bring the must back to a boil, being careful not to boil it over. You can do this by stirring it. If it starts to boil over, turn down the heat. * Add 1/2 oz Saaz hops. * Boil for 15 minutes, skimming off any scum that forms (it'll be beeswax, bee parts, and such from the honey, not anything you'll want to drink). * While it's boiling, you can get the blueberries ready, by putting them in a hop-boiling bag. * Reduce the heat to keep it at a simmer. It shouldn't boil again from this point on. * Add the blueberries, mashing the bag around a bit over the pot before you dump it in--you want to break the fruit up, to extract the juice more easily. * Simmer for 10 more minutes. * Add the remaining hops (about 1/2 oz). * Simmer for 5 more minutes, getting the fermenter ready by putting the apple cider in it. * Add the hot must to the cider, and bring the fermenter up to 5 gallons total by adding cool water. When you pour the must into the fermenter, it'll splash, which will aerate the must. This gives the yeast the oxygen they need to get started. * Seal up the fermenter and wait for it to cool (overnight, perhaps). * When the must in the fermenter has reached about 70 degrees F, toss in the yeast, put the airlock back on the fermenter and wait. This recipe will take about a month to ferment at 65 degrees or so. If the area you have set aside for your fermenter is warmer or cooler than that, your time will vary. Warmer temps make for faster fermentation. Cooler temps make for slower. If you've got a hydrometer, you can wait for the specific gravity to drop below 1.0. If not, just wait for it to bubble no more than once every five or ten minutes. If it's bubbling more often than that, let it sit longer. If the airlock goes dry, put more water in it. If you get a real vigorous fermentation and it either fills the airlock with foam or blows it clear off, don't worry. Just find the airlock, clean it up, refill it with water, and pop it back on the fermenter. A couple notes here while you're waiting for your melomel to ferment: when I brewed this, the original gravity was 1.075. This is a chance to use your hydrometer if you bought one. If not, don't worry about it. When fermentation slows, it's time to bottle. Hydrometer Usage Using a hydrometer is pretty easy. The hydrometer will come in a plastic tube. To measure the SG of a liquid: take the hydrometer out of the tube, fill the tube with the liquid, and then (over a sink) put the hydrometer into the tube and splash a little more liquid out after it's done overflowing. When things quit splashing around and the hydrometer quits bobbing up and down, read the number off the scale on the hydrometer where the liquid meets it. There may be multiple scales, but the one you want is the one that goes from about 1000 (or 1.000) at the top to about 1150 (or 1.150) at the bottom. If you've filled the hydrometer tube with water to see how it works, it should be very near 1000. (It won't be exactly 1000, because your water will probably have some gases dissolved in it, won't be the temperature the hydrometer was calibrated for, etc.) When measuring gravities of beer/wort, wine/must or mead/must, you should read the manufacturer's instructions and try and get things near the temperature they specify. Also, if you're measuring a carbonated liquid, let it sit long enough that it's gone entirely flat. Put the cap back on the hydrometer tube and shake it some, even. That's it. Bottling First you need to clean the bottles. Again, there're a number of ways to do this. I'll cover a couple of them. The first, and easiest, way to clean the bottles is to use your dishwasher (if you have one). Make sure they're all empty and clean first, and then just run 'em through with Electrosol dishwashing stuff. Most dishwashers will hold the three cases of bottles you'll need. If you don't have a dishwasher, you can use B-Brite (according to the directions on the bottle) or use chlorine bleach. If you use bleach, just mix up a bucket of sanitizing solution using about a cap-full of bleach for a gallon or so of water. Fill each bottle to the rim with bleach-water, and then rinse it at least twice making sure to get all the bleach out. If the bottles smell of bleach, you haven't rinsed 'em enough. You can reuse the bleach-water that comes out of the bottles, and the rinse water goes down the drain. The plastic tubing you'll be using to siphon your mead around needs to be sanitized at this point, too. I find that siphoning one bottle's worth of bleach-water through it works well. Make sure to rinse the tubing thoroughly. Also sanitize the bottle caps. If you've got a bottling bucket, sanitize the bottles, caps and tubing in the bucket, and then rinse it twice, too. Okay. Everything's clean now. Siphon the mead into the bottling bucket using some of your plastic tubing, being careful not to splash it around too much. If you don't know how to siphon liquid, ask one of the neighborhood juvenile delinquents, or check out the Appendix 3 - Siphoning. Also try to avoid getting any of the sediment from the fermenter into the bottling bucket. You'll want to add about a half-cup of sugar of some kind to the mead--either corn-sugar from your homebrew supply store or honey will work. Dissolve it in a couple cups of boiling water and add it to the bottling bucket. Now fill the bottles. Siphon the mead into the bottles one at a time, leaving about an inch or so of head-space in the bottle. This is to allow room for the carbon dioxide to expand into and not blow up your bottle. If you're using a bottle-filler, it'll leave about the right amount of room in the bottle for you. As each bottle is filled, cap it. When you've got them all filled and capped, sit back and relax. In about a month it'll be ready to taste and check for carbonation. If it's still too flat, don't worry, just let it sit a little longer. It'll get there. Drink it! First you'll need to chill it some. Treat this mead the same way you would a light imported beer, chilling it to about 40 or 45 degrees (Fahrenheit). When you open each bottle, you'll notice a little sediment in the bottom of it. This is the yeast that gave its life for the carbonation. Just pour slowly from the bottle into a chilled glass, and leave about the last half-inch or so in the bottle. Lift the glass to your lips and enjoy. Notes for Beermakers Mead can be brewed just like beer, except it uses honey instead of barley malt, and is often unhopped. There are a couple differences to note, though. Fruits should never be boiled. Doing so will set the pectin, and you're apt to get something more closely resembling jelly than mead. Also, boiling will drive off some of the more delicate flavors present in the honey, so you want to keep it short. Honey won't support bacterial growth the way barley malts will, as it's a super-saturated solution of sugar, so it doesn't need to be boiled. Although there are some bacteria in natural honey, they won't usually cause problems. Boiling just makes it easier to dissolve, and drives off the chlorine that you'll find in city-water. Heck, if you pay attention to sanitation, you can mix up a mead without even heating the water (you should either use spring water or well water if you're not going to boil the water to drive off the chlorine, though). The important things to remember are sanitation and aeration. The must needs to be aerated so the yeast can be fruitful and multiply during their aerobic stage. Not aerating your must enough gives anaerobic bacteria an advantage over the yeast. Lack of sanitation lets the little buggers into your brew in the first place. Another big difference from beermaking is that honey doesn't contain many of the nutrients that barley does, which yeast need in order to survive and make alcohol. In many cases, recipes will call for yeast nutrient, which supplies what the yeast need. These nutrients are also present in fruits. Next is a recipe that does include boiling and hops, but only a minimal amount of each. Blueberry Mead (properly, a melomel) Ingredients: * 10 pounds light clover honey * 4 pounds frozen blueberries * 1 oz Saaz hops (1/2 bitter, 1/2 finish) * 1 pkg. WyYeast champagne yeast Directions: * Add honey to boiling water. * Bring back to a boil, skimming any scum that forms. * Add bittering hops. * Boil 15 minutes. * Reduce heat to a low simmer. * Add fruit. Simmer 10 minutes. * Add finishing hops. Simmer 5 minutes. * Into the fermenter with it. OG 1.080, FG 0.995. Notes: Make it just like you would a beer. Rack into a secondary fermenter after about a week or so, and leave it in there for about a month. Leave it in the bottles for a month or so. Prime with 1/2 cup honey. No need for yeast nutrient as there's plenty of fruit that'll supply what it needs. Notes for Winemakers Honey doesn't contain many of the nutrients that yeast need that are present in most fruits. I've found that when I use more than about 30% fruit for the fermentables, everything is fine, but less than that, and I need to add yeast nutrient. Other than that, making mead is much like making wine. You don't want to boil most of the ingredients, but warming the water makes it easier to dissolve the honey and helps bring the things you don't want to the surface. These things include beeswax and little-bitty-bee-parts. Beyond that, I don't have much winemaking experience, so this is a short section. Cold Mead This is the more traditional (pre-1600s) way to make mead. The only thing that's changed since then is that we're (at least most of us) not living in the Old World where the wild yeasts are friendlier. New World wild yeasts haven't had as many years of coexisting with humans brewing stuff. In general, good sanitation, getting any chlorine out of the water, and proper aeration will make for good mead. Raspberry Cooler Ingredients: * 8 lbs dark wildflower honey * 4 oz raspberry extract * 1 lb. frozen raspberries * 1/2 oz Saaz hops * 2 pkgs Red Star champagne yeast Directions: * Mix 8 lbs dark wildflower honey in 4 gallons cold water, stirring until the honey's all dissolved. Splashing it around is good, as you want to make sure the must is well-aerated. * Add 4 oz raspberry extract. * Mush up the fruit, and throw that in the fermenter, too. * Toss in 1/2 oz Saaz hops. This is dry-hopping, and they'll spend their life in the fermenter. * Add 2 pkgs Red Star champagne yeast, sit back, and wait. The dark honey and the raspberry extract make an interesting combination. I'm not sure if I'd use the whole 4 oz bottle of extract again, but it's about right to balance the strong flavor of the dark honey. If you use a lighter honey, use a little less extract. Over time, the raspberry flavor kind of gives out, so this is a mead that's better without too much aging. Three to six months was good, but bottles saved longer than that were missing the raspberry flavor. High Gravity Mead Just like other meads, except more so. When I speak of high-gravity meads, I mean mead in the 4-lbs-honey-per-gallon-of-water range. The added sugar means it'll take longer to ferment. It also makes it very likely that you'll need a yeast nutrient. Another issue to consider is that most yeasts don't do well under high-sugar conditions. The things to remember are the same as for other meads, but you'll need to expect longer fermentations (having to wait three or more months for fermentation to slow is typical), and once the fermentation is done, these meads typically take longer to age. Given enough patience, you can make some very tasty, very strong meads of a traditional style. Meads of this style were traditionally started in the summer for consumption in the winter or spring. This will work out nicely from a temperature standpoint, as you'll have warm temps to start the yeast off quickly, and then cooler temps to age the mead once it's mostly fermented. However, these meads are not for everyone. With this type of mead, you'll probably want to rack the mead (transfer it from a primary to a secondary fermenter) twice, as having the mead sitting for prolonged periods on the dead yeast will add `off' flavors to it. The results are typically worth the wait, though. A way to speed the process is to add the honey in smaller batches. For example, if your recipe calls for 20 lbs of honey in a five-gallon batch, start out with 10 lbs initially. Once the fermentation starts to slow down, rack the mead into another fermenter and add 5 more lbs of honey. Wait for the fermentation to slow, rack again, and add the last 5 lbs. If you take this approach, make sure to leave some room in the fermenter for the added volume of honey. Adding the honey a little at a time like this will keep from hitting the yeast with high- sugar conditions which aren't good for them. The yeast will repay you by doing their job more quickly, and you won't have to wait as long for a finished product. This is a good area to get into once you've made a few lighter gravity meads and have gotten some extra equipment, since you'll be tying up a carboy for at least six months. Yeast There are a number of yeasts you can use to make mead. I've used various champagne yeasts a lot, as I don't make my meads incredibly strong, and I like a dry, sparkling mead. The drawback of champagne yeast is that it's not too tolerant to very high original gravities, and it is very tolerant to high alcohol content. This means that it will start very slow if you're brewing a high-gravity mead, but it will ferment out almost all the sugar available. If you're brewing high-gravity meads, I'd suggest starting with either a wine or mead yeast, and if you like a dry, strong mead, finishing it with champagne yeast. If you like a sweeter mead, you can use a mead or a wine yeast right from the beginning. Some yeasts that I've had good results with, or have heard recommended by others, are Lalvin K1V, which is a fast starting, intermediate finishing wine yeast; Flor Sherry yeast, for a sweet finish (or you could use more honey with the Lalvin K1V); and Prise de Mousse, which is similar to champagne yeasts in finish. I've heard of people having good results with Vierka mead yeast, but I've had mixed results. I've also tried YeastLab Dry Mead yeast, which worked nicely. I think the problems I've seen with the Vierka may have been due to older yeast. As mead continues to increase in popularity with homebrewers, more new varieties should become available, and they'll be fresh more often. Be aware that this list is far from complete, and there are probably many other suitable yeasts out there. For lower gravity meads, I've used Edme ale yeast with good results, and it's becoming a favorite of mine. As long as you don't make the mead with such a high starting gravity that the yeast never get a good start, results are pretty good, and slightly higher-than-normal temperatures don't bother ale yeasts as much as they do other strains. An added benefit is that the mead doesn't need as much aging as mead made with wine or champagne yeasts do, and you can enjoy it earlier. In short, don't be afraid to try something new, but make sure you check the expiration dates. Some mead yeasts sell slow enough that keeping fresh stock in a homebrew store is a challenge. You may also want to check out the Zymurgy special issue on yeast and beer, or the Summer 1994 issue, which has a table listing yeasts and their characteristics. They describe a large number of yeasts, many of which will work well for mead-making. Yeast Nutrient There are two different kinds of yeast nutrient available. They are yeast hulls (also known as `ghosts') and di-ammonium phosphate (usually just called `yeast nutrient'--this is the easiest to find). Some people say that the yeast hulls make for better meads more quickly, since you don't have to wait for the chemical taste from the phosphates to wane. My opinion is that both are usable, but the yeast-hulls leave you more margin for error. If you put in too many hulls, you'll just have a larger layer of sediment to deal with. If you put in too much phosphate, you'll have a chemical taste that'll take a while to fade. In older times, egg white was also used as a yeast nutrient, but given the problems with salmonella in eggs nowadays, I'd recommend against using this method. That said, to use 'em, you basically just whip up an egg white until you've got something resembling meringue, break that up into little bits, and toss it into the must. If more than roughly a third of your fermentable sugars are coming from fruit or barley malt, you won't need to worry about yeast nutrients, since these ingredients contain the things yeast will need. Recipes, Recipes, Recipes The first batch of recipes are from the Mead-Lover's Digest. We've edited them for clarity, while also trying to preserve the spirit of the originals. Also, we've tried to touch the authors' original comments as little as possible, since some of them cover things I haven't covered yet in the book. I hope you find them helpful. Here's a blurb on the MLD that its coordinator asked we include: The Mead-Lover's Digest is an electronic forum for meadmakers and mead-lovers to discuss all aspects of mead: recipes, ingredients, techniques, history. (Most of the day-to-day discussion tends to be about making mead). To sign up for the Digest: Send e-mail with the subject "Subscribe", with your full name and your e-mail address in the message, to: The Mead Lover's Digest About the Digest: The Mead-Lover's Digest was created in Fall, 1992 to help people interested in mead find one another, discuss mead, and exchange information. An issue of the Digest is sent out about every two or three days, depending on the amount of material submitted. As of October, 1995, more than 400 issues of the Digest had appeared. A typical issue is between 200 and 500 lines (about 8 - 30 KB). Distribution is worldwide. The Digest is a non-commercial, strictly volunteer effort by/for mead folk. The caretaker of the digest is currently Dick Dunn. * Traditional Mead or Maple Wine * Citrus Mead * The Thrilla from Vanilla * Blueberry-Jasmine Mead * Cranberry Mead * Grapefruit Melomel * Jamaica Blue Mead * Mulberry Mead (Morat) * Royal Colors Melomel * Strawberry Melomel * Sweet Pyment * de-Cyser Apple Mead-pagne * Honey-Maple Mead * Simha * Honey Bucket Bracket And here are a few more of Dave's recipes, new to the html version of this book. * Dave's Bracket * Hangover Cyser The Bee's Lees is an collection of recipes that have been posted to the Mead- Lover's Digest. Traditional Mead or Maple Wine Ingredients: * 5-6 qts honey or 7-8 qts maple syrup (bulk grade B dark) * 5 tsp yeast nutrient * 15 grams white wine yeast Directions: * Relax, don't worry, have some mead. * Hydrate the yeast and dissolve the yeast nutrient separately in warm water for 30 minutes. Mix the honey, maple syrup, or both with first hot and then cold tap water in a large open container to about 5 gallons. Splash or spray the water to oxygenate the must so that the yeast will multiply. Pour the must into a glass carboy, then pitch in the hydrated yeast and dissolved yeast nutrient, dregs included. * Use a blow off tube for the first few days and then switch to a water trap. In a month or so, the alcohol will kill the yeast before it runs out of sugar. If not, and the mead turns out too dry, add some more honey. It is ready to drink as soon as fermentation stops. * Maple wine becomes crystal clear with a beautiful sherry color within sixty days. Mead will sometimes clarify in ninety days. If you choose to bottle the mead before it is clear, it will clarify in the bottles, leaving an unsightly but delicious sediment. * Use bentonite (clay) to quickly clarify a mead any time after fermentation stops. Boil 12 ounces of water in a saucepan. While simmering, slowly sprinkle and stir in 5 tsp of bentonite. Cover and let stand for 24 hours. Add during racking. It may be necessary to rack and bentonite twice. The result is crystal clear. Notes: Traditional Meads and Maple Wines have an alcohol content of 12-15%. Always use yeast nutrient and plenty of yeast for a strong start. The fermentation will take off with a bang and the rapidly rising alcohol content will quickly kill off any wild yeast. There is no need to sulfite, heat, or boil the must. Why ruin good honey? I have never had a bad batch of mead, except when I added acid blend. Citrus Mead--A Metheglin Ingredients: * 10 lbs honey * Citrus peel (about 3/4 the skin of one orange) * Sliced ginger (about the size of a thumb) * Yeast Directions: * Make a basic mead with 2 lbs of honey per gallon. Use a clover honey or a light wildflower honey for this recipe. Just before taking the must off the boil, add a small amount of sliced ginger (about the size of one's thumb for a 5-gallon batch) and then add the thinnest peel of orange skin (about 3/4 of the skin of the orange). Be careful not to get the white pith of the skin--it leaves a bitter/soapy aftertaste. * Let it cool naturally about 3/4 hour (longer for larger batches) and then remove the ginger and orange peel. Put in a carboy to cool, then add yeast and let it go for three to six weeks (I usually let it go till it starts to clear). Bottle, let sit for another week or two (to charge the bottles) and then chill and serve. Notes: I've made this with lemon peel or grapefruit peel instead of orange peel, and all taste great! If you use orange blossom honey, use orange peel rather than some other citrus fruit--it really enhances the flavor! Grapefruit is the strongest flavor, and the most likely to be bitter/harsh, so use less of it than for orange or lemon. Leave some of the ginger and the skin in the must during fermentation for stronger flavor. Use less ginger and less citrus skin for the first batches, and then increase the amounts till you get the exact flavor you want. (One friend used a pound of ginger per gallon! And he liked it!) The slow-cool method (rather than using a chiller) is supposed to be part of what makes the flavor great. I prefer mead yeasts if possible, but champagne or general purpose wine yeast works fine. This should create a slightly sweet mead with an alcohol content of three or four percent. The Thrilla from Vanilla Ingredients (for 7 gallons): * 9 lbs of mesquite honey from Tempe, AZ * 2 tbsp gypsum to harden up the water a bit * 1 4-ounce bottle of Madagascar vanilla extract Directions: * Vanilla extract added after the must cooled. * The unfermented beverage tasted great, it's been bubbling away for over a month. I don't know how many vanilla beans are in one bottle, but I've heard that they are rather potent. Notes: The inspiration for this recipe came from a mead that was poured at the `Beer and Steer', a large outdoor homebrewers party held in Colorado occasionally. As this mead has aged, the vanilla flavor has become more pronounced. For the next batch, we will probably increase the vanilla extract to 6 oz. At nine months the flavor is still improving, I project that it will be incredible at eighteen months--if there is any left. Dave's Notes: I made a mead based on this recipe, except I went nuts with the vanilla. I had a 16 oz bottle of Mexican vanilla extract, and I put in the whole thing. I don't think it was too much vanilla, and most people agreed. The other major change was that I used a real dark "wildflower blend" of honey, which balanced the strong vanilla flavor nicely. Blueberry-Jasmine Mead Ingredients: * 10 lb clover honey (basic, grocery store variety) * 2-12 oz bags of frozen Maine wild blueberries * 1/4 cup jasmine tea (dry) * 3 tsp pectic enzyme * 3 tsp yeast nutrient * 1 pkg Red Star Champagne yeast Directions: * The honey, blueberries, pectic enzyme, and yeast nutrient were added to about 2 gal of water and raised and held at 170 F for 25 minutes. I squished the blueberries and strained them about halfway through the heating process. This mixture was then poured into a carboy with water to make a bit less than 5 gallons. I then boiled about 2 cups of water, steeped the tea for several minutes and strained it into the carboy. When cool, I pitched the dry yeast (I know, I should know better than to use dry yeast...). * OK. Time passes. Fermentation happens. It stops. I taste the result. The jasmine was a bit too heavy, but I figure it will probably mellow with age. The blueberry smell, flavor, and color was kind of underwhelming. The main problem was, the resulting mead was thin-bodied and dry as a bone. Now I want a fairly dry mead, but this was way too much so. * So next, I heated: * 2 lb clover honey * 12 oz frozen wild blueberries * 1 tsp yeast nutrient * 1 tsp pectic enzyme in a quart or so of water, squished and strained, and added this mixture to the carboy. * Fermentation started again (slowly) and has continued for the past couple of months. It is now crystal clear, has a beautiful purple color, nice blueberry and jasmine aromas, and a very nice mouthfeel (not to mention a fairly high alcohol content!). Notes: * 1st OG: 1.067 * 1st FG: 0.990 (before 2nd addition of honey) * 2nd OG: 1.004 (after 2nd addition of honey) * 2nd FG: 0.996 Cranberry Mead Ingredients (for 2 gallons): * 1 gal Oceanspray cranberry juice. (Good jug too!) * 5 lb vernal honey (clover-alfalfa) * Palmful raisins, chopped * 1 tsp yeast nutrient * 1/2 tsp acid blend * Champagne yeast Directions: * Heat the honey with some water (1:1 is fine). Pasteurize or boil. I campden- treated the juice. Shouldn't really need it though. Add the rest of the goods, divide the juice between two gallon jugs. Divide honey mixture. Pitch yeast, bring up to a full gallon. (10/17/92) * I fermented one in a closet upstairs (60s) and one in the basement at lower 50s. They both fermented forever. In January I transferred to a secondary. The SG was 1.010. Added 2 cups/gallon dissolved corn sugar to top it up. The upstairs one was bottled 1/31. It was, and still is, cloudy. * The downstairs one was bottled 7/5. It was clearer, sweet and strong. It did finally clear. and was significantly better than the first. Notes: Some of this broth lasted a full year. The last bottle disappeared with my folks at X-mas, celebrating their survival of the Pasadena fires. It is very sweet, and tasty. Nicely balanced. It has become lightly carbonated--even though it's corked. Nice touch though. Light red/orange color, clear, fruity nose. It has a full body, almost syrupy, and is quite strong! Grapefruit Melomel Ingredients: * 7 lb Clover Honey * 6 (medium) grapefruit * 1 tbsp fresh grated ginger * Dash of acid blend * 1/2 oz cascade hops (used as finishing hops) * 1 tbsp pectic enzyme * 1 tbsp sparkalloid * Champagne yeast Directions: * Mix honey into a couple gallons heated water. * Bring to a boil. * Skim scum. * Grate peel from grapefruits and juice them. * Add peel, hops and acid blend to boil. * Add juice when heat goes off. * Cool by adding cold water. * Pitch yeast. * Ferment for a month. * Rack to secondary. * Add pectic enzyme and sparkalloid. * Ferment until done * Rack again, and bottle with 3/4 cup corn sugar. Notes: It was a grapefruit melomel mead brewed in Feb, `92. I didn't take gravity readings, but it was a pretty light mead. It was bottled maybe two or three months later. After a month or two in the bottle it had carbonated, but smelled like vomit. Had a sour citrusy aftertaste. Not pleasant. I put it away for a long time, and a year later it was clear, sparkling, and smelled nicely citrus. The pukey smell had cleared. It did taste like grapefruit, but more gently so. It may have been a bit too acid. A nice champagne-like presentation. You could even make raisin submarines in it. (If you've never tried this, drop a wrinkly raisin in a glass of clear sparkly mead, and be amazed!!! Fun for the whole family! Up and down!) The take-home lesson here was: age is a good thing. Be patient! Some meads are very harsh young, but can age beautifully, and become quite enjoyable. Jamaica Blue Mead Ingredients: * 6 lb clover honey * 1 lb orange blossom honey * 1.5 lb corn sugar * 2 oz fresh, minced ginger root * 3 tsp ground cinnamon * 3 tsp yeast extract * 1 gal fresh blueberries * 2 lemons, halved * Wyeast #1214 Belgian Ale Yeast * 0.5 cup orange blossom honey (bottling) Directions: * Put honey, corn sugar, and yeast extract in brewpot with water. * Simmer for 10 minutes, skimming foam with kitchen strainer. * Add ginger root and simmer for 10 more minutes without skimming. * Remove from heat, squeeze in lemons, and throw into brewpot. * Cover and let stand for 15 minutes. * Strain out lemon halves and ginger. * Add blueberries, chill, pour mixture (blueberries and all) into primary fermenter, and pitch yeast. * After 7 days, rack off of fruit into secondary and age for one to two months. * When fermentation is complete, prepare a `tea' by simmering cinnamon and honey in water for 15 minutes in a covered pot. * Cool, add to bottling bucket, and quietly siphon in must. * Bottle and age for a couple of months or so. Notes: This makes a nice, light, sparkling beverage that is a brilliantly clear rose- purple color. The flavor is of blueberries kissed with cinnamon. A wonderful change of pace for a summer drink at about 5% alcohol by weight. Mulberry Mead (Morat) Ingredients: * 6 lb fresh picked mulberries * 5 lb snowberry honey * 3 lb corn sugar * 2 cups raisins- chopped * 2 tsp sodium-bisulfate * Pris-de-Mouse yeast Directions: * Pick through berries, remove leaves, grubs...etc. * Process berries. * Add hot water to honey to dissolve. * Add sugar and processed raisins. * Mix processed berries and sugar mix. * Add sodium-bisulfate (campden), mix well and leave overnight. * Next day, add water to bring up to 5 gallons. * Pitch yeast (7/1/93). * Racked a couple of times. * Bottled on 9/2/93 with 3/4 cup corn and demererra sugar (mixed). Notes: My girlfriend has a tree outside her house. Birds eat the fallen berries, become intoxicated and get hit in the road. So I thought I should remove some of the berries, save a couple birds. They were deep purple to red. The mead tasted good at bottling. It slowly became sparkling, and now is like a light sparkling burgundy. Quite fruity, but has a wine-like quality. It is fairly dry, but does have a berry-sweetness I find very enjoyable. It cleared beautifully, and has a deep red color, but easy to see through. The thing that surprised me was how good it was young. I rarely have meads taste good young (see grapefruit recipe!), but this one did! Specifics: * OG: 1.070 * FG: 0.990 Royal Colors Melomel Ingredients (for 7 gallons): * 19 lbs alfalfa or other lightly flavored honey * 10 pints blueberries * 4 oz lemon juice * 10 g Flor sherry yeast Directions: * Heat 5 gal of water to 160 F (70 C) * Add the honey, mashed blueberries, and lemon juice. * Raise the must to 180 F (80 C), hold for 15 min, then chill. * Rehydrate the yeast in 1 cup of 90 F (35 C) water for 5 min. * Divide the must into two 4-gallon food grade plastic buckets and pitch half the yeast in each. * Ferment for one week and rack off the fruit into a 5 gal carboy and two 1- gallon jugs. * Allow to ferment to completion and clear (in my case this took eight months), racking every four months. * Bottle with 1/2 cup corn sugar per 5 gallons. Notes: This is a semi-dry blueberry melomel that took a first place at the 1992 Mazer Cup. The mead is a beautiful purple with an intense blueberry aroma when young. As it ages, the fruit aroma becomes more brandy-like. Specifics: * OG: 1.099 * FG: 1.009 Strawberry Melomel Ingredients: * 6 lbs clover honey * 4 lbs alfalfa honey * 12 lbs strawberries * Red Star Prise de Mousse yeast * 4 oz dextrose (bottling) Directions: * Start the yeast in about a pint of water with a few tablespoons of dextrose. Be sure the starter solution and jar are sterile, and at 70-80 F before adding yeast. This yeast should start quickly--a few hours at most. * Clean and hull the strawberries; chop into a few pieces. (Don't crush them or you'll have an impossible mess at racking.) Put them into a sanitized plastic- pail primary. * Bring 4 gallons of water to a full boil. Remove from heat and immediately add the honey; stir thoroughly. (This will sterilize the honey without cooking the flavor out of it.) Cool to about 150-160 F, pour over the berries in the primary fermenter. Cool to pitching temperature (below 80 F) and add yeast starter. Stir thoroughly to mix and aerate. * Every day or two, push the floating mass of strawberries down into the fermenting mead (the equivalent of a winemaker's `punching down the cap'). * After the strawberries have become very pale--probably ten days or more-- strain out as much of the strawberry mass as possible, then rack into a glass carboy. Be prepared for the racking tube to clog. (A stainless `Chore Boy' over the bottom end of the tube will help.) * Ferment to completion. If necessary, fine with gelatin. Prime with the 4 oz (by weight) of dextrose dissolved in water; bottle using crown caps. Notes: 12 lbs strawberries in a 5-gallon batch seemed like a lot at first, but it has worked out right. This gives a pronounced strawberry nose and taste, nothing subtle about it. You could use as much as 15 lbs (3 lbs/gallon) of fruit. I used frozen strawberries ...naturally, these are mushier and more likely to create pulp that's hard to manage in the primary, but they also release juice more readily. The blend of honey was intended to be such as not to mask the strawberry flavor. This turned out not to be an issue; you could shift the balance more toward the alfalfa or other stronger honey. Keep in mind that strawberries don't have a lot of sugar in them. They contribute flavor but not much fermentable. The mead fermented out in about eight weeks. I have no real idea what the true starting gravity was; it's just not possible to get a useful number with the fruit in it. It finished at 0.991. We were serving the mead and getting good reviews at sixteen weeks from the start of fermentation (eight weeks after bottling). After almost a year from start, the strawberry character is still holding true. Sweet Pyment - Mead with Grapes Ingredients: * 5 gal Riesling juice (TA=1.10, Bx=19, pH=2.99) * 7 lbs clover honey * Yeast Lab dry mead yeast (M61), 1-liter starter Directions: * Add the honey to the sulfited grape juice to raise the OG to 29 Bx. * Adjust the acid if needed with acid blend. * The following day pitch the yeast starter and let it ferment at ambient basement temperature leaving in primary twelve months. * Rack off the sediment and bottle when completely clear. Notes: Wonderful sweet/sour balance with a tremendous honey/sweet Riesling aroma. Should be stunning after a few years of bottle age. Taste is reminiscent of a late harvest Riesling with honey flavors and aroma very evident. Specifics: * OG: 1.120 (29 Bx) * FG: 1.019 (5 Bx) de-Cyser Apple Mead-pagne Ingredients: * 4 gal fresh pressed cider (from an orchard) * 5 lbs honey (used local clover/alfalfa) * 1 tsp acid blend * Handful chopped raisins, or 1/4 tsp grape tannin * 1 tbsp yeast nutrient * Irish moss (or other clarifier) * 2 tsp pectic enzyme * 4 campden tablets (sodium metabisulfite) * Epernay yeast (or champagne) Directions: * Pour the cider into a sterilized 5-gallon carboy. Allow it to splash to aerate. * Treat overnight with campden tablets. Crush and predissolve. * Add the raisins to the carboy. * Next day heat the honey in < 1 gallon of water (160 deg 1 hr, or boil if you choose). * Add all other ingredients to the syrup and then add to the fermenter. * Use some of the treated juice to hydrate the yeast, and pitch the starter after it bubbles. * After a few weeks, rack to a secondary. * Add more finings if needed (isinglass is good) and top up with juice or honey syrup. * I've generally liked to let cysers, and ciders, age for a pretty long time. Most have been in fermenters for at least four months. * You can bottle still, or sparkling. Use 1/2 to 3/4 cup corn sugar and champagne bottles for a nice sparkle. These have taken a long time to gain a good bubble level. They have been stored cold (55). But well worth the wait! Notes: A potent and pleasing fruity wine. Once mature, a clear, bubbly champagne-like mead. My dad really enjoyed this one, and he usually drinks nicer wines. I was flattered. He kept grabbing the bottle at dinner! If you rack several times you can eliminate most of the sediment, and only have a fine layer in the bottle. I prefer to keep the priming down, because they seem to continue fermenting slowly for a long time. I've had a batch carbonate without priming! So much for a still wine! You could stabilize and sweeten to taste if you choose. Bottling with teas is a nice addition. I've used cinnamon, but I'd bet ginger, or a tad of clove would be nice. Specifics: * OG: ~1.070 Will vary depending on source of cider. * FG: 1.000. Honey-Maple Mead Ingredients (for 2 gallons): * 2 quarts maple syrup (that hurt$, as Charlie Papazian says) * 2 to 2-1/2 lbs light honey (I used clover) * Acid to taste--I think I used a little less than 1 tsp of acid blend for this batch. * Pasteur champagne yeast Directions: * Bring honey and maple syrup to boil in enough water to liquefy. * Add acid and a bit of nutrient if desired. (I don't think you need yeast nutrient--the maple syrup seems to have the necessary stuff in it.) * Skim for a minute or two, enjoying the flavor of the yummy foamy stuff. * Cool. * Then add water to make a 1.120 SG must. * Pitch with working Pasteur Champagne yeast. Prepare for a moderately vigorous fermentation. * Rack off after primary fermentation, and once again if it isn't clear in a few more weeks. I topped off the gallon jugs with boiled water after the first racking--that seemed to help settle the yeast. Notes: Both batches I made this summer (the first with about half this much syrup) fermented out to almost exactly 1.000. They fermented and cleared at 70-72 F in six to eight weeks. The result (that's what you've been waiting for): a beautiful, crystal-clear brilliant straw-colored liquid, slightly sweet, with a monster alcohol palate and strong bourbon notes. Smoooooth. Then, for a stellar, absolutely world-class result, take the three month old young mead and prime with a small quantity of fresh yeast (1/4 pack or less) and about 1.25 times (or perhaps a little more) what you consider a normal dose of sugar for beer. Bottle quickly and carefully, and let age for at least six months, turning and shaking gently a few times during the first weeks. The sparkling honey-maple mead will wow absolutely anyone. Serve it ice cold in your best champagne flutes. I rather like the still mead on the rocks. Is this heresy? Honey-Maple Mead Ingredients (for 2 gallons): * 2 quarts maple syrup (that hurt$, as Charlie Papazian says) * 2 to 2-1/2 lbs light honey (I used clover) * Acid to taste--I think I used a little less than 1 tsp of acid blend for this batch. * Pasteur champagne yeast Directions: * Bring honey and maple syrup to boil in enough water to liquefy. * Add acid and a bit of nutrient if desired. (I don't think you need yeast nutrient--the maple syrup seems to have the necessary stuff in it.) * Skim for a minute or two, enjoying the flavor of the yummy foamy stuff. * Cool. * Then add water to make a 1.120 SG must. * Pitch with working Pasteur Champagne yeast. Prepare for a moderately vigorous fermentation. * Rack off after primary fermentation, and once again if it isn't clear in a few more weeks. I topped off the gallon jugs with boiled water after the first racking--that seemed to help settle the yeast. Notes: Both batches I made this summer (the first with about half this much syrup) fermented out to almost exactly 1.000. They fermented and cleared at 70-72 F in six to eight weeks. The result (that's what you've been waiting for): a beautiful, crystal-clear brilliant straw-colored liquid, slightly sweet, with a monster alcohol palate and strong bourbon notes. Smoooooth. Then, for a stellar, absolutely world-class result, take the three month old young mead and prime with a small quantity of fresh yeast (1/4 pack or less) and about 1.25 times (or perhaps a little more) what you consider a normal dose of sugar for beer. Bottle quickly and carefully, and let age for at least six months, turning and shaking gently a few times during the first weeks. The sparkling honey-maple mead will wow absolutely anyone. Serve it ice cold in your best champagne flutes. I rather like the still mead on the rocks. Is this heresy? Simha -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: While this isn't a mead, and doesn't use any honey, I figured I'd put it in anyhow. Traditionally, it probably did use honey, but this is the modern recipe. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ingredients (1 gallon): * 1 cup white sugar * 1 cup brown sugar * Water to make a gallon * Two lemons * Yeast Directions: * Combine sugars, add water to make 1 gallon, and boil. * Squeeze two lemons into the mix and throw them in, quartered. * When it's cooled enough add 1/8 tsp of yeast (I used bread yeast). * Allow to ferment for a day or two at ~65-70 F. * Bottle, adding a few raisins and a tsp of sugar to each bottle. * Allow to sit at ~65-70 F until the raisins are sitting at the top (< 1 day). * Refrigerate or place in quite cool place. Notes: Drink in a couple weeks. So far I have only done one batch and I drank it over the course of two weeks. It keeps getting better and better. Plastic Calistoga bottles are what I've been using, they work great and seem to have no flavor. This is a Finnish drink called `sima' or maybe `simha', made only for May Day celebrations. The recipes for it that I've seen (and made) are all pretty much like this. Dave's Notes: I made a batch of this, and it was pretty tasty while young. If you let it sit too long, though, you'll be back to the vomit-smell problem mentioned in the Grapefruit Melomel recipe. Since I'd bottled in grolsch bottles, when that smell hit me, I just slammed the bottle back shut, and put it in the back of the fridge, hoping my roommate would drink it. Found it about six-months later, and the offensive smell had gone, and it was tasty, but bone-dry. The ideal way to drink this is very young, while it's still fermenting, but if you do like I did and forget a bottle, let it age plenty, and it'll be drinkable. Honey Bucket Bracket -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: This is an all-grain recipe. If you're not familiar with all-grain brewing, or not up to the effort, check out Dave's Bracket instead, which is an extract recipe. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ingredients (for 8 gallons): * 25 lbs honey malt * 39 grams Saaz hop flowers * 130 grams shredded ginger root * 1 tbsp Irish moss * 12 lbs blackberry honey * 1 tbsp acid blend * Red Star Montrachet dry yeast Directions: It was a dark and stormy New Year's Eve. 25 lbs of honey malt (17 degrees Lovibond) were mashed at 156 degrees until starch test showed complete saccrification. The mash was sparged at 164 degrees. This wort was brought to a boil. The color contribution of this malt was estimated at approximately 60 degrees SRM. 39 grams of Saaz hop flowers (at 6.0% acid) were added for a proposed 60 minute boil. 130 grams of shredded ginger root were added for a proposed 15 minute boil. 1 tbsp of Irish moss was added for a proposed 10 minute boil. At the end of the 60 minutes, I added 12 lbs of Schneider's blackberry honey. Heat continued, even though the wort wasn't boiling. After 25 minutes, the boil resumed, and I added 1 tbsp of acid blend. After another 10 minutes of boil, the heat was turned off, the immersion cooler was inserted, and cooling was begun. I used Red Star Montrachet dry yeast in this batch. The first package was added when the wort was still too hot (oops!), so another package was added later, before obvious signs of fermentation had begun. All of the above yielded about 8 gallons of wort, which had a specific gravity of 1.112. The actual hopping rate was estimated at 22 IBU, not including the acid added. The final gravity reading was 1.052, with the resulting alcohol at approximately 6.4%. Racking occurred on 13 Jan 94. Bottling took place on 25 Jan 94, giving just under one month of fermenting. Priming sugar consisted of 1/2 cup corn sugar, 2 cups of water, and 1 tsp ascorbic acid. Never having had a bracket/braggot before, the taste was rather interesting. It is an exceedingly sweet beer, not mead-ish at all! Because I used honey malt, I called this brew Honey Bucket Bracket. Dark as the night, and thicker than sin! Notes: Michael Hall, who was one of the judges at the Duke's of Ale Spring Thing competition held recently in Albuquerque, New Mexico, wanted the recipe of the mead that I had entered. It took honors for the best mead of the competition. This is my attempt at supplying the recipe. It's not actually a mead, but something called a bracket or braggot. The American Mead Association is of very little use in supplying a definition of the style, only saying that the mix has to have at least half of its fermentables coming from the added honey. The idea was to make a batch of beer and a batch of mead and slam the two together. Thus a beer was made (at a very low hopping rate), and a lot of honey was added to it. Judges' comments: * Michael Hall gave it 42 points. Good honey expression! Roasted malt comes through too! Fairly clear, good head retention. Good honey taste. Good roasted malt taste. Nice complex taste. This is the most interesting mead we've tasted! Nice balance of mead and beer. Very good idea! I could drink a lot of this (slowly...) on a winter night. * Bill Terborg gave it 45 points. Complex nose. Very nice. Great color and very clear. Very nice--complex, malt strong, yet honey in background. Good balance--sweet & acid. Great mead! Publish the recipe so we can all enjoy! * William deVries gave it 37 points. Good solid honey/malt aroma. Nicely balanced, almost smoky. Honey exudes throughout, bitter component masks the modifying sweetness, but not too badly. Malt flavor aids the complexity. Nice even flavors cause a pleasant and lasting impression. Dave's Bracket Ingredients: * 6 lbs light clover honey * 6 lbs light dry malt extract * 1 oz Chinook hops (boil) * 1.5 oz Saaz hops (finish) * Edme Ale Yeast * YeastLab Sweet Mead yeast (optional) * 5-10 lbs light clover honey in reserve Directions: * Brew a standard light ale with dry malt extract and hops. * Have honey in bottom of primary fermenter. * Pour hot wort onto honey, stirring gently to dissolve honey in wort, but not so much as to aerate hot wort. * Add cold water to make 5 gallons. * When temperature reaches 80F, shake like the dickens and pitch ale yeast. * Let ferment for a week. * Rack into secondary fermenter * Add 2 lbs of honey, dissolved in as little water as possible. * Wait for fermentation to slow * From this point on, a lot is going to depend on your fermentation conditions, and what you want for a finished product. The basic idea is to keep adding honey until the yeast have given up the ghost, and then add just enough more honey to sweeten to the desired level. * Add honey, 2 lbs at a time, until the yeast are Just Plain Done. If your yeast poop out before you're done with them, add a different, more alcohol tolerant strain, but Edme Ale Yeast has multiple strains, it seems, and at least one of them is a real trouper. * If a still beverage is desired, bottle. * If a carbonated beverage is desired, there are a few possibilities: * prime with about a pound of honey, and hope there's a little life left in the yeast. * keg and force-carbonate (my method) * bottle in 2-liter pop bottles, and force carbonate using "The Carbonater" Notes: The final result I got had 12 lbs of honey and 6 lbs of malt extract in a five- gallon batch. There was little residual sweetness, since the yeast did finish off the last of the honey while in the keg (I had to vent pressure a few times - careful if you've bottled so you don't get glass grenades). Somewhere along the way, the brew picked up an anise aroma. I couldn't smell it in the honey, and it's certainly not an aroma that was present in any beer I've brewed before this. I think it might have been an artifact of the YeastLab yeast, or one of the strains present in the Edme Ale Yeast. If you've got an idea, drop me a note. For a high-alcohol brew, this was pretty appealing. The combination of a little bit of hop bite, with plenty of alcohol, and the mystery anise smell combined nicely. About the only thing I would change would be to hop a little more heavily, both for the boiling and finishing hops. Maybe an additional half-ounce at 7 each stage. I wasn't really sure how strong this was going to end up being. I was trying to use the inexact methods that might well have been used in earlier times: "Keep putting in honey until it's done." I was pleased with the results, though, and I was surprised at how long the ale yeast lasted before being killed by the rising alcohol level. The other thing I was experimenting with was keeping the sugar level from ever being too high at one time, thus the repeated additions of honey. Too much sugar in solution is hard on the yeast, so I avoided that. Hangover Cyser -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is called Hangover Cyser because I'm usually making it while hungover, not because of any particularly ill effects it has. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ingredients: * Gallon jug of Apple Juice (get a glass jug. Plastic is no good, since you're going to be fermenting in this jug) * Pint jar of honey (1.5 lbs) * 12 oz can of fruit juice concentrate (no preservatives). Grape and Cranberry are among my favorites. I've avoided citrusy things so far. * Heaping tablespoon yeast energizer * Red Star Champagne yeast Directions: * Pour 48 oz of apple juice out of the bottle. This is about enough to ease the hangovers of two people. * Drink some of the apple juice you've poured off. * Pour the honey into the apple-juice jug along with the yeast energizer. * Drink some more apple juice. * Shake like the dickens until honey is dissolved, or head spins too much. Repeat until the honey is completely dissolved. * Drink some more apple juice. * Add the can of juice-concentrate. * Shake the jug again. This time should be easier. * Finish the apple juice you've poured off, and add yeast to the shaken mix, which should be about at the shoulder of the gallon jug. Attach airlock, and get on with your life. * Between a month and three later, the fermentation will be done, and you can bottle. If fermentation stops early, rack and add more yeast energizer and yeast. Notes: We first made this while we were writing this book initially. The recipe didn't make the first (paper) edition of the book, but the result turned out good enough that I had to write the recipe down. It's also an easy enough recipe that when he saw me make this, Tim Mitchell said "Hey! Even I can make mead like that!" There are only a few things you can do wrong with this. One is to add too much honey. The recipe as listed above makes for a starting gravity of about 1.120, which is about as high of an initial gravity as you want to use. If you're going to add more honey than that, do it in stages. The result of this recipe is a fairly strong, fairly smooth drink. Cranberry juice concentrate makes for a tasty holiday wine. Grape and apple flavors mix nicely, too. Just remember that whatever kind of juice you add needs to blend with apple, and you're fine. Mead Made Easy: Glossary Acid blend: A mixture of ascorbic and citric acids. Used for adjusting the pH of a must. Airlock: Used for locking the air out of your fermenter while letting the gases produced by fermentation escape. B-Brite: A sanitizing solution. Kills bugs dead. Barley malt: Malted barley. Bottle capper: Used for putting caps on bottles. Blow-off tube: A plastic tube, one end going into the stopper in your fermenter, the other going into a container with some water. It lets extra foam and such blow off from the fermenter, while still working as an airlock. Bottle filler: Used for filling bottles. It's typically got a spring loaded valve on the bottom of it so it doesn't pour mead on your floor. Bottle, Grolsch-style: A type of beer bottle with a ceramic lid attached by a wire thingie, sealed by a rubber gasket. Bottling bucket: A bucket. Used while bottling. It's used as an intermediate container between the fermenter and the bottles, so you don't have to worry as much about siphoning sediment into your bottles. Brewing pot: Something vaguely pot-like that you boil stuff in. Bigger than three gallons is good. Stainless steel is best. Carbonater, The: A handy little cap that screws onto two-liter plastic pop- bottles, and has a ball-lock quick-connect on it that works with CO2 systems. It's a pretty swell way to carbonate up 2 liters of mead or other beverage to see if you want to carbonate more of it. When I get around to finding the address of the company that makes it, I'll add a link to them here. Carboy: A three, five or six-and-a-half gallon bottle that probably used to hold bottled water. Carboy comes from karabah (I bet I mangled the spelling of that), which means "jug". Cetacean: Belonging to an order of marine mammals, including whales and dolphins. Cheesecloth: Cloth normally used to squeeze the watery stuff out of cheese curds without squeezing cheese all over the kitchen. Handy in general for filtering solids out of liquids. Chore Boy: A metal scrubby thing you usually use for getting the spilled goo off the top of your stove. It'll work as a filter. Di-ammonium phosphate: (NH4)2PO4--it's something that yeast need to grow strong and healthy bodies. Dry-hopping: Tossing hops directly into the fermenter without boiling 'em up in water, i.e. dry. Electrasol: A dishwashing detergent. Kills bugs dead. Fermentation: Yeast eat sugar, burp CO2, and excrete ethanol. Any questions? Fermenter: Yet another bucket, except when it's a carboy. Fermenter, primary: Almost always a bucket. Sometimes open to the air. Sometimes sealed with an airlock. Early stages of fermentation happen here. Fermenter, secondary: (Optional.) Almost always a carboy. Never open to the air. Always sealed with an airlock. Later stages of fermentation happen here. It's used because in the early stages of fermentation, stuff will settle out. If the brew is left sitting on that stuff for a prolonged period, funky flavors will get into the brew. Flocculate: To form flocculent masses, which are clumps like wool, according to my dictionary. It's typically used to describe what happens to the yeast when it quits partying and settles out of the must. Gruit: A mixture of herbs and spices that was used for flavor in early beer and mead brewing. Gruits were replaced by hops, because the recipes for gruits were closely held secrets, whereas it's hard to keep plants a secret. Hard cider: Fermented apple squeezin's. Yee-Haw! Hop-boiling bag: A smallish (well, smaller than your head,) bag made of some kind of mesh. They come in either cotton (disposable) or nylon (reusable) varieties. It's like a teabag in that you can pull the chunks out and not have to strain. Hops: The flower of any plant of the genus Humulus. Used for preserving beer, due to their anti-bacterial properties, and also for bittering it. They look kinda like pine-cones before they get processed into the pellets you buy. Hydrometer: Used to measure the specific gravity of a liquid. IBU: International Bittering Units. They measure how bitter a brew is, which you shouldn't worry much about since you'll be making mead, not beer. Internet mailing list: A keen way of exchanging information between geographically distant parties. Computer and modem required. Lovibond, degrees: A measure of the color of a brew. Higher numbers are darker. Malted barley: See barley malt. Mead: An alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey. Also known as meathe in older tymes. From the Sanskrit `madhu', which meant `honey.' Must: A mixture of fermentable sugars, typically from fruits, and water. Neutral grain spirits: Ever Clear. Wee-Haw! It's alcohol with only as much water as is required by the laws of physics. About 192 proof. Peak flavor: Good taste. Fermented beverages are icky straight out of the fermenter and need some aging to taste good. Pectin: A carbohydrate found in fruits that tends to clump up and make jelly after you boil it. Pitching yeast: The act of tossing yeast into your fermenter. It sounds technical, which is probably why brewers say `pitching' instead of `tossing.' Sediment: Stuff that settles out of a mixture. The gunk on the bottom of the bucket. Siphon: Pulling liquid up a tube, down the same tube, and into another container. One practical application is transferring mead from a fermenter into bottles. Another is getting gasoline in your mouth. The first is more pleasurable. Sodium phosphates: Nax(PO4)y--Many are good at killing bugs dead. Specific gravity: The ratio of the density of a given liquid to the density of water, and like that. It's a way to measure how much stuff you've dissolved in water. Typically sugars, in our case. Trub: Sediment. Especially dead yeasties and fruit skins. The leftovers in the bottom of the fermenter. Looks kinda like baby diarrhea. Wild yeast: Saccharomyces that haven't been hanging around man long enough, so they're not much good for baking bread or brewing beer, wine or mead. Wort: Beer before it's any fun. A mix of malted barley, hops and water. Yeast hulls: The dehydrated skins of dead little yeasts. Contain all the essential nutrients to make more yeast. Yeast nutrient: Things that build strong yeasts twelve ways. Appendix 1: Mead Yeast Starter To give your yeast the best chances for happy and productive lives, you need to give them a proper upbringing. This is pretty easy to do with a starter solution. There are a couple different starters I've used over the years. The easiest one is just a quart bottle of pasteurized, unpreserved apple juice (unfiltered seems to work a little better). Just toss the yeast in, and seal with an airlock. If you do this about 24 hours before the must is ready for the yeast, they'll have time to be fruitful and multiply, and will be off to a good start. You can also make a starter according to the directions on the yeast package (if there are any). Alternatively, you can mix up starter as follows: Add 4 oz (1/4 lb) dry light malt extract to a quart of boiling water. Boil it for 15 minutes or so. Pour into sterile quart container, leaving an inch or two of free space at the top (it probably won't all fit--just dump any leftovers) and cover loosely. When this has cooled to about body temperature (baby-bottle temp), toss in the yeast and seal with an airlock. Again, if you do this about 24 hours before the must is ready for the yeast, they'll have a nice head start on growing into nice upstanding citizens and making good mead for you. If you don't have malt extract on hand, sugar can be substituted, but you'll need to add a teaspoon or so of yeast nutrient. Appendix 2: Clarifying Meads How to Clarify Mead with Bentonite by John Gorman 1) What is Bentonite? Bentonite is pure powdered clay and is used in wine and mead making. It is inert and tasteless. You can get it at your local homebrew shop or by mail order quite inexpensively. Bentonite is used during racking to flocculate out the leftover yeast so that it settles to the bottom, leaving crystal clear mead behind. The clay particles are tiny flat sheets of mineral with minute electric charges sticking out at the edges. These charges attract the yeast cells, which then stick together in visible clumps that settle out rapidly. The time to bentonite is any time after active bubbling ceases. If you bentonite while there is still fermentation activity, the yeast that settles to the bottom will keep bubbling and re-cloud the mead. If you use a yeast nutrient, fermentation will proceed rapidly and cease in a month or so. By using bentonite, your mead will be clear and ready to bottle in a few days, freeing your carboy for more mead! 2) Bentonite Preparation Use 1/2 tsp bentonite per gallon of mead to be clarified. To prepare the bentonite for 5 gallons, boil 1 cup of water in a small saucepan. Pre-measure 2 1/2 tsp of bentonite granules into a small bowl. As the water boils, slowly sprinkle in the bentonite, stirring occasionally with a fork. If you sprinkle it in too fast, the granules will stick together as they absorb water, making large thick clots, which is not what you want. If that happens, just throw it out and try again. If you sprinkle just right into the boiling water, it will stay soupy. Take it off of the heat and store covered for 24 hours while the clay goes completely into suspension. 3) Racking Procedure Fill a clean pot with water, and bring it to a rolling boil for 10 minutes to drive off all of the oxygen. This water will be used after racking to fill up the head space. If you leave a head space after racking, the oxygen in the head space air will get into the mead and produce flat off flavors. Stir the bentonite mixture with a fork to get it all into suspension. Pour the bentonite mixture into the second (empty) carboy. Then rack from the first carboy into the second. Avoid splashing, which will oxygenate the mead. Top off the head space with the boiled water. Stir the mixture thoroughly without splashing by rotating your J-tube in the carboy. The bentonite will bind with the yeast into visible particles and flocculate out fairly quickly. After two days or so, it will all be resting in the bottom 1/2 inch of the carboy. Sometimes there is so much yeast in a mead that the first bentonite cannot flocculate out all of the yeast. In that case, do it again. The result will be crystal clear. Clarifying Mead With Gelatin Here's a quick little note on using gelatin to clarify mead. The process is similar to using bentonite. However, while bentonite clarifies by attaching to the proteins that may be left in a mead, gelatin clarifies by attaching to any yeast that are left in solution. This should be done just before bottling, since you want the yeast to keep working up to that point. To clarify a mead with gelatin, put 1 tablespoon gelatin in a couple cups of cold water, and heat it just until the gelatin dissolves. You don't want to boil the gelatin, since it'll make a sticky mess of your stove, as well as making the gelatin useless (it breaks down under the heat of boiling). Plain old Knox unflavored gelatin works just fine. Once the gelatin is dissolved, add it to the mead, let it sit while you get everything ready, and then rack the mead into your bottling bucket and bottle as normal. Appendix 3 - Siphoning -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When I initially published the first edition of this book in paper form, there wasn't a section on siphoning. This was because I assumed that anyone who was going to make mead would have brewed something else before and been exposed to siphoning at that point. The one review I got of the book (Brewing Techniques . September/October 1995, pg 92.) mentioned that the reviewer would have been clueless about how to siphon if he hadn't learned siphoning as part of having learned to make beer. Anyway, to address that complaint, I've added this short section on siphoning to the html version. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The theory of siphoning Water (or any other liquid) will try and achieve a level surface. Another way of stating this is that water flows downhill. The goal of siphoning is to give the liquid a path from one container to another. Since it has to flow briefly uphill, the way to do this is to have a closed tube full of water, and then the weight of the liquid on the downhill side of the tube will be greater than the weight on the uphill side, and gravity will do it's thing. This is an over- simplification, but it holds until the uphill side gets into many feet of height. If you want a much more complete description of the physics involved, Halliday & Resnick, which was my college physics textbook has one, as does Charlie Papazian's Complete Joy of Homebrewing. The practice of siphoning What you want to do is achieve a tube full of liquid leading from the higher, full container to the lower, empty container. There are a few ways to do this. The easiest method I've found is to take your siphon tube, and fill it with water (just don't empty it out when you rinse it the final time after sanitizing it). It doesn't have to be absolutely full, but having the water within a couple inches of each end will be best. You hold both ends of the tube at about the same height, and lower one of them into the full container, and once it's in the liquid, lower the other one to the empty container. Your mead will start flowing. The other method is the tried and true "sucking" method. What you do is place one end of the tubing in the full container, bend down to the empty container, and suck on the lower end of the tube until the mead starts to flow. In both cases, there are two things to watch out for. One is to have the lower end of the siphon tube close enough to the bottom of the container you're siphoning to that the mead doesn't splash around and get aerated, which can give your brew an oxidized flavor (tastes like wet cardboard. Bleh). The other is to keep the upper end of the tube below any floaties in the liquid you're siphoning, and above any sinkies sitting on the bottom. Each method has it's pluses and minuses. Working with a siphon tube full of liquid can be a little tricky your first few tries, and even after you've mastered the technique, you're liable to spill a little. You also dilute your mead a little with the water you have in the tube. Sucking on the tube adds the possibility that you'll get some bacteria from your mouth into your mead. The dilution isn't a big deal, unless you're working with a very small batch. When you're bottling, the dilution means that your first bottle goes to waste. As for infection from the bacteria in your mouth, you can always sterilize your mouth briefly with a little firewater. I'm partial to Wild Turkey or Rumpelminze. One last thing that can cause problems for you is that if the liquid you're siphoning has a lot of dissolved gas in it (carbon dioxide in a carbonated liquid, for example), that gas will tend to come out of solution at the top of the siphon-tube. The only real way to solve this problem is to make the uphill leg of the tube shorter by tipping the upper container. If the amount of gas in the tube gets to be too much, the siphon will stop, and you'll need to restart it. No big worry, but it's a hassle. The point is, try not to have to siphon carbonated liquids, and if you do, keep the uphill leg of the siphon as short as possible.