I know we have some homebrewers here. Anyone here make their own mead?
I have, but only using Charlie Papazian’s recipes from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing books. Apparently his mead recipes are not traditional, but I liked my results enough to get some other books (Ken Schramm, for one) with more traditional recipes. I think one of his recipes is going to be my next attempt, possibly a cyser (fermented cider with honey).
Tell me about your meadmaking attempts.
I did, several times. Honey was about $1 a pound then, so I did a little experimenting. I would NOT recommend buckwheat honey mead. It tastes pretty much like buckwheat pancakes. Orange blossom honey mead was kind of disappointingly bland. Plain old clover honey made the best mead.
I’ve made a lot of mead over the years, and the best advice I have for you is keep everything clean, clean, clean. And drink carefully, it’s weirdly powerful stuff.
Did you folks boil, use sulfites, or neither?
Papazian (the brewer) advocates boiling. Schramm (the mead traditionalist) argues against boiling, saying it drives off a lot of the delicate flavors and aromas and that you can get good results using sulfites or even, with care and proper attention to sanitation, just pitching a good starter.
That might be interesting if you add some maple syrup. No, seriously!
I’ve mostly used the mead kits from my local homebrew store. The sweet mead came very nice, but slowly fermented away all the sweetness so it became carbonated in the bottles, which turned out not so good because I put it into wine bottles…
Here’s the cyser recipe I used:
3 gallons pasteurized, no-preservatives-added organic apple juice
3 pints of water
3 pounds honey (one of those Honey Bears is a pound of honey).
Teaspoon of yeast nutrient
Dry champagne yeast
Put the apple juice into a 5-gallon carboy.
Boil the water. Turn off heat.
Add honey, yeast nutrient to hot water.
Stir, put lid on pot, let sit until fairly cool.
Add to apple juice.
Check temperature to make sure it’s below 90 degrees.
Add champagne yeast.
Rack to secondary after a while.
Bottle when clear.
Came out to about 13% alcohol.
The original recipe for this was to take a gallon jug of cider, pour off a pint, add a cup of honey and yeast and put a fermentation lock on the jug, for those with not so much equipment. This, with fairly low expense, would make a gallon of fairly high-octane cider, and possibly a humongous mess.
[QUOTE=Laughing Lagomorph]
Did you folks boil, use sulfites, or neither?
/QUOTE]
I tried sulfites with a batch of hard cider. The must was already working when I bought it. The sulfites did nothing to stop it. So much pressure built up in the fermenter that must was jetting out of the fermentation lock (I used one of the sink trap shaped ones). The stench was not to be believed!
So, no. I never tried using sulfites in mead.
I have always boiled, but unlike boiling beer, my brewing partner and I (it’s always best to have someone to drink with while you brew) have always used an extremely short-duration boil. Less than a minute. Other than that, we just keep everything clean.
I always use 15 pounds of honey for a 5-gallon batch. Comes out pretty strong, but very tasty. And while a batch using only buckwheat honey is, as noted above, not very drinkable, using 3 pounds of buckwheat in a 15-pound batch is quite good. We call it “Drunkwheat.” Still looking for a photo of Eddie Murphy as Buckwheat to put on the label.
I’ve found I have best luck experimenting with the various honeys sold at my local farmer’s market. The differences in the mead are subtle but noticable. There’s a wildflower honey that I prefer to using just clover honey, but a lot of that comes down to personal preference.
Oh, and as far as ingredients go, it’s quite simple:
15 pounds of honey
yeast
water
I never boil my mead. Use very hot water, yes. Boil it, no. That destroys the subtle aromas.
The secret to award-winning cyser is to add a can of apple juice concentrate to the mead just before you bottle it. That gives it an amazing fresh flavor and aroma.
My favorite cyser is 17 lbs. honey, acid blend, 5 gallons of fresh, filtered apple juice, 3 cinnamon sticks. Make a tea with the cinnamon, and add to the juice. Pitch with a good mead yeast. Wait a year. Enjoy.
I make mostly fruit-flavored meads that tend to be dry. I boil for only a minute or two, and then the minute the boil stops, the fruit is added. I like using either Champagne or Montrachet yeast, though I use Epernay occasionally as well.
Peach mead is my fave, and I like to use both clover and wildflower honey. I also add yeast energizer to get a good vigourous ferment, which can be a problem with just honey and yeast alone.
[QUOTE=Bewildebeest]
Hmmm. I know from my biological lab background that it generally takes less of a chemical agent (like, say, bleach) to prevent fermentation from happening then it does to stop a roaring fermentation in its tracks. My guess is you need way more than the usual amount of sulfites to “clean up” an already fermenting must than one that is relatively pristine. Interestingly Ken Schramm claims that he has often fermented cysers using just the wild yeast already there and gotten good results. He apparently grows his own apples and squeezes his own cider so he has a lot of control over how clean his raw ingredients are.
The one thing that is disappointing me so far is finding local honey for sale in the large amounts I need. I can easily buy honey in bulk from the supermarket or Costco but I want something with more character. I can buy interesting honey in bulk over the Internet, but I was hoping for something local. Then when I go to the farmstands and farmer’s markets around here they are selling precious little half pound jars of honey for, like, 8 bucks or something.
The season for agricultural fairs is just starting around here so I am going to keep my eyes open. Hopefully I can find a local honey connection.
I did this as well - I pasteurized it by heating it to about 160 F (IIRC). This is the third “school of thought” I’ve seen from major brewers when it comes to mead, in addition to “boil” and “sulfites”.
Is there a difference between mead and honey wine?
Not as far as I know. I suppose someone could say that mead is a more general term, and honey wine maybe only refers to a subset of mead (fermented honey beverages).
LL, try looking in the phone book under “Honey.” I’ve found that there are usually co-ops or distributors found there that would be happy to sell to you in bulk. They usually are the people who put their own hives out and process the honey locally. Or you could contact these people:
Warm Colors Apiary
Daniel Conlon
2 South Mill River Rd.
South Deerfield, MA 01373
Phone: 413-665-4513
Email: warmcolors1@juno.com
Website: http://www.warmcolorsapiary.com
This “phone book” you speak of…would this be an actual book of phone numbers grouped by category, so people can look them up that way rather than the traditional way, on the Internet? What a convenient idea. I’ll see if I can find one of those things. 
Seriously, I don’t think we even get a phone book anymore. I haven’t seen one show up here in a couple of years. But that link you provided looks like a winner, not real close but they ARE near my in-laws and close enough to satisfy my definition of “local”. They seem to have a great variety in a good range of sizes. I will be putting some business their way shortly.
I see your definition of local is like mine: Can I get there and back in an afternoon?
While you are over there, look for berries. Raspberry mead is a wonderful treat.
Well, Mass. is a small state. Virtually any trip within the borders can be done as a day trip.
What is frustrating to me is that I have been using www.honeylocator.com to try to find local suppliers and the place you found isn’t even listed there!
I googled massachusetts+honey+co-op+distributors.
Teine told me I should look at MPSIMS for this thread. And hey, a local meadmaker, cool.
I mostly do one-gallon batches, because I’m sort of messing around. I’ve also got a five-gallon carboy, but have learned that five gallons of cyser takes a lot of bottles.
Of meads I’ve done, the aforementioned cyser, a rhodomel, a braggot, a lime-ginger melomel, and I’ve got a peach sack mead in at the moment. That’s what I can remember, at least. I’ve used recipes off the Bee’s Lees and elsewhere on the web, book recipes, and make-it-up-as-I-go-along. Mostly these days I’m in make-it-up-as-I-go-along mode. (See also “messing around”.) Though if I do a maple syrup fermentation it’ll probably be off one of the Bee’s Lees recipes, 'cause I don’t know how maple syrup behaves in a bottle just now.
I’ve both boiled-and-skimmed and heated-up-enough-to-dissolve-the-honey, depending on what I’m doing. Mostly I’m doing the latter these days, because it’s less time-consuming. I tend to get my honey from Trader Joe’s, actually, but it would probably be a good project to find some local stuff to brew with.
Great link. My boyfriend, his roommates and I are brewing a batch, which should be done within a month.