I have a 3 gallon batch fermenting right now in the secondary fermenter. It should be ready for bottling, and after that it’ll be maybe 3-4 months before I try it. My aim is for a sweet, carbonated mead (at my husband’s request). I used some clover honey from Vermont, and mixed in a small amount of raspberry blossom honey from Maine.
I made mead in college, before I had proper homebrew equpment. Found a recipe on the web and made 3 1-gallon batches with BALLOONS! for airlocks. Heh. I boiled and used quite a bit of spices. I tried 3, 4, and 5 pounds of honey per gallon, a nice strong cup of tea as yeast nutrient and an ale yeast.
It came out rather harsh, with lots of phenoyls (sp?), but had mellowed nicely within 6 months. A nice introduction to homebrew. Enjoying some of my own, right now in fact. (Beer, that is.) If honey is ever reasonable again, I’ll definetly try it again.
Chances are overwhelming that anything you see in a store labelled “honey wine” is grape wine with honey added at bottling time. It’s probaby nice, but it’s not mead.
Chances are not overwhelming but still extant that anything you see labelled “mead” is also grape wine with honey added. Unfortunately, for some reason, alcoholic beverages don’t have to have their ingredients listed… I wonder why?
I’ve never seen honey wine in the store - I have seen honey wine recipes and I was wondering if honey wine and mead were the same.
Just speculating, but my guess would be that food labeling laws are driven by the various attempts at approving nutrition on a nation-wide scale. I could see booze being excluded because no one would expect it to have any nutritional value.
As to the label issue, there was a SD addressing this- though it’s a wee bit old:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_356b.html
Me, I’m less a mead chef than a mead housewife. A friend showed me how to make gallon batches involving water, honey, yeast, some black tea for tannin, and the juice of a lemon to adjust the pH. Then throw in anything that looks like it might be interesting. I sterilize everything and I start the stuff boiling then turn the heat down right away.
I use whatever I can get at Whole Foods in bulk; there’s often orange blossom, or sometimes widlflower. My favorite thing to add to mead is oranges and damiana. Sweet!
I used the Charley Papazian recipe for mead (the one with LOTS of ginger)! Mine came out like a very dry white wine…good fizz, but almost NO honey flavor.
Yes, honey is expensive…and another thing: beware of cheap honey-most of it is imported from China, and the Chinese are known to dilute their stuff with corn syrup.
I’d like to try a mead made with orange blossom honey…anyone ever tried it??
Sure. I tend to pick my honeys in part on what’s available and in part on what flavour nuances I want, and sometimes that’s been orange-blossom honey. Orange honey’s pretty good if you want to do a mead without much added to the honey; it tends to be a little higher acid than other honeys, so you don’t need as much lemon or other citrus to get the balance right.