Fermenting Honey into Delicious Mead (Mead Making Part 1)
Mead making, how hard can it be? This week I decided to try it out. Turns out that you don’t need that much equipment at all and the process is much simpler than for instance the beer brewing process. Get the best quality honey you can afford, some wine or mead yeast and yeast nutrient, work clean and that’s about it. Well, still have to wait for 6 months before I find out how this one turned out…
You can download my basic recipe for sweet mead by clicking this link.
Video transcript:
Hey, You! Who? Me? Yes, You! What are you drinking? I’m drinking cheap ass supermarket beer. Why on earth would you do that? Well, because it’s cheap, it hardly tastes like anything so I can drink a lot! Why don’t you make your own booze? Make my own booze? Why how would I do that? Alright alright, I will download a recipe off of the internet and try to make my own mead in this video. Have fun watching.
To make this mead I’m going to use four kilograms of the best honey that I could afford, 30 grams of yeast nutrient, a packet of premium mead yeast, a food grade fermenting container, an hydrometer to measure the specific gravity, some Earl Grey tea to put some extra flavors in there, an oxidizing sanitizer, a glass container to rehydrate the yeast, an airlock and about seven liters of water that I pre boiled and let cool down to get rid of chlorine and calcium. You can pick this all up at your local brew store. And in addition I’m going to use this spoon.
First I am going to make the sanitizing solution by adding the sanitizer to this bucket of hot water and then mix it up with this spoon. I’m going to use this solution to sanitize everything that comes into contact with the mead including all the equipment.
Now I’m going to make one liter of Earl Grey tea. I do this at the beginning of the process so that it can cool down a bit and in the meanwhile I’ll fix myself a cup of easy coffee. I’m using Twinings original Earl Grey tea. It’s the absolute best Earl Grey tea that I have ever had. Now we’ll set this aside for a little bit so it can steep and in the meanwhile I will prepare the fermenting bucket.
This flask contains 150 milliliters of lukewarm water. I will use it to rehydrate the yeast. Therefore I will add some yeast nutrient to the flask and the yeast itself and after a few minutes it should start foaming. That indicates that the yeast is still healthy and alive.
All righty, now it’s time for the fun part. We have the yeast and the tea set aside. The yeast is nicely rehydrating and the tea is getting nice and strong. We will add this bucket of honey into the fermenting bucket, add some water add the yeast, add the tea, mix it all up and get the fermentation going. I will use the hot tea to rinse the bucket.
This mixing has two purposes: the first one is to get the honey mixed in with the water, the other one is to get some oxygen dissolved which will help the yeast multiply.
To be a bit more scientific I took a specific gravity reading. This reading will give an indication of how sweet and alcoholic the mead will end up to be and in addition to that it will give me a better estimate of when the fermentation has finished. The reading shows 1.120, that means that this mead will be high on alcohol and very sweet.
The yeast looks hydrated. It has a nice frothy layer of foam on top. Let’s add it to the mixture.
It’s almost a day later now and as indicated by the airlock fermentation has already started I will put this bucket of mead in a dark and cool room in my house. It needs to ferment for another two weeks and then it needs to continue fermentation in a glass container for another six months. Six months is a really long time so I will update you about this batch in four weeks and at the same time show you how I bottle a six months of batch of mead. Six months means it’s ready to drink so I will taste it in that video as well.
I hope you will stick around for that and thank you for watching this video. Bye, bye!
Still here? Why not go ahead and watch another video… Cheers!
