As can be seen from my recipe for Quick ‘n’ Easy Orange Mead, mead making doesn’t need to involve large amounts of special ingredients or complicated equipment. But there’s an even quicker and easier way to make a fruit mead … Continue reading
There’s quite a lot going on at the moment in my little kitchen alchemy lab, as the corner by the microwave has come to be dubbed! I’ve just been bottling up the strawberry and tropical melomels (fruit mead) that were started back in August, along with an experimental coffee mead. There are 4 gallon demi-johns bubbling away too; two are plum melomel, one is jasmine green tea mead (technically a metheglyn – that is, a herbal mead), and the fourth is another experiment – Yuletide spiced tea honey wine. I’ve also got three 2-litre batches going; one is a passionfruit melomel (made with passionfruit foraged from a vine that had escaped someone’s garden and fruited heavily in what little sunshine we’ve had this year), and the other is chamomile and vanilla honey wine. The last – started off this morning – is another batch of the short (or “sack”) spiced orange mead using the recipe in my previous post.
This evening I’ve also been preparing the chocolate syrup for another 1-gallon batch of my chocolate mead, which always seems to go down a treat. It makes a lovely, unusual sipping mead – but you can also freeze it (known as ice distillation – legal in the UK and most US states, but check your local regulations & restrictions before chucking bottles of alcohol in the freezer!) to make a very nice, smooth chocolate mead liqueur that is very potent but also very tasty!
Recipe: Chocolate Mead
(Brews 1 gallon/5 litres)
Melt the treacle and syrup in a pan; add 2 cups of the water. Add cocoa powder, mix until dissolved. Bring briefly to the boil then remove from the heat. Stir in the honey, then gradually add the remaining water until all the honey & chocolate syrup is thoroughly dissolved. Leave to one side to cool until it reaches about 20°C.
Pour about a cup of the must into a clean jam-jar, add the yeast, cap tightly and shake thoroughly. Loosen the cap and leave in a warm place until the yeast has activated and started to froth.
Add the yeast starter back to the must, whisk thoroughly to incorporate lots of air. Carefully pour into a clean demijohn, add the dried fruit, then agitate thoroughly. Cap and insert airlock (or fit balloon if using the balloon airlock method described in the orange spiced mead recipe) then put in a warm place to brew.
It should be ready for racking about a month after starting; strain off the fruit at this point through a fine nylon net. Once racked into a clean demijohn, it will need to sit for a further month or two before being bottled. As with any mead, the longer it is matured in the bottle before drinking the better it will taste!
If making chocolate mead liqueur by the ice distillation method, it should be ready after about a month of bottling. Pour 1 litre into a clean plastic 2-litre milk jug, cap tightly and leave in the frwwzer overnight before decanting off the liquid into a fresh clean bottle. 1 litre of mead will yield about 200ml of chocolate mead liqueur, which is best kept in a dark glass bottle tightly capped/corked.
Mead-making can seem somewhat daunting at first, with all the strange-seeming paraphernalia and odd words. But it doesn’t take a whole kitchen of fancy equipment to brew mead – in fact you can make your first batch of mead that’s drinkable in only 6-8 weeks with very little equipment indeed!
All you need is an empty 2-litre plastic milk carton, 2 jars of honey, 1 sachet of bread machine yeast, 1 orange, a handful of dried fruit, some warm water and a balloon.
Chop up the orange and put it in the milk carton. Add the dried fruit, honey and yeast, then fill the rest of the way with warm water to about 2″ (5cm) below the neck of the carton. Cap the carton securely, then shake thoroughly until all the honey has dissolved into the water. Take off the cap. Poke about 3 or 4 holes in the balloon with a pin (this is going to be the airlock that allows CO2 to escape but keeps out dust & dirt), then stretch the mouth of the balloon over the neck of the bottle.
Now leave it alone in a warm place for 4-6 weeks until fermentation has stopped; you’ll know when that has happened, as the balloon – which will fill up due to CO2 from the yeast – will deflate again. Don’t touch the mead until this has happened. When it’s finished, strain off the mead through fine muslin into a fresh clean carton, and leave to rest for a couple of weeks or so until it tastes drinkable – then bottle it and enjoy! Drinkable mead in only 2 months!
A hydrometer isn’t essential for home brewing – but is an inexpensive tool you’ll want to invest in if you want to be able to work out the alcohol content of your mead.
A hydrometer is used to calculate the specific gravity of a liquid. It is a sealed glass tube with a weight at the bottom and a graduated scale along the neck. The hydrometer reads specific gravity of a liquid in comparison with water. If you place the hydrometer in plain water it would read a density of 1.00. Home-brewing hydrometers such as the one shown above are pre-calibrated for use in brewing beers, wines and ciders. You calculate the alcohol content of your finished mead by taking two measurements – one when starting the mead, and the second when bottling it.
Take a sample of your mead before you add the yeast. Float the hydrometer in the sample and make a note of the number. 
Read the number at the bottom of the curved line of liquid (the meniscus). This is your starting specific gravity (SG). For most wines and meads this will be somewhere between 1.060 and 1.120.
When the mead is ready for bottling, take another sample to check the final SG. It will be much lower than the first reading, as alcohol has a much lower density than a water-sugar mixture. The lower the reading, the dryer the mead:
There are several handy online calculators, but calculating the strength of your mead is fairly simple. Subtract the final SG reading from the beginning SG reading, and divide by 0.00736 to get the percentage of alcohol by volume (ABV), e.g. if starting SG is 1.109 and final SG is 1.018 then the final ABV is 12.36%.
When brewing alcohol, there are several stages to go through before you get to the drinking stage – and after a few weeks of initial fermentation, my batches of mead have gotten to the next stage – racking. This is where you siphon off the liquid from the must into a clean container so it can finish fermenting.
Here you can see the chocolate mead in the process of being siphoned off into a clean 5-litre plastic demijohn, using a length of clean food-grade plastic tubing. The easiest way to get the liquid siphoning is to fill the tube with water with a thumb over each end. Insert one end into the full demijohn on the higher surface, and then point the other end into an empty cup until all the water has run out and you’re starting to get mead flowing through. Cover the end with your thumb and transfer the end of the tube into the mouth of your lower, empty demijohn, take away your thumb, then stand back and watch as the liquid is transferred easily and effortlessly into the clean demijohn – hygienically and with minimum mess! Leave behind any solids and the yeast residue that has settled out (“flocculated”) to the bottom of the demijohn. Then cap the demijohn with a clean airlock, and leave it to finish fermenting in peace and quiet for a few more weeks.
The racking stage is the perfect time to take samples to check specific gravity. I’ll go into more detail about specific gravity in another post; basically SG readings are how you calculate the alcohol content of your mead and also help you work out when fermentation has finished and it’s time to bottle the mead. If you bottle it before it’s finished fermenting, you’ll end up with potentially dangerous mead-bombs that could explode without warning.
It’s also a point at which you can do a little taste testing, if you’re so inclined. Most meads aren’t really drinkable after only three or four weeks unless you’re making a very small batch or making a short mead – and even those would be improved with some aging. After 4 weeks fermenting, the orange blossom mead really isn’t ready for drinking – it has a very sharp, thin, almost vinegary flavour that definitely needs to mellow with age. The chocolate mead is a little better – it’s a surprisingly bitter brew at present, but there’s promise there.
The spiced orange short mead is, indeed, drinkable after only 3 weeks although it’s quite a sharp taste; racking for a few weeks longer will improve it further but it’s certainly mead.
The real surprise has been the agave mead. The natural sugars in agave were not enough to feed the yeast so fermentation stopped after only a week, with the spent yeast flocculating well into a pale sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Test readings with the hydrometer showed the alcohol content was only 0.1% – so agave by itself isn’t an adequate source of sugar to brew with. So the next stage of the experiment was to add sugar and more yeast, to test out what the flavour of agave would be like when brewed. I added 8 teaspoons of white powdered sugar and half a teaspoon of Young’s General Purpose brewing yeast, which kickstarted the fermentation again nicely; and I racked it into a clean bottle at the same time as I racked the other meads. I reserved a little for taste testing – and this one was a real surprise! Very smooth and drinkable, with a delicate taste – honeyish but without being cloying. This one’s been a real success, so I’ll be brewing up a larger, 5-litre batch of this one next.
I have a few friends who, for one reason or another, have to follow a low-GI diet which led me to thinking about low GI brewing. Agave nectar is increasingly finding favour as a low-GI alternative to sugar for cooking and sweetening, but what we didn’t know is whether regular brewing yeast would work with agave.
So I decided to twy out an experiment: agave mead. For this experiment, I need to find out just how far agave by itself is suitable for brewing with, so I’m making a plain show mead with it – that is, the only ingredients it contains are yeast, water and the agave nectar itself. The quantities I’m using are one cup of agave nectar to 6 cups of water and one teaspoon of Young’s all-purpose dried active brewing yeast. I’m using the balloon airlock method, much as I did with the orange spiced short mead in the last post.
It’s looking promising already; after an hour, the balloon has already inflated and there’s a froth formed on the top of the must:
Agave mead after 1 hour - yeast is obviously active
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There are many different types and styles of mead – so many that it can be very confusing to the beginning mazer, as can all the different equipment needed. For a complete novice, it can be intimidating to know where … Continue reading
