But I suppose I should take about my meadmaking history, my credentials, so to speak. I was first introduced to mead about 10 years ago by a gaming buddy of mine, John. He brought a bottle over that was just heavenly. As I’ve already mentioned, I have a very sweet tooth, and his mead was the first alcohol that had really tasted good to me, without being mixed with syrup or hidden by soda.
The next time he made a batch he invited me over to help and most of what I remember of that day was watching a gigantic pot of honey water boil while we scrapped scum off the top. Once it cooled we mixed in some freshly squeezed orange juice, making it actually not a mead, but a melomel.
John later moved across the country and when he left he gave to me all of his brewing supplies, since they were so large to try and ship. I gave it a try on two occasions. The first time I made very young mead (I was impatient in my youth) that tasted strongly of yeast and was pretty harsh. The second batch I decided to let age longer, but I think I let the vapor lock dry out and the must went bad.
So today, armed with a new and quite wonderful book, The Compleat Meadmaker
, by Ken Schramm, I decided that I wanted to give it another try. The summer has been very busy, but I felt like I needed to get the mead going over the summer, since we don’t heat our kitchen/laundry room over the winter, and the yeasts need the room temperature to be in the 60s.So I’ve been looking around for good prices on honey. WinCo had orange blossom honey for $3.24 / pound, but could only sell them in little 2 cup jars or in the industrial 40 lb. buckets that they got them in. I only need 18 lbs. for this recipe, so it was a bit of a conundrum, but eventually I decided to get the big bucket and have enough honey for two batches.
The recipe I’m going to try in the Sweet Show Mead on page 164 of The Compleat Meadmaker. 18 lbs. of honey, 4 gallons of water (bottled spring water), and some modern yeast energizer and nutrient. The yeast I used was two packages of dry Lalvin D-47 yeast.
I heated one gallon of water to boiling in a large stock pot. I then added the 18-20 lbs. of honey (using a sterilized soup ladle). This took a lot longer than I expected and by the time it was all in the temperature in the pot was 110°, while it was supposed to be about 150°. The recipe wanted the honey water to sit at 150° for a while to kill any bugs in the honey. So I heated it up on the stove to 150°. No problem.
The next step, was to pour the hot honey water into the rest of the water. There were two important sub-step to this:
Don’t pour the 150° honey water on yourself (which I managed to succeed at).
Use refrigerated water so that it would reduce the overall temperature of the honey water to 80° so that the yeast could be added at a happy temperature for them.
Well, I had forgotten to buy the water until just a few hours before starting, so it wasn’t very cold and only dropped the overall temperature of the must to about 125° -- way too hot for the yeast. But, not anticipating this, I had already proofed the yeast -- poured it into some warm water to re-hydrate it and get it going. The instructions on the package had been very adamant that the yeast should bloom for 15 minutes and no longer.
It took something like three hours for the honey water to cool down to 85°. I was worried that the yeast might not be good anymore. Maybe they had woken up, found nothing to eat and starved to death. But I pitched them in anyway, and the stirred the heck out of it, to aerate the stuff as much as possible. Then I sealed it up, attached the vapor lock (a water-filled valve that lets CO² exit the airtight container, but doesn’t let bacteria-filled air in) and waited.
By bedtime it wasn’t doing anything but in the morning it was bubbling away.
It started fermenting with a Specific Gravity of 1.140. That’s a little higher than expected, so I probably put in more that 18 lbs. of honey. I want a sweet mead anyway, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
More details as things develop.
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