Home Brewing and Mead (honey wine)

As promised, here is a quick rundown of what you need to make mead.

Honey. Water. Primary Fermenter, Secondary Fermenter. Airlock. Bottles. Brewer's yeast. One pot large enough to hold 6 gallons of liquid. Sanitzier. A spoon. A hydrometer if you want to know your alcohol content. Siphoning tubes. (A bottle filler is recommended as well).

Corks or caps, depending on preference (warning, if you have not stopped fermentation in a capped bottle, it can EXPLODE!) Corker or Capper.

Sanitize everything you're going to use. This can be done with a %age bleach solution. I use a no rinse cleaner made for brewing purposes instead).

Sanitize the primary fermenter (plastic bucket or glass carboy...a carboy looks like one of those big water 5 gal water bottes, but made of glass), the pot, the spoons/measuring cups, hydrometer, and the air lock. You won't need to mess with the bottle just yet.

Soften and start your brewer's yeast (making sure it's alive), if it's not alive, no need to go on, you need live yeast!

Basically. you take your honey (about 12 lbs for a 5 gallon batch, which is the standard reciepe size). You heat up the honey with 1 gallon of water in your huge pot, stirring as you go. Add the rest of the water to the mixture. Don't boil the honey, unless you have say..bee parts in it, and need to skim that off. Boiling the mixture reduces the flavor of the mead.

After it's all mixed, turn it off and let it cool down a bit. You're cooling it off so you don't kill off the yeast when you add it to the mixture. Siphon the mixture in to the primary fermenter.

Use the hydrometer to take your alcohol readings (this is a specialzed home brewing thing, usually comes with instructions.)

Set up your airlock so that it has the proper amount of water on it. Put your lid on or your rubber stopper in (for the plastic bucket fermenter or glass carboy respectively) and put your air lock in.

Put your fermenting mead into a warm dark place. (many people do this is a basement, mine mead sits in my kitchen closet).

Take a shower, and clean up. At some point, you may have gotten honey on you or the floor.

Leave your fermenting mead alone for a month, only checking on it to make sure the airlock has enough water in it. Also, check on your mead a lot in the first week. I have overfilled many a carboy and had a nice strong fermenation, resulting in my cleaning my closet walls.

After a month, you should have quite a bit of dead yeast at the bottom.

Sanitize your secondary fermenter, and your siphoning equipment.

This is the time to do another hydromemter reading. Siphon off the mead into your secondary fermenter being sure not to suck up all the dead yeast cells on the bottom. (This is why you siphon and don't pour). Airlock your secondary fermenter.

Clean up your stuff and leave your secondary fermenter where your primary was, for another 2 to 3 months.

If you can freeze off your batch, now is the time. This will kill off all your remaining yeast and will help to clarify your mead. If you can't do that, you can put the bottles in the fridge for 2 weeks after you're done, and it will kill off the remaining yeast.

Wash and santizie all of your bottles, and siphon equipment. Pull out your secondary carboy and being bottleing your brew. You can taste it at this point. It might be really good and it might taste like jet fuel. If it tastes sour or bitter, or like jet fuel , bottle it anyway and let it age. Mead typically peaks at 3 years of age. I have had two batches that were really horrible at this time and are quite good 6 months to a year later. Cork or cap your bottles.

A 5 gallon batch makes approx 25 750 mil bottles (standard american champagne bottles).

Clean up the rest of the kitchen and enjoy.

It is recommended that you have one other person help you do this, as it will take a long time if you do it by yourself. YOu can always offer them a free bottle every time you do a batch for helping :)

YOu can also scale down or find reciepies for 1 gallon mead brews. I have 2 myself, and I make experimental meads in those. Different types of fruits, vegtables, edible flowers, and spices can be added to your mead to make different types. I have a coffee mead batch bottled right now. (Btw, coffee mead must age for at least a year to be drinkable).


These are my little one gallon carboy's full of mead brewing. These were made with diferent fruits and honeys, hence the color difference.
https://ball-pythons.net/modules/cop...%20carboys.jpg

I think that's all the basics, if you have any questions just ask.

Several places do a starter kit, such as www.midwestsupplies.com which is where I get my stuff.

Once you invest in your inital brewing equipment you can also make wine or beer if you want to.

wow, that's too much to even read. what is mead? should i know that?

Thanks! I think I was the one who asked about this in the first place. I do have space for such a hobby, if I could get the equipment together, and I'll bet people would enjoy it if it turned out well.

Mead is an alcoholic beverage, it's made from fermented honey and water. A few people on the board asked about it.

Btw, I recommend you get The Compleat Meadmaker if you want to get a good book.

I might try that. Out of curiousity, what does it taste like when brewed?
I have an uncle who's Italian and makes homemade wine... mmm...

It's hard to explain, it can be made sweet or dry. It's not like wine, and it's not like beer, but it's closer to wines than beer.

I prefer sweet myself. However, every batch I've made is different. I've never made a straight plain mead anyway, everything I have has spices in it. I"ve drank plain mead, but I prefer the fruity stuff.
The lemon mead is nice and lemon, reminds you of summer. The yule mead is intended to warm you a little and be taste on a cold winter's night. I haven't tasted the pear mead since it finished fermenting.

I should mention that with champagne yeast you can get a high alcohol content, and 21% packs quite a punch (42 proof). YOu can freeze if off sooner to stop fermentation if you want a lower %age alocohol if you keep up with it using a hydrometer. There are some specialized brewer's chemicals that can do that as well.

The orange ginger firewater mead tastes like a malt. The blackberry tastes like blackberry and it's very sweet. The coffee mead....I haven't tasted recently, it hasn't aged enough yet to be drinkable.
A few months ago it was really starting to taste like coffee.

It takes a bit of practice, and refining. It's not that hard though. I have tasted some very very good brews. I've never bought from a commerical meadry online, but I've heard that some of those meads aren't that good.

I have met a man who is so good at mead making, he was challenged to make a goat's milk mead, and it was really good. We in turn, challenged him to make a spinach mead. We'll taste the results next year :)

Something else I forgot to mention. My mead anyway, tastes the best served at room temperature. It may very, but serving my mead cold makes the alcoholic taste stand out.

thank you very much for posting that - I have tried mead but it was cold and did have a pronounced alcohol flavor. I look forward to trying this method though! I'm gonna read Beowulf again first though haha. :)

Schlyne isn't joking about the bottles exploding. The first time I made rum I bottled it too soon and when the bottle exploded it blew the oak door off and antique cabinet, which hit the chair for the massive oak dining table my parents have and moved the table about a foot, the cabinet itself is about 2 feet from the table table and chair in the first place. The bottle was obliterated and even after fixing the cbinet the wood workers still couldnt get all the tiny shards of glass out if the wood. They are forever inbedded in there as a reminder, do not bottle your stuff if is is still fermenting at all. I am just happy that no one got hurt. It was like blowing off a bomb. It is a fun hobby, but do it safely.