In May 2012 I attended Wellspring, an annual festival and Annual General Meeting of my church,
Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship (ADF) There I sat in on a workshop by the preceptor of ADF's Brewer's Guild, Rev. Robert Lewis.
Robb showed the basic process of brewing a batch of beer from a kit, and afterward I asked him a few questions on getting started, what to try first (beer, wine or mead?) and settled on trying mead.
I was so motivated that on May 30th I joined the brewer's guild, and started reading everything I could get my hands on to do with brewing, but especially mead (honey wine) making. Mead is one of my favorite drinks in the world, but it is very hard to come by in Ontario because the provincial liquor store monopoly, LCBO does not usually carry any, and when they do there is only one brand. That one brand is Moniack. While I am a big fan of mead I am not as big a fan of Moniack mead. it will do in a pinch, but meads of more interesting flavours have to be sought out from home brewers who are very rarely willing to part with their favorite drinks as a gift to a stranger, (home brewers cannot ever sell their brew) or from small farm based brewers, who are required by law to use ingredients they grew themselves and are limited in the quantity they can brew. Understandably these brewers run out of stock often. The favorite in my community is
Applewood Farm in Stouffville, Ontario.
On July 18 I started my very first batch of mead. Being new and gullible I believed the recipe book I had when it said that most of the recipes could be finished in 3-5 months, so I set my sights on bottling something on Oct 31, and foolishly announced that that was the plan.
For the first batch I decided to go very simple with it. I wanted to minimize the ways it could go wrong and by sticking with the simplest honey and water recipe I could find, I knew pretty well what the flavour should be like, and therefore knew that any unexpected and unexplainable variation would mean a failed batch. This also had the shortest brewing time according to the book. (Ha! honey and water has the least nutrients for the yeast compared to a must that also contains fruit juice of some kind, therefore, it should take the longest.)
My attitude on this first batch of mead was "Go big or go home!" there would be no messing around with small test batches. I was going to do one big 6 gallon (23 litre) batch if this was going to be successful. If I was going to have to wait many months to years, I was not going to have only a few bottles to show for it. This meant a bigger risk in terms of a more costly investment in ingredients, but I could get 9kg (20lbs for my American friends, and yes I know I'm not being consistent with which measurement system I write in parenthesis, deal with it) of honey for $60. With that much honey and a few other ingredients I could produce 20-30 bottles, depending on the bottle size, of mead and have honey left over... or for the same money I could buy 4 bottles of finished mead. Why cheap out and do small batches? Time is the big investment, honey is expensive, but that comparison put it into perspective.
Having announced my intention, I asked friends to look for used brewing equipment for me and save their used wine bottles. One friend found a suitable carboy at Value Village (a used clothing and housewares store) once that was acquired, I decided to start batch #1. I decided to forgo the plastic bucket fermenter that most home brewers use these days as a primary fermenter and begin fermentation in the carboy, with the plan to acquire a second carboy later for the secondary ferment and be able to rack back and forth between them as required.
While this seemed like a sound plan, future batches will almost certainly be started in a plastic fermenting bucket purchased new from a wine kit store. Fermenting in the carboy is safe, the glass container is easy to sterilize, but it is not ideal. The bucket does make cleaning somewhat easier with it's wide mouth, and while you don't want oxygen in contact with your brew once fermentation is done and you are waiting for it to clear, it is pretty crucial to the initial breeding of the yeast. (that was mistake #2, not giving the yeast enough breathing room. Mistake #1 was not providing the yeast enough nutrients, which was a flaw in my recipe and initial instructions obtained from a low priced e-book I had purchased from
Amazon.com
on the subject).
On August 21 I racked the bunch of it over to another, smaller, 5 gallon (19 L) carboy that I bought for $10 from a beer guy who had obviously been told to sell off some of his equipment for space reasons. I took the remainder, put it into plastic bottles as I was going to be using it immediately. Plastic bottles are NOT recommended for storage of any brew (with the exception of plastic beer bottles designed for that purpose). I had a ritual to run and wanted to use some of my unfinished mead as offerings to the kindred and ancestors. ...and of course this allowed me to take a hydrometer reading, and a taste. I should have taken a reading at the very start so that I could properly calculate my alcohol content, but that was not a priority at the time. If I'd known how cheap a good hydrometer would be I would have bought one right away, but it was not absolutely necessary until time to determine if the fermentation was stopped yet, so I skipped the OG (original gravity) reading.
At the time of this racking it was only at 1.072 (for reference, this would have started at about 1.092, and fully fermented would be down around 1.000) This was the first sign that the batch was not going well, and at this point I should have clued in that the yeast was not doing well and been able to correct it, but it seemed on schedule according to how I thought this recipe was supposed to go, but really it was not. By this point I should have been at or close to the finished point of the primary ferment.
The act of racking it over to the other container of course stirred up the yeast and in a couple of days, despite the low nutrient level, the yeast kicked into action at a higher rate of fermentation than before, also the gas trapped in the must began to degas a little.
Even at this early stage when the alcohol content was only around 2-3% by my estimation, it was starting to taste like mead. It is my practice now, as I have started to learn more, to take the mead I steal from the batch for hydrometer readings and drink that. There is absolutely nothing wrong with drinking honey water or fruit juice with live yeast in it.(
unless you have certain health problems, or you consume large quantities > 3 tablespoons of yeast /day) and no, it won't give you a
yeast infection. That's a different kind of yeast. By tasting about 1/2 a glass each time, I can get a better feel for how the batch is doing, and what a waste if I took it out for a reading and then threw it away. I would never, put it back into the batch. If you are going to do that you have to make sure that the hydrometer and the container that it comes with is absolutely sterile, and that you don't accidentally contaminate it in the process, which means wearing sterile gloves since you'd be touching the hydrometer. It is much easier to just sterilize the wine thief or baster that you use to take the sample out if you are sampling when not racking also, by boiling it in a pot of water for 10 minutes. If you are taking a sample while racking, your siphon should be sterilized anyway, or else you are ruining your batch.
The small amount removed during secondary and clearing phases when it is in a carboy should be replaced with water to top up the carboy making sure that there is minimal surface area for the mead in the batch to come in contact with oxygenated air. A little room in the neck of the carboy is ok as it will fill with carbon dioxide if the brew is still gassing.
On Sept 18, Caroline W. (an acquaintance)
posted to her blog about a 17th C. mead recipe that she saw at
Stormthecastle.com. I commented on that and she noticed my posting on Facebook about my mead and reminded me that after stabilizing, unless I let new yeast in before bottling I should have no worries about pressurized bottles even with plenty of sugar still in it. Although I suspect she mistook my comments about it still bubbling away steadily and not having taken an OG reading as meaning I was not monitoring it at all, and so, I suspect that I think I may be one of her "
stupid mazers" in her follow up article of Oct. 4.
Needless to say after giving up the wait and stabilizing it with still plenty of sugar to go, in order to feel comfortable that I was not going to ruin the whole lot
by getting it infected with bacteria, and to give me enough time after
stabilizing it to ensure it was indeed stopped fermenting before bottling, I added some silica gel from wine kits that the fellow over at
Vintner's Cellar gave to me for free because many of his clients don't bother with it. I waited and racked and added more silica, and repeated a few times. adding a little potassium metabisulphite every second racking to keep it sanitized and stable.
I bottled that first batch on Oct 31, and shared some with my friends. Yes, without even aging it!
I was told that that batch was quite impressive for a first batch, and encouraged to enter a contest next summer. My wife tells me she prefers it to the Mac Meade (cyser) from Applewood. But she's biased, I think. I gave some bottles as gifts to friends who had contributed to the effort in finding equipment and bottles for me. When I gave one to one friend, I recommended he age it, and his reaction was "If the sample we tried the other night is an indication, then I don't think it needs it."
An acquaintance who heard I was about to unveil my first batch, and my concern that the fact that I had ended the ferment with lots of sugar still there to convert meant that it would be a weak and unsatisfactory batch, assured me that the first batch was sure to be a failure as most mazers he knew took 4 years or so to get something drinkable. After tasting it, he wanted to buy some of it from me (remember, that's not allowed)
So, despite my disappointment with having to end the ferment early in terms of potential alcohol, I believe that I ended up with a successful first batch and learned a lot in the process.
The recipe as used in this batch:
Bring 3 quarts (12 cups) water to a boil
Reduce heat to 160F (71C) as you
Slowly stir in 9lbs (4kg) honey
Top up to 3 gallons with more water (Brita filtered) and cook for 10 minutes at 160F or higher. If it takes a while to get back up to 160F after adding the honey then start your timer at the point when it reaches 160F, any time at lower temperatures doesn't count.
Add 1/2 cup Lemon juice 1
whole lemon cut into wedges to carboy for citric acid
Add 2 cups Lady Grey Decaf tea to carboy for tannins
Cool pot in sink of cool water (ice helps) to 80-90F (27-32C)
Transfer to Carboy (which I was using as primary fermenter)
Make another batch as above. (because I only have a 3 gallon stock pot)
Add Yeast to carboy and agitate to oxygenate mixture.
Yeast Used: LALVIN EC-1118 Gluten-free champagne yeast
If I were to do this recipe again I'd at least add some raisins for additional nutrients.
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