Recently a friend gave me a 2-liter jug that used to be filled with Weston’s scrumpy cider (mmm, cider… for the Americans, this means fermented!) It seemed the perfect excuse to try some recipes out without making several gallons of stuff and then trying to find somewhere to store the bottles (yes, I do feel like a squirrel sometimes).
This is the first of these small-batch experiments: chai mead. For the uninitiated, mead simply means fermented honey-water. It’s most likely the oldest alcoholic beverage by far (imagine your caveman ancestor collecting honey and discovering it made him happy after sitting out for a few weeks!) It has a lovely history despite the fact that it has sunk to relative obscurity in modern times. If you ever come across a bottle, I heartily encourage you to give it a try.
Mead can be as simple as honey, water and yeast, or it can be made more exotic by mixing it with beer or wine (pre- or post-fermentation), or fruit or fruit juices, or spices, or… just about anything you like! This recipe is my own creation (I said it was an experiment, right?) using black tea with indian spices. I have seen other recipes on the internet using tea, so hopefully it won’t be a disaster, fingers crossed!
I’ll get to the recipe in a second, first, here is my lovely assistant:
Now, here are my ingredients:
Honey (1 lb.): This is kind of important 
The idea with these experiments is to tr to make something half-decent without going overboard with fancy ingredients. The normal supermarket wildflower honey is about half the price of ‘specialty’ honeys from around the world. There is certainly a world of flavour difference, but with an awesome honey I’d be less keen to add other ingredients on top, so this may be a good choice for the chai.
Water (1.7-ish l., not pictured): Next to the honey, the most important ingredient. The water dilutes the honey so that the yeast can survive and eat the sugar (did you know that undiluted honey doesn’t spoil?) I’m using water from the tap filtered with a purifier. I doubt that this removes much of the residual chlorine, but it does take out the off-taste of minerals from the very hard water I have.
Tea with spices (1 bag): I could have made my own spice mix, but I really like the flavour of this brand. The goal is to supplement the honey without overpowering it. Time will tell if I was sucessful
Yeast (1.5-ish tsp.): Again, simplicity played a factor. I could have made a trip down to the homebrew shop and bought some ale or wine yeast, but I would have had to waste most of the packet because I’m making such a small amount. The bread yeast is sitting in the cabinet and I can take just what I need. Some people on the internet have reported good results with this, so I gave it a go.
Raisins (8): I didn’t have any yeast nutrient on hand, and read here that raisins can do the trick. Nutrient-fed yeast are happy yeast, and happy yeast makes good mead. Enough said.
I began by boiling the water, tea bag, and raisins chopped in half. Besides steeping the tea, this kills any bacteria that are living in the raisins and hopefully dissolves some of their nutrients in the water. I brought it to a good boil for 2-3 minutes before removing the heat, the idea is that the bitter tannins from strong tea (that dry-mouth feeling) might be a good balance to the residual sweetness of the honey. While the water was still hot I removed the tea bag (but not the raisins) and stirred in the honey. It’s much easier to do this now then when the water cools! Then the pot went in the sink for a cold water bath.
While the water was cooling I rehydrated the yeast in about 100ml cold water mixed with 1tbs of the tea-honey-water to give the yeast a taste It didn’t foam up very much, so I hope the little guys are ok.
Finally, when the tea was cool i poured it into the jug and shook it vigourously for 5 minutes. This puts oxygen into the water so the yeast can breathe. Then I added the yeast solution. My gravity reading (a measure of the sugar) was 1.086. Not that you care, but it will be useful for me when I look back to calculate the alcohol percentage, which will probably be in the 9% range.
And that’s it! I’ll post an update when the yeast (hopefully) takes off. I hope this shows how easy it is to get experimental with mead. Why not give it a try?
