mead

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Two more meads ‘in the can’ (well, bottle!)

6 August, 2009 in Brewing | 1 comment

Next weekend we’re moving house, so it’s time to get everything in bottles! This week I bottled my ginger mead and cranberry echinacea mead. You may be interested to follow those links and compare them to the pictures here.

I finally got some specialised winemaking stuff for this: potassium sorbate (‘stabiliser’) to knock out the remaining yeast, and ‘fining’ agents to clear any haze. Both were good investments! The stabiliser allowed me to sweeten the end product without the yeast eating up the extra sugar. I found this was absolutely necessary, because they had become very dry. Now they are nicely semi-sweet.

Now, anyone care for a traditional bowl of mead?

I am really pleased with both of these brews, and can’t wait for them to mature a bit. I’ll probably start cracking them open next spring. The really nice thing about these is that they are really easy to drink. Beer, for instance, is something that people either really like, or really don’t. And my kombucha… well, let’s not go there. But these meads are not at all challenging to the palate, nothing too complex or ‘out there’ for virgin taste buds. They’re also not too alcoholic, so you can enjoy them without getting too buzzed. In short, I bet my wife will like them, and I consider that an accomplishment

The hardest part, as always, is deciding what to do next. I’m not feeling any particular inspiration at the moment. Yarrow? Ginko Biloba? Nettle? Any suggestions?

Tags: cranberry, echinacea, ginger, mead

Cranberry-Echinacea mead

3 June, 2009 in Brewing | 1 comment

Pretty, isn’t it?

One of the cool things about mead is that you can add pretty much whatever you want to it. (Well, I guess you could put anything into beer too, but it might be gross!) Fermented honey doesn’t have a ton of flavour on its own, so there’s lots of room for other ingredients. To date I’ve made a straight mead from starflower honey, one with with chai tea, one with ginger, and this one with cranberry and echinacea flavour from a store-bought tea (ok, it’s not a tea, it’s an infusion).

Like usual, I boiled the water and steeped the tea bags, then mixed in the honey while the water was still hot enough to dissolve it easily. Then I poured it into the fermenter, squeezing all the good bits out of the tea bags, added some yeast nutrient and shook it for a few minutes with my hand over the opening to get as much oxygen dissolved into the ‘must’ (that’s the fancy wine term) as possible. Finally I sprinkled the yeast on top and let it sit. Now that it’s bubbling I pick it up and swirl it around as vigorously as I can 2 or 3 times a day for the next few days.

One improvement in this batch is that I got some proper wine yeast. Time will tell how much flavour difference it will have.

Speaking of which, time is the real problem of the whole process. The first mead I made is the only one that’s close to being ready to drink, and most of that is for a friend’s wedding! The others are sitting in their attractive, clear 200ml bottles, and I just have to keep reminding myself that they definitely won’t be ready for many moons It’s a good thing beer doesn’t take this long!

Tags: cranberry, echinacea, mead

Ginger mead update

7 May, 2009 in Brewing | 2 comments

So, I brought my broken camera into a shop today, and the guy put different batteries in… and it worked. Yes, I did put in several sets of fresh batteries at home, but assuring him of that didn’t make me look like less of an arse. Then he put my batteries back in… and it still worked. Which did make me look like slightly less of an arse, since he saw it was dead when I gave it to him. All that to say, I have a working camera again. For now.

Luckily, my microbes proved more reliable than my microchips (how’s that for a transition?). I had activity in the mead by the time I went to bed in the evening, and by the morning I could hear the fizzing and it looks like a little jacuzzi in there! Not bad. In the picture you can see some of the little chunks of ginger. I didn’t strain them out in the hope that the alcohol solution will extract more flavour. This is a common practice, especially with fruit, where the whole (crushed) fruit is normally added to the fermenter.