Tuesday, March 26, 2024

How To Make Mead Wine

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Viking Blod Mead Recipe

How I Made Mead (Honey Wine)!

Ingredients for a 6 gallon batch of Viking Blod Mead

  • Make a hibiscus tea with 1.5 gallons of water. Bring to a boil then turn off and allow hibiscus to steep for 30 minutes.
  • During this time, pour honey into the other 3.5 gallons of water.
  • After 30 minutes, strain the hibiscus flowers from the pot and stir the tea into your honey water.
  • Once the mixture reaches 70 degrees, pitch your yeast and add ¼ tsp of the yeast nutrient.
  • At 24, 48, and 72 hours after pitching yeast, slowly stir mead and add ¼ tsp of yeast nutrient. Adding yeast nutrient will cause a reaction, be sure to have enough headspace for activity or use a blow-off tube.
  • After two weeks, transfer mead to secondary and dry hop with 0.5 oz Centennial hops.
  • Leave hopped mead for one week and transfer again.
  • Additional transfers after this will allow dead yeast to settle out each time, prevent yeast autolysis , and improve clarity.
  • Stabilize mead with potassium metabisulfite and potassium sorbate.
  • Bottle your mead and wait! Using smaller bottles allows for more testing as you wait months/years. Try a bottle at six months, one year, and two years. Youll be amazed at the difference as the strong alcohol presence mellows and other flavors emerge.
  • For more tips, including how to back-sweeten your mead, check out our article 6 Secrets for Making Better Mead.

    Here Is Another Dry Mead Recipe:

    You will need 3 and a half lb of honey. You also need water, wine yeast and yeast nutrient.

    The trick to this recipe is to start the yeast two days ahead. Once you sanitize your jar, add a tablespoon of honey. Add boiling water and stir to mix.

    When you cool it to 68°F, you can add the yeast and yeast nutrient. Keep it covered for two days.

    Now, put the honey into a fermenting bin or carboy and add boiled water thats still warm. Stir the honey until its all dissolved. Once it has reached 68°F, add the yeast mix.

    You need to keep it in a warm-but-not-hot place until fermentation stops: around 3 weeks.

    This is another way to end up with a dry homemade mead. Once again, you mix it up with your favourite herbs and fruits. A great combination is a peach and vanilla, or pineapple with lemon balm.

    Basic Honey Mead Recipe :

    Yield: 4 to 5 bottles

    • 4 cups of local wildflower honey
    • 5 quarts spring water or filtered water,
    • 1/2 cup of grape juice concentrate or raisins
    • 1 packet champagne wine yeast

    Instructions

    • Dissolve honey in boiled and cooled filtered water.
    • Sanitize a 1 gallon glass fermenting jug, along with its tin cap. Pour the honey and water mixture into the jug.
    • Pour the grape juice concentrate or raisins into a glass. Stir in 1 cup of water. Allow it to come to room temperature. If you are using raisins allow them to reconstitute. Sprinkle the yeast over top of the grape juice or raisin mixture. Wait 30 minutes. Stir the yeast into the grape juice and wait till it becomes frothy or bubbly.
    • Pour the grape juice yeast mixture into the fermentation jug. Cap the jug and shake it for a few minutes to finish dissolving both the yeast and the honey. Top up the jug to the shoulders with boiled and cooled filtered water.
    • Sanitize a wine fermentation lock. Fill the fermentation lock with boiled and cooled water. Place the fermentation lock on the jug.
    • Place the jug on a plate to catch any overflow. Place the jug in a spot out direct sunlight and away from source of heat, for several weeks. The fermentation will become active with bubbling. It may froth and overflow.

    Racking off

    Clear the mead

    Bottle the mead

    Ideally youll want to have enough mead in your wine cellar so that you can age it for a full year before opening the bottle.

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    How To Make Mead The Honey Wine

    Based on the James-Beard-Award-winning One-Block Diet, The One-Block Feast is the ultimate guide to eating local. Complete with seasonal garden plans, menus, 100 recipes and 15 food projects, this guide explains how to raise and produce everything needed for totally made-from-scratch meals, all from your own backyard. The following excerpt on how to make mead, the honey wine, is taken from The Winter Projects.

    You can purchase this book from the GRIT store: The One-Block Feast.

    Channel Your Inner Mead

    How to Make a Gallon of Mead Easily

    Start with some very simple ingredients: honey, water, and yeast. Of course youll also need some tools for home-brewing your own mead, such as a brewing kit, a large plastic pail, glass carboys, a big pot, and a mead-making book to answer all of your questions .

    Make sure all of your tools have been sanitized completely. This means either boiling them in hot water or washing them with a special wine-making sanitizer or bleach mixture, then rinsing them. The reason sanitizing your tools is so important? Even the smallest amount of bacteria can spoil an entire batch of mead.

    Treehugger / Sanja Kostic

    To make a six-gallon batch of mead, boil 1.5 gallons of water in a large pot, and then add about 1.5 gallons of honey to it once it’s off the stove. At this point, you can also add fruit or herbs to flavor your mead differently. You can add cut-up fruit directly to the mixture or put herbs in a muslin bag before adding them to the batch.

    Treehugger / Sanja Kostic

    Add three more gallons of cool watereither filtered or spring water so it doesnt have chlorine in it. Measure the temperature of the water and add the yeast when its between 65-75 degrees Fahrenheit. Just as in baking, if the water is too hot or too cold, then the yeast wont activate and the fermenting process will not occur. Some mead-makers also suggest adding yeast energizer to boost the nutrient content.

    Treehugger / Sanja Kostic

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    Getting Started: Equipment And Honey Selection

    You may have everything you need already from previous brewing experience, but Ill go over everything just in case you are just starting up.

    • Carboy or bucket – To hold fermenting and aging meads.
    • Airlock and bung – This allows CO2 produced by fermentation to escape while sealing the mead from the outside world.
    • Hydrometer – These measure if your batch is still fermenting and let you calculate ABV.
    • Auto-siphon and/or Siphon tubing – Allows the transfer of liquid without disturbing bulk of sediment.
    • Bottles and Bottling equipment – Mead can be bottled in wine or beer bottles, youll need a capper and beer bottles , or a corker and wine bottles . *Note: Do not store carbonating mead in wine bottles. It will explode as wine bottles are not meant to contain the force of carbonation.
    • Sanitizer – Using sanitizer greatly reduces the risk of infections and ruined batches. This is especially important as meads age for longer periods of time than beer.

    That is a basic list of what youll need, but it covers all your bases and you can add more equipment later. Now its time to go over some honey basics. Honey is the main fermentable ingredient in mead, and believe it or not, there are a great many types of honey available. They cover all ranges of flavor profiles and costs. I could spend a very long time going over all the different types of honey, so Ill just go over a few of the common ones that mead makers use.

    With Three Ingredients And Some Patience You Can Brew This ‘drink Of The Gods’

    • Yeshiva University

    Mead is experiencing a resurgence in the United States and, if you want to try it, you can whip up a batch at home.

    Produced from a mixture of honey, water and yeast, mead is the oldest alcoholic drink known to humankind. Long before wine and beer, there was mead.

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    Additional Home Wine Making Information

    • Before starting your first batch of homemade wine you may want to take a look at the following article listed on our web site: The Top Ten Reasons For Fermentation Failure. This will help you to avoid the mistakes that have been most commonly made by beginners. Being sanitary is one of the keys to great home wine making. Be sure to thoroughly clean all the home wine making equipment and home wine making supplies before getting started. Four crushed Campden Tablets to each quart of water makes a good sanitizer. Just follow the directions provided with the Campden Tablets.
    • During the wine making process, it is very important to keep fermentation temperatures stable between 70-75 degrees F. Getting the fermentation too cool could result in the fermentation stopping before all the alcohol is made. Getting the fermentation too warm could result in off-flavors in the wine.
    • The wine will be dry tasting when done fermenting. If you prefer your wines sweeter, simply add sugar, honey, etc. to taste. However, you must first add a wine making stabilizer such as Potassium Sorbate, or there will be a strong chance of re-fermentation occurring in the bottles.
    • You may decide to purchase a Wine Making Hydrometer. It measures the concentration of sugar in your wine at any given time. With this information you can determine your wineâs alcoholic content or simply monitor the progress throughout the home wine making process.

    Simple Honey Mead Wine Recipe

    How to make honey mead
    • 1kgFresh unpasteurized forest Honeyvolume about 700gm
    • 3LiterWater
    • 2.5gmHoney Mead and floral wine yeastDon’t use baking yeast or champagne yeast as they will strip off all aromas
    • 2-3gmYeast nutrientmust add as honey is very low in proteins and fermentation takes very long
    • 5teaspoonlime juiceAcid blend or citric acid can be substituted as well
    • 0.2gmOptional Irish mosshelps makes it clearer
    • Whole spices to taste.

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    Tips For This Basic Mead Recipe

    Anytime you ferment something, there is always the possibility of failure. This homemade honey mead recipe is pretty foolproof, but something could always go wrong.

    Make sure to sterilize your equipment and bottles. This will prevent bacteria from forming. Filtered water is also a must. Tap water can contain all sorts of nasty things. Unclean fruit could also cause problems. And be sure to keep an eye on your airlocks to avoid clogs.

    If you sniff your mix while it is brewing and you smell rotting fruit, dont worry. Its not rotting, its working! If it still smells bad after its done, leave it a few weeks in the new bottles. Raw and green mead will smell strong. Once it sits for a while, the smell should mellow out.

    If you see mold, or worse, maggots, compost it. There is no help for that batch. And if it smells like vinegar, have you added tea? Some mead makers will add tea for the tannins. The smell could be something similar to kombucha brewing. It may not be bad, but it could be. You may want to have an experienced person test this batch out.

    Mead made this way will have some alcohol, usually around 15%. Not a lot, but more than other alcoholic beverages. Be aware of this in case you want to give it to someone with sensitivities to alcohol.

    Have you ever tried making a homemade honey mead recipe? How did your batch of mead turn out?

    *******

    How To Make Mead: Homemade Honey Mead Recipe With Flavoring Ideas

    Homemade mead is a fermented beverage made from honey, water, and yeast. Our honey mead recipe can be sweet or dry and also offers flavoring suggestions.

    Fall makes me think of pumpkins, apple cider, and mead! You can make mead with simply honey, water, and yeast, or you can add fruit, herbs, and even pumpkin!

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    You’re Done Be Creative

    Now that you’ve finished your mead label your product! You can be creative with this. Many people print out lovely custom labels to put onto their concoction. Or if you are like me and have masking tape and a sharpie that will work as well.

    Once labeled you have finished the easy part of the mead process. Sure, if seemed like a of steps and three weeks of waiting for fermentation, but you are not done. Now the waiting game has begun. Store your mead in a safe location and let them age for at least six months! I know it’s tempting to just want to drink them right away. They are alcoholic at this point but if you drink them now you will not be happy. Mead just gets better with time, so start your timer and wait it out, I promise you will not be disappointed!

    The great part about mead is that you can make it without all the flavors or mix up the flavors with other fruit as well. I like the mint/lime mix but you can be creative. You also have six months of waiting to do, so go ahead and experiment with a new batch. Mead is not a difficult skill to attain, but it a fun, enjoyable and tasty one!

    Mead Producers To Know

    Modern Bushman

    Enlightenment Wines based out of Hudson Valley, NY produces an abundance of meads, from sparkling to unfiltered, some flavored with toasted buckwheat, other with lavender and juniper. Meanwhile, B. Nektar andKuhnhenn, two Michigan breweries, make their own take on mead, also flavored with a slew of fruit, spices, and botanicals. Those interested in sampling the hybrid mead style known as braggot can check out .

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    Pitch The Yeast & Add The Airlock

    The next step is to add the yeast, but you need to make sure that the temperature of the mixture isnt too hot first. It needs to be below 90°F, room temperature is best.

    Use a thermometer to check the temperature of the must, and wait to add the yeast if its too hot.

    Once the temperature is good, add about 1/2 package of champagne yeast to the jug. You can save the other half in the fridge for the next gallon batch of mead that you make.

    Once again, put the cap on the jug if you have it, or improvise with something else, and give it a few shakes to distribute the yeast.

    Fill the airlock with water to the line, then put the stopper end into the top of your jug.

    Mead: The Worlds Most Varied Drink

    From being completely flat through to being super sparkling from being crisp and dry through to seriously sweet and from straight-up mead flavour through to being fruit flavoured, it seems that mead may very well be the worlds most varied drink. So, after youve gotten to grips with the five recipes within this article there is a whole world of other recipes to try out, so. lets get started!

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    Bottling Small Batch Mead And Wine

    For large batches, you need a siphon to transfer the brew into different containers. However, with small batches, you can easily and successfully pour the mead or wine into a separate container without a siphon. Make sure you pour slowly to leave the sediment behind.

    For bottling, you just need a clean mason jar or a glass bottle. Just cap the jar or the bottles. If your bottle doesnt come with an integrated cap, you might need a bottle capper or regular wine corks.

    At this point in the process, some meads and wines taste better than others. Some can be straight-up horrible. But this doesnt mean you did something wrong during fermentation. It just means the meads are still raw and they need more time to develop their taste. Typically, you should allow wines and meads at least two weeks before you serve them. Preferably more. As a rule of thumb, flower meads or spicy meads need more time than basic ones.

    However, if the mead or wine tastes like vinegar, something really went wrong. Dont get discouraged! Use the vinegar as salad dressing and try again.

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    Make The Maple Mead Must

    How To Make Honey Wine (Mead) at Home

    Once youve done that, put about ½ gallon of non-chlorinated water, along with the cinnamon stick and cloves, in a large pot and warm up on medium heat.

    Then add the maple syrup and honey. Do not boil.

    Turn off the heat once the maple syrup and honey have dissolved in the water.

    Then use a funnel to transfer this mixture, including the spices, into the gallon jug. Add the raisins and orange wedges to the jug.

    Fill the jug with cold non-chlorinated water, leaving about 3 inches of head space at the top of the jug.

    If you have the cap to the jug, put it on and give it a few shakes to mix everything together. If you dont have the cap, try and improvise with something else.

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    + Mead Recipes For Homemade Honey Wine

    This post may contain affiliate links. Read full disclosure here.

    Mead recipes can be hard to come by in this modern era, even though honey wine is one of the oldest beverages brewed by ancient peoples around the world. Still, dedicated homebrewers, historical reenactors, and even archeologists are recreating modern recipes for one of the worlds oldest craft beverages.

    Our own homemade mead recipes. Clockwise from top left: Chamomile Mead, Rose Mead , Grape Mead , Herbal Lemon Balm Mead.

    Making mead at home is both incredibly simple, and immensely satisfying. With just a few simple ingredients and minimal equipment, you can craft a truly exceptional honey wine. People have been making mead for millennia, in small homestead kitchens, long before modern breweries and vineyards took up most of the production.

    I made my first mead recipes in college, with minimal equipment in my tiny dorm room. Since then Ive made literally hundreds of gallons, much to the delight of my friends and family.

    Thousands of years ago humans were brewing mead in wooden troughs, filtering the brew through juniper branches and bottling it in cured animal hides. Even without modern yeast strains, stainless steel brew kettles, and running water, they were able to make high-quality honey wine, worthy of praise in epic poetry and Viking sagas.

    Really, all you need is honey, water, and a bit of patience.

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