Mead Making Basics Part 1: Ingredients

Introduction to Mead
Mead is the alcoholic beverage made from fermenting honey and water with yeast. Meads range from sweet to dry, bubbly to still, and plain (flavored only by the honey) to spiked with fruit and/or herbs.

Mead is an ancient beverage, one of the first known fermented drinks. Archaeological evidence for the production of mead, so far, dates back to 7000 BC ([wikipedia]). We'll be covering a simple overview of mead making.. if you want complicated, well there's always Mead Made Complicated.

Making Mead
Making mead is pretty simple. You need at least honey, water, and yeast. Since honey doesn't have many nutrients that yeast needs to thrive, you should probably add some yeast nutrient (available at your local brewing supply store). This will make the fermentation finish faster, versus proceeding very slowly. Mead likes to ferment at warmer temperatures, say 70-80F, so it is a good beverage to brew in the summer (although it will ferment in your heated home any time of year). It is also nice to add some sort of acidity or tartness to balance the sweetness of the honey. This can be accomplished with some lemon juice, your favorite acid (citric, tartaric, blend, etc.), herbs, or fruit.

Let's look more at the individual ingredients useful for mead:

Mead Ingredients

• Honey. It takes a lot of honey to make mead, so this can be a bit expensive if you're used to making beer. Keep in mind that mead is more like wine, and the higher gravity and fancier nature warrant the expense. It keeps forever and is a remarkable drink. You can make a decent 5 or 6 gal batch of strong/sweet mead with 12 lbs (or more) of honey. If you go with a basic clover or wildflower honey, you're looking at about $46.00 (Northern Brewer online incl. shipping, or $44 in Portland at FH Steinbart or $41 at Homebrew Exchange. The fancier honey varieties are more expensive.
  


• Water. Make sure your water is clean and dechlorinated. If you use tap water, set it out in the sanitized, covered fermenter bucket 24 hours ahead of time. Stirring with a sanitized whisk or shaking can help degas any chlorine.


• Yeast Nutrient. Use a little yeast nutrient, especially if you're not adding any fruit or malt or anything else with the vitamins that yeast needs to ferment well. (More info on yeast nutrients.)


• Fruit. You can add many kinds of fruit to mead. Rasberries, strawberries, blackberries, are all spectacular. Sometimes fruit meads are called melomels.


• Herbs. Again, the possibilities are endless. One good way to try different herbs is to add a strong tea of each herb during bottling. This allows you to try multiple different herb mixtures with a single batch. Just remember to label those bottles. A little wormwood (artemsia absinthium) is a great bittering agent, but go easy. Check out this page for how many grams of each herb to use for a given gallon of your brew.

Next post, I will explain how to actually prepare and ferment the mead.

Build your own barley grinder--nah.

One question that arises for home brewers that use a lot of grain, is should they invest in their own barley grinder (a.k.a. grain mill)? If you are one of those obsessed, all-grain brewers who buys 50 lb grain sacks from your local Portland homebrew store--or wherever you live--to get a discount, you'll soon realize having a grain grinder at home would be convenient.

You can buy a hand-crank grinder, or even motorize the thing. If you motorize it, you can hack it with a power drill, or take the more elegant approach of a motor and pullies ("sheaves" is the right term, I'm told). Some brands to look into are:

• Schmidling (Jack Schmidling's stuff). Hand crank and motorize-able.


• Barley crusher. Affordable hand-crankers?


• Crankandstein.. clever name, solid metal parts, for the do-it-yourself types: some assembly required I think.
  

All this is nice, but I am usually a lazy partial-extract brewer. Still, I've been looking at building a safe, nicely finished grain grinder. I have found that it is a rubbish lot of work if I'm to properly conceal belts, wiring, and so on. Rubbish lot.

To Repitch or Not to Repitch

When I brew a new batch of beer, I usually just buy a fresh pack of yeast. To save money, however, I've looked at reusing the yeast. I've done this a couple of times. Half of the times I tried it, I got strange off flavors. I'm guessing this was because I saved the yeast too long in the fridge before reusing, and that I didn't refresh it with a starter before pitching.

I'd like to understand what exactly the right way to reuse yeast is. It seems like the following guidelines are a start, but a definitive guide would be nice. Can anyone recommend a good book to learn more about yeast chemistry, etc., with a focus on brewing beer?

Possible Guidelines for Reusing Yeast

• Repitching fresh wort onto leftover yeast slurry at the bottom of your primary fermenter (after racking or bottling the last batch) is an easy way to reuse yeast. You should probably throw out half of the yeast slurry to avoid over-pitching, and only reuse the same strain 3 times or so.


• Saving yeast into a sanitized beer or soda bottle, as explained in the Joy of Home Brewing, is ok, but don't keep it more than a couple months in the fridge. If you keep it more than a week, make a small wort starter of the same or lower gravity as the beer you are making to refresh the culture.

Off flavors.
In hopes of learning more about repitching yeast, I started a discussion of how to properly reuse yeast in home beer brewing at the homebrewexchange.net forums.