On making mead

Posted: March 11th, 2008 | Author: Stacy | Filed under: Gluten-free, Homebrew, Mead | 2 Comments »

Ever since we visited Lindisfarne in Scotland and had some delicious Holy Isle mead, I’ve wanted to try my hand at mead-making. Those monks make a mead that isn’t sticky sweet, even tastes good at room temperature, but is unfortunately expensive to purchase in the US. Lots of local meads are delicious, too, like Mountain Meadows Mead from California (I really love their cranberry mead), but they’re also a bit expensive. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to make my own? Of course!

All I needed was 15 pounds of honey, yeast, and 5 gallons of water. Simple! We bought 9 pounds of local clover honey mixed with 2 pounds of blackberry honey and 2 pounds of mesquite honey from Trader Joe’s. To top that off to 15 pounds, we also added 2 pounds of agave nectar because, hey, why not! Mountain Meadows makes an agave mead, after all.

I had tried to buy yeast a few weeks ago, but some joker bought out the whole mead yeast selection at FH Steinbarts. Having grown weary of Steinbarts consistently being out of stock for at least one brewing item I needed every time I go there, I decided to call Let’s Brew to see if they had mead yeast. The 11am phone call went like this:

Let’s Brew Lady: “Let’s Brew, how can I help you?”
Me: “Do you have any yead meast?”
Kathy: “giggle giggle giggle”
Me: “Uh giggle giggle giggle I mean mead yeast… giggle giggle”
Kathy: “giggle giggle giggle”
Let’s Brew Lady: “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that…”

Yeah, that should have been a sign that perhaps this wasn’t the weekend to make mead. But no, I wouldn’t be deterred. We got to Let’s Brew and bought some champagne yeast rather than sweet mead yeast because we wanted a dry mead. Sounds good so far. Later that afternoon, I boiled 15 pounds of honey/agave with 1.5 pounds of water. Boiling took a long time! And of course, I had to taste the mixture and it nearly made me diabetic it was so sweet. Shocking, I know.

Finally the boil got rolling, I let that go for 10 minutes to kill off bad bacteria, then I put the sweet mixture into my carboy along with enough water to bring it up to 5 gallons. And so the yeast had to wait until the wort temperature got down to at least 78.

Enter the next morning… I reach into the fridge to get my yeast out, and set it on the counter to warm up for a few hours before pitching it, then I go to softball practice. On my return from practice, I pitch the yeast only to notice that is was my German lager yeast and not the champagne yeast! Aaaargghhhh! What to do? Beer yeasts don’t have the alcohol tolerance that wine yeasts do, so the mead would turn out low alcohol and really sweet. Yuck. So I did the only thing I really could do; pitch my champagne yeast in there too!

Two days later, it looks like there’s some fermentation happening. I have no clue how this will turn out!

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