7/17/10 Basic Mead recipe

This will be a two parter, I'll deal with the racking in another post.

I don't know what it was about mead that caught my attention. But to me it seemed like it would be something to try, it seemed pretty basic and low cost and I could could get the ingredients pretty easy. (not like partial mash/all grain brewing or wine making)

So I called around town looking for some 4.5L jugs, or demijohn as the book I picked up called them. I would later learn that the book was printed in the UK and demijohns were all over the place there and some what a pain in the ass to find over here. I managed to find some, picked up some champagne yeast, acid blend and some creamed honey from the grocery store.

Here is the basic mead recipe that I was going off of.

5L unchlorinated water
1.5kg honey
1 tsp acid blend
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 packet champagne yeast

For the water I filled the jug up with tap water and then left it out over night for the chlorine to evaporate out of it. A foodie friend vouched for the method and I decided to give it a go. The honey was just a creamed no name brand, it ended up giving me a higher gravity then the clover honey I used for later attempts. Which would mean that it had more sugar in it, whether this is because it was creamed or not I'm not sure. I'll be sticking with the organic stuff from now on. The acid blend, yeast  nutrient and yeast (Lalvin EC-1118) I picked up from a LHBS (local home brew store).

I re-hydrated the yeast by boiling ¼ cup of water, mixing in some honey and then pitching when it was around 35C ish.  I left it for 70 minutes or so before pitching it into the must.

I boiled around 3L of water in a 11L stainless steel pot, it didn't need to be that big of a pot but it didn't hurt having the extra room. And I'm sure that one day down the line I'll end up using it to full capacity. I let the water cool a bit and then started stiring in the honey a little bit at the time. Making sure that if the bottom of the pot was too hot it wouldn't get burned. 

I made the mistake of thinking that the 3L of water and 1.5kg of water would be enough to fill the jug. I had placed aside around 1.2L of water but then poured the rest out in order to empty out the jug for filling with the wort. I also took a gravity reading at this time... which was 1.146. This ended up being a mistake as that the wort was short of the 4.5L I needed to fill the jug, even with the 1.2L I had put aside I'm not sure that I made it to the full 4.5L. The other issue with this is that I didn't realize at first that adding water to the wort would mess up the gravity reading. So I ended up taking another and got 1.118.

The yeast was pitched when the must reached 35C and I gave the jug a good shake in order to make sure that the yeast had enough oxygen to reproduce. I then left the airlock off of it for 26 hours with a piece of cheese cloth on top to keep out bugs and the like while still giving the yeast access to oxygen. I gave it another good shake when I put the air lock on and my notes state that it frothed up a whole hell of a lot and I ended up stopping before the full minute.

By the time I put the airlock on it seemed to be bubbling away happily towards a good fermentation. I'll let you know about the racking next post.