- Mead
- Start
- Temp: 72.1°F
- Sg: 1.091
- Est. ABV: 12%
At the same time as I was finishing the first fermentation on my second batch of wine, I started an experiment in mead brewing. Brewing mead is surprisingly simple and all you need is water, honey, and yeast. I used exactly the steps used on The Modern Rouge when they made mead. The great part about the simple process that they showed is that you don’t need any special equipment, buckets, or special cleaning. All you need is a jug of water, enough honey, and yeast.
I decided to make two gallons of mead, and try two types of honey.
For this first mead I used:
- 1 Gallon of “refreshe” water (on sale at the grocery store)
- 2.5 lbs of “SueBee” Honey (Clover Honey, Product of the U.S.A.)
- 1/2 packet of red wine yeast
To figure out how much honey I needed I used this mead calculator to figure out how much honey I needed to get an ABV of about 12%. That came out to about 2.5 lbs, which was convenient since I could buy 2.5 lbs bottles of honey at the grocery store. In order to mix the honey into the water, I did need to pore about half the water into other containers (pitchers and water bottles) to make room.
I did a taste test before poring in the honey and it tasted, well, sweet. It tasted a lot like the honey you would have gotten at McDonald’s to dip fries and nuggets in as a kid.
Mixing the honey and water together is a workout, since you need to vigorously shake over 8 lbs of liquid. After that was done I added back some of the water that was set aside, while leaving some room for the yeast. I did another taste test of the now sweeten water, and it was very sweet. I think it was sweeter than a lot of sugary sodas. So sweet that my mouth and thought felt dry after and I needed a drink of water to wash it down.
After adding the yeast, I added the perforated balloon air lock and stuck it in a cabinet to rediscover on a later date.