How to Make Mead (Part 2)
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- Опубліковано 4 лют 2024
- Using Golden Hive Mead's beginner kit, Libby takes on the task of making mead for the first time. Here is how it went and how it tasted!
Part 1: • How to Make Your First...
Golden Hive Mead Beginner Mead Making Kit: goldenhivemead.com/products/g...
Bottling Kit: goldenhivemead.com/products/h... - Розваги
We need a Libby ferments series where she just gets tasked to create a product with zero help. Beer, fermented chilli sauce, mulberry wine etc.
This was great, I've never done mead, but I kinda want to try now.
I think we mead more content like this! Well done, Libby!!
🤣🤣🤣🤣
You guys killed it. I’ll make a reaction video answering some of your questions and giving some helpful tips. Age will definitely help smoothen it out and take away that “burn” you described. Cheers!
Mountain Dew wine was crazy.
Very well done. Experimentation is great! Try it all and see what happens. That's how we all learn.
Love it! My wife is a beekeeper so we easily get a 5 gallon bucket of honey a year: forgot the weight. It's a lot. Beekeeping is a ton of work, hence the high price tag, but nothing beats local honey and all the funk that comes with it
Mead is easy and other than the cost of honey is probably the best thing to be a persons first attempt in home brewing. I’ve been brewing for about 4 or 5 years now and mead is by far my favorite thing to brew.
With basic no frills mead, I add a little wine tannin then age for a year. If you want to spice it up a bit, stabilize and add some vanilla infused honey to back sweeten.
I make a lot of mead, however I usually make a 5%abv mead, where I use Nottingham at 64 degrees then Keg and force carb, any mead over 10%abv I let sit for 8-12 months then add refining like acid or back sweeten, I also use wine tannin and yeast nutrient in all of my meads for initial fermentation to help drive the yeast. The wine tannin also helps with clarity and mouth feel. Cheers!
This is a great video!!!!!! We have also dabbled in making mead and wine!!!!! Its a really simple process other than the time consuming racking over and over to clean up the mead. Cheers guys for some awesome content.
Another great video nice work Libby really enjoyed it your definitely a natural in front of the camera 🎥👍cheers 👍🍻
either way, Libby, your editing is fire
Glad to be fire instead of fired 🤣 Thank you! - Libby
well, that mead looks mead-yummmmm
Looks awesome!
A few things...
1. Pectic Enzymes for Clarity: Honey tends to have a lot of particles that will be suspended during the brewing process. I typically allow the mead a month or two in secondary to complete clarification naturally, but pectic enzymes or other clarifiers can be added in the primary to clarify your mead.
2. Energizers and Nutrients: To speed up the fermentation process and reduce the stress of your yeast, it is necessary to add Energizers and Nutrients to your Mead during the brewing process. Energizers are like adding 5 cups of Cafiene in the brew for your yeasts. It really gets them eating up the available nutrients and sugars and producing that beautiful alcohol.
Nutrients, on the other hand, are the "healthy foods" that allow the yeast to produce the Alcohol without putting off bad esters (flavors/smells) because of stress.
3. Aging: Aging certainly helps a mead to do multiple things. Haze is definitely something that will reduce slowly with time as suspended sugars and pectins slowly drop to the sides or bottom of your bottle. This will also help with the "bitey" mouth feel you get with "green" (new) meads. Aging really settles out the alcohol taste, allows the flavors to combine, and really improves the taste of a mead.
Note: It is important to "Oak" your mead in secondary fermentation if you are not going to add any tannins to your mead during the primary fermentation step. Oaking your mead provides much-needed tannins as well as imparts flavors from the wood. I highly recommend looking into the various forms and doing some research on how the wood will affect your mead. Powdered tannins can be added during secondary fermentation but will increase your clarification time, and you will need less of the powdered tannins if you plan to add wood (as they can add a bitter taste and feel to your mead if they are not in balance).
A good rule to follow for Mead is to make 4 bottles: 1 for 3 months, 1 for 6 months, 1 for 1 year, and one for 2 years. A 2-year-old mead is typically peak aging for mead and will give you the best flavors and mouthfeel... so if you don't like that mead now... try it again in a few months or a year and see what you think the flavor will likely change.
If you guys have questions, I'm more than happy to help, but there are a lot of mead channels out there that have the answers with some really good recipes. Salancha! Happy Brewing!
You can drink mead however you want cold flat mulled sparkling, I find tonmy personal taste made is best made as naturally as possible without too much messing about. I rack one once after any signs of fermentation are finished then I will add fruits spices herbs etc (unless it's a braggot) then once all that's setttled its time for another racking and after that time is your friend so leave for another month or so then bottle. I've been making meads now for over five years and still learning and it's definitely a hobby that needs a lot of patience ...oh and never be frightened to experiment. Cheers 🍻
i want to try it now! I'd watch future tastings to see if it improves!
A lot of people don't realize that mead was never really meant to taste great, it was meant to get you hammered. I think you did very well for your first run. My first go was like drinking bee shit. Didn't taste like bee vomit at all. I still drank it all though. Then I learned about back sweetening... As far as aging goes with mead, I've found it doesn't age very well and is best consumed within a month after bottling.
Yes as a new brewer I have such a hard time letting things age, but when I have wow its paid off in spades.
5 lb of honey is 15 dollars at Costco and 22 dollars at Walmart. They only have wild flower honey but that's perfectly fine for mead
Y'all should come down to Greenville, SC and stop by Wandering Bard Meadery! Easily the best mead around and owned by THE nicest dudes!
Mead can be served cold or room temperature. You will get different flavors depending on serving temperature. That is another fun way to experiment!
Otherwise adding yeast nutrient and enough oxygen at the start really helps to make a mead better at a younger age. I enjoy making mead so it is nice to see you trying it on your channel!
Good job on your first mead 👍 My signature mead are a "burnt" mead or bochet mead where I boil the crap out of half of the honey make it OG about 1100-1120 and use Kitzinger Reinhefe Portwein yeast. And that does not need a lot of age to be drinkable. 🍹Cheers out there and happy brewing 🍺
I like making mead with beer yeast. It needs less time to age and doesn't need back sweeting. Rasberry jalapeno is my fav.
I like aged meads, but a pure honey mead should probably be aged for a year to really mature, I rarely do pure honey meads now a days but usually mix honey and fruits. I find that those types of meads tend to be ready to drink a lot faster.
How are you with adding tannins? I've always thought a straight forward mead doesn't need tannin at all and think tannins can give it quite an acidic tang.
I don't add tannins to my pure honey meads, might try it just as an experiment. I did however make a strawberry chai mead last year which got tannins from the chai tea as well from the strawberrys. It turned out very good. But generally I don't add extra tannis, there will be some tannins naturally in the fruits if you make a mead with fruits.
Mead takes time to age. In my experience it takes a year to get good. Takes 3 years to peak. However, depends on dryness/ sweetness, type of honey, and vessel aged in. Have fun.
Oh also when you first start out making mead dont go for the most expensive honey out there just in case it frells up a bit and you can always use the more expensive stuff for back sweetening.
That mead is what is referred to as Fool's Gold. If you think it tastes good now, then just give it more time and it should be a lot better. Clarifying is a must otherwise you might get medicinal off flavors from the sediment left behind. Keep it up! Find a local meadery and try their fare for comparison.
Not sure about the Mead, but the Puns are on point!
I can't brew too well but I can be punny - Libby
As far as when to drink, it depends on the style. My favorite is a session mead (6-8%), carbonated with various fruit juices added by the glass.
Without sounding a fool, what is bad about having a bit of yeast or "cloudiness" in the product? Thanks
I usually let my Mead age for 2-5weeks usually not more, i guess it comes down to the kind of honey we use.
They did not have clarifier 3000 years ago... so clearness is no issue... However.. always respect the work of the beezzz. ferment at low temp... small tip
Some bottle mead like beer, some like wine.
Which one is more accurate? I hear using corks for bottling is better for the aging.
Sorry about the hydrometer comment. I have broken so many doing that I even winced the second time watching it in THIS video. Best of luck and congrats on working with Clawhammer Supply
Don't be sorry! We're just goofin' over here! Def don't want shattered hydrometer in my drink 🤣 Thanks for looking out - Libby
Time will definitely help. Clarity to me depends on the user. I think it might be interesting to use the yeast from the piece of wood that yall have used before.
Haha I’m about to crack a home brewed mead at 10am too, it’s real old tho, like 5 years
Woo hoo!
I’ve made Meade before I switched to beer. I wonder if pressure fermentation would quench some of those “footy” esters that you get when it is young.
It doesn't work that way with mead if you force it it's not nice at all
niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice
pro tip, you can improve the flavor of mead by adding 2.3 oz. of dog shit and one dirty sock, also works with gin.
If you enjoy this and want a product you can drink faster, use agave syrup. I've had a lot of success with agave and pineapple. Mead needs to age at least 3 months.
If I'd known how easy that was to make I'd of done it years ago as I like mead it's the drink of vikings 😊
Room temperature, or warm. Cold is for hydromels, session meads, sparkling session meads, hopped session meads. By the way I don't make UA-cam videos but I could give you a literal f*ck tonne of information and do's and dont's with meadmaking and there were very few of the former in this video. I have studied the arts of meadmaking and have obsessed over it for years now. Also watch City Steading Brews, they are on point with meadmaking practises and cautions, like ie check 2 days consecutive for gravity changes, yeah that's a pretty common thing people say but unless it hasn't moved for 2+ days consecutive and it's above 1.010 it may have stalled and that bottle will build pressure and one day you or your dog or cat could be walking by and bang it explodes because it had way too much fermentation, pressure sealed inside for the bottle to handle, if you use carbonation drops or tsp of table sugar, dextrose, corn sugar in beer and mead making you know that's added like 1.002-1.003 once dissolved and that makes a good pop when you open it more so if bottled before it had a chance to finish, imagine 1.020. No rush, it's gotta sit for a while anyway, bulk aging is better imo, ferment in an ale pail, white bpa free bucket and when it's actually done move it to a carboy or 3, whatever, then you can add stuff and stabilise, clarify then bottle it.
Oh honey, we mead more libby (dont fire her pls, thx)
Couldnt send Emmitt out to get several meads?!? ala the Ross and Tripel video. feel like the vid couldve been much better.
Next stop, braggot in a clawhammer system!
Meady Ogre
Shrek approved
Meads more practice 😅
Ouch (but funny) - Libby
Trigger warning 😂😂😂
Awe Emmitt has a girlfriend now lol
Trigger warning lol. Anyone who was triggered over that needs to f’ing relax and go grab a beer!