Ok, I’ve been negligent lately on my blog. So much so that I can’t remember the exact day I brewed by first batch of mead. I believe it was the 23rd of December, so I’ll go with that.
Deciding to brave this journey, I began with a very basic mead recipe. 15 pounds of honey, water, yeast nutrient and yeast. Pretty basic. I used clover honey, since that was available and didn’t cost me anything. Water was free and the wine/champagne yeast was $2.50 or something like that (I forget right now what yeast I used). Yeast nutrients were $3-$4. So, my total in this batch is $5-6. Oh, what I could have free honey the rest of my life!
The question of whether or not to boil came up, and I defaulted to Papazian’s advice: Boil for 15 minutes and call it good. This neutralizes a lot of the nasties that are normally in honey and preserves some of the floral quality (though not all). So, I boiled 1.5 gallons of water, added the honey, stirred and waited 15 minutes, then put it in my carboy.
Talk about easy!
I still have the whole funnel issue with my carboy, so I used a measuring cup to slowly transfer the mead to the carboy. Once most of it was out of the brew pot I lifted the pot to pour the remainder in. All in all the safest way to do it.
Once the honey was cooled I rehydreated the yeast, took the initial gravity (1.106), and pitched the yeast.
As of today (January 5), it is still fermenting away. February 3rd will be 6 weeks fermenting, so I’ll check it then to see where it’s at. I am really looking forward to this. This will be a new experience for me.
Who Said What?