Mead – Batch 35

Viking Drinking Horn filled with Mead

Viking Drinking Horn filled with Mead

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.

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