[moocher]

Just wonderin if anyone has made mead, visited The Snowdon Honey Farm & Winery last week and was blown away by some of the flavours, my fav being cowslip mead, I cant get over how many things have been used to make the mead, from parsnips to nettles, fab place to visit and you can try before you buy, I well wobbled on the way out.  Just wondering if its hard to do, my lot is sloe gin and was told by the guy there that we are in for a good year with sloes by all account.

[SG6]

Not difficult.
But you need to add nutrient, acid and tannin as honey doesn't have them present.
If you add flavorings to them it is called something else.

Spiced mead is simply add some ginger, cinnamon, cloves or whatever, just no idea how much. May be able to say in a year as it will be ready then.

If you use just honey then it can take a time to ferment and to mature.

They say a good honey is best, but they cost lots of money. At say £4.50 a jar and needing 4 or 5 jars it isn't cheap. For a trial have a go with el cheapo supermarket honey at 68p a jar. 4-5 jars should be OK.

If you add a small amount of fruit the fruit flavor comes through and the mead is easier to make as the fruit adds to it.

Web site of use could be: http://www.gotmead.com/

Also:
http://www.homewinemaking.co.uk/forum/YaBB.pl
http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/
http://www.winesathome.co.uk/forum/

One of them has a small mead section on it.

Have some recipes if wanted.

[Captain Reech]

Cheapo Supermarket honey doesn't give you a deep colour or a very interesting flavour but it does work. I took five jars (68p a time from sainsburys), dissolved them in half a gallon of hot water and allowed to cool for a couple of hours. While cooling I made up a starter bottle of yeast (Youngs dried wine yeast from Wilkos) and sugar water and sterilised the demijohn (not forgetting to rinse.) When the liquid was cool enough to syphon (kind of the right temp for babies bath water!) I put it in the demijohn, topped up with cool water, added a teaspoon of yeast nutrient (Wilkos again) and added the yeast starter. Sealed with an airlock and waited.....for a very long time! Mead is one of the slowest fermenting wines I've ever made but it does get going and then it bubbles away just fine. After about six months the fermentation slowed right down and it started to clear so I racked it into a clean demijohn and made up the space (you always loose a bit of the lees at the bottom when racking) with water in which I had dissolved a jar of very nice Chestnut blossom Honey (it was on special offer when I wanders past the bargain rack in the CO-OP) This started bubbling away very nicely and fermented for another five months! When it stopped properly I left it to settle for two weeks then treated with Vin Clear (You guessed, Wilkos!) and bottled it. Took a while to clear (Winemaking is good for developing patience!) but it came out very nice, a little drier than some of the supermarket meads and a lot lighter than some I've drunk at re-enactment events but very drinkable.

I think the 5 jars of cheapo and one of decent honey is a good compromise, even on special offer the chestnut honey was about £2.50 a jar but I do believe the darker, good quality honey produces a better mead.

[Swing Swang]

I used to make mead when I used to keep bees. The wax cappings from the frames produce the best quality wax, but they have to be washed first, and the resultant honey-sweetened water was used for mead. The quality of the honey was top notch, but I was effectively using a 'free' by product that otherwise had little value as to if this wasn't washed off the cappings it would have been heated in the wax-extraction process (or even fed back to the bees) and have had a negligable resale value. As you'll boil the honey in the wort ro kill off any wild yeasts this wouldn't have mattered either.  So if you know of any beekeepers see if they're prepared to sell you honey that is heated during the wax extraction process as it should cost you much less than the stuff that they bottle for the public. I've no idea as to costs, but twice the price of the equivalent amount of sugar would seem a reasonable place to start haggling. Maybe soem of the beekeepers on this site will comment.

With regards to mead - I made both spiced and unspiced - got excellent results with sherry strains of yeast to about 14 percent alcohol - very dry 'fino' type wine with aromatic topnotes, although a little 'thin' in the mouth when young, and took about three years to mature.

Of course I had visions of quaffing flagons of foaming mead, eating off trenchers, and throwing spent carcases over my shoulder for the packs of hunting dogs to eat, all whilst the warrior daughters of Wotan attended to my every whim!'

So I also brewed a mead 'beer' - short fermentation/top fermenting yeast and drunk 6 weeks after bottling. Can't remember what I added for nutrients (probably malt extract), but there were certainly no bittering agents. Was quite strong - about 7percent and not a great success (but got drunk nevertheless).

Final experimental batch was a pale malt/crystal malt/honey blend bittered with hyssop & wormwood, again top-fermented, and again because of the honey it brewed fairly/deceptively strong and 'dry'. Brewed conventionally - ie wort boiled until the protein break (so again honey heated and not used 'pure'). The crystal malt gave 'body' which would otherwise have been lacking for its strength, and the hyssop/wormwood bittering was interesting (but not unpleasant). Worth a go, but I'd only brew experimental 2gal batches rather than a more normal 5-8gal.

Oh, and I'm still waiting for the Rhine maidens!

SS