We just bottled our very first batch of mead!
Mead is a honey wine. It is, at its simplest, honey combined with water and fermented. Some brewers add a variety of other ingredients, including fruit or hops. Our first batch was honey and water, which we let age for just over a year before bottling. Now that they are bottled, we’ll wait 12 months before trying the mead again. It will likely need at least 2 years of aging.
It turned out a bit sweet. We added nearly 18 pounds of honey to less than 5 gallons of water, which is 6-8 pounds more than we should have used. Brian thinks this is due to a mistake when converting kilos to pounds; neither of us can remember exactly what we were thinking, though we tried to keep good records as we were making it.
Less than 5 gallons of water + 18 pounds of honey = sweet mead!
Mead is a pretty neat beverage. Archaeological evidence finds examples of meads from as early as 7000 BC! Whoa! All around the world there are examples of people using honey to make alcohol. Actually, the first time I tried a ‘mead’ was a quick fermented honey beer in Tanzania, made on the boma (homestead) of a Maasai group.
Brian brewed a lot of mead back in Seattle, and considers himself somewhat of an expert (nevermind the mishap with the overly sweet first batch!). We bought 5 gallons of honey from a local beekeeper just last week, and we’ll try again. We are also experimenting with using agave nectar to brew a mead-like drink; so far our experiments haven’t worked well. The sugar in agave nectar is much different from that in honey, so we’ll need to play around a bit in order to get it right.
So, come on by in a couple of years and enjoy some home-brewed mead!
Read more about mead on wikipedia.
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