never made mead - yet

A friend who keeps bees has a large surplus of honey this year and has asked me to make a gallon of mead for him. Can anybody suggest a simple recipe - allI ask is that the finished wine is on the dry side.

Use EC-1118 (Champagne Yeast). That'll get it really dry.

But seriously, try the JAOM recipe for your first one. Maybe use Lalvin 71-B for the yeast (a lot of people suggest it). JOAM is fairly basic and pretty much everyone likes it.

Simple mead would be 2.5 lbs of honey to make 1 gallon of mead (you could go as high as 3lbs) . Use Premier Cuvee yeast , and some nutrient. Dissolve the honey in water*** (do NOT boil the honey) and add 1/3 nutrient then yeast. After a day or two add the next 1/3 of the nutrient and then add the next third a day or so later.
When the mead is close to 1.005 rack onto K-meta in a sanitized carboy with essentially no head room. It will clear in about 1 month but steadily improve over the next few months.
***What I do is heat some water in a pot and immerse the container of honey in the hot water. This is to increase its viscosity and enable it to flow more easily. I then pour some of the water I intend to dilute the hoeny with into a blender and pour in the honey in batches pulsing the bejesus out of the mixture to areate the must.

If your buddy has big surplus make 5 gallons, is it light or dark, any idea what kind of honey? A little oak can add a nice touch to a mead also. WVMJ

I would suggest an unmodified Joes Ancient Orange Mead...
Use the bread yeast as per the recipe.
Age it for 8 months to a year before passing judgement on it.

Why not boil?

I'd second 5 gallons. If you are going to wait a year...

I did a blueberry mead and we boiled 15 minutes scooping off anything that floated.

Followed a similar yeast nutrient schedule to bernardsmith.

Turned out amazing. I used the white labs mead yeast.

WHY boil... doesn't do anything useful except lose some of the character of the honey.

Paul_F said:

WHY boil... doesn't do anything useful except lose some of the character of the honey.

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Hum ? Maybe you should have a search around Paul.

No I don't heat mine at all, because as you mention, loss of aromatics etc.

But boiling/simmering a must will coagulate protein and a few others elements, which get skimmed off as scum. Some have found it makes a smoother (if less complex) mead that doesn't need aging so long.

Personally, I'll stick to no heat , aromatics, character etc.....

thanks everybody after reading around it will be 2.5 lb honey and juice of 1 orange and one lemon, champagne yeast, plus nutrient in stages, ferment at 68 deg F, leave on sediment till clear and bottle.

fatbloke said:

Hum ? Maybe you should have a search around Paul.

No I don't heat mine at all, because as you mention, loss of aromatics etc.

But boiling/simmering a must will coagulate protein and a few others elements, which get skimmed off as scum. Some have found it makes a smoother (if less complex) mead that doesn't need aging so long.

Personally, I'll stick to no heat , aromatics, character etc.....

Click to expand...

FB, I am no chemist - don't even play one one TV - but I suspect the foam that is said to collect at the top of boiled honey is wax and pollen and bee's knees and the like. Honey, unlike wort, is basically almost 100 percent fermentable. What significant protein is in honey such that any yeast would be unable to drop the gravity to about .996 or lower assuming the concentration of alcohol or sugar was such that the yeast would not die of alcohol poisoning or death by sugar? In beer the final gravity is likely to be around 1.010 or thereabouts because of unfermentable complex sugars and protein. I really don't think these are present in any measurable quantity in honey.

bernardsmith said:

FB, I am no chemist - don't even play one one TV - but I suspect the foam that is said to collect at the top of boiled honey is wax and pollen and bee's knees and the like. Honey, unlike wort, is basically almost 100 percent fermentable. What significant protein is in honey such that any yeast would be unable to drop the gravity to about .996 or lower assuming the concentration of alcohol or sugar was such that the yeast would not die of alcohol poisoning or death by sugar? In beer the final gravity is likely to be around 1.010 or thereabouts because of unfermentable complex sugars and protein. I really don't think these are present in any measurable quantity in honey.

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Proteins in honey are but one of the tiny amounts of non-sugar in honey that rise as scummy foam in honey musts when they're boiled, pollen can contribute too. All the stuff you list would only be present in raw honey. Most of the stuff available (here especially) will have had all the wax, hive debris, etc filtered out. Not down to pollen or protein levels, but it's still sold as clear honey.

Mix it in water, then bring up to so called "pasteurisaton" temps, or a little higher, and you get the scummy foam. Skim it off etc, and once it stops being produced, cool and ferment in the usual way.

There's a good bit of info I read on one of the sites/forums about it, as they wanted to compare heated to not heated musts. It does seem that it's all the natural aromatics, VOC's and other such materials which are mostly lost by heating that contribute to the varietal nature we all seem to like so much......

And no, I'm not a chemist either - just a fatbloke with a voracious appetite for info

Bernard, foam is made by proteins, the wax also melts and goes to the top, but the foam is protein and of course there is some of that in honey that has not been ultrafiltered to remove the pollen. A big benefit from getting it local straight from the beek is you get all the good stuff in it. Beer guys tend to cook their honey, they loose a lot of the varietal characteristics of the honey, but they can get a honey taste. In cooking a bochet the proteins coagulate into clumps, kind of spongy, very easy to tell there is enough proteins in there. WVMJ