10 1-gallon meads

So I found honey for only $14 per gallon. Its a limited time offer but I figured that I should make as much mead as possible while this good thing lasts. The honey is in florence mississippi and the apiary owner is a nice guy and a brewer himself. PM me for his contact info.

I have been doing beer for a while but mead is new to me. I have never had mead and so I don't know what I like. I figured that I would try 10 1-gallon batches. I have picked out 10 recipes that sound tasty and I am going to make them. The recipes are a mish mash of pyments, braggots, melomels and random other things.

The recipes are at the end of the post. I don't expect anyone to actually read them. 2 of those meads use K1V-1116 and 4 of them use Lalvin EC-1118. The rest use other things. My idea was to make a 4-gallon batch of sak mead with Lalvin EC-1118 and a 2 gallon batch of sak mead with K1V-1116 and then split them up and add all of the miscellaneous ingredients that the individual recipes require over the course of a couple days.

My other idea was to ferment these all in plastic gallon water jugs from walmart with balloons over the top.

I am going to use proper amounts of DAP and yeast energizer on each one. I also got some chemical whose name I can't remember and some litmus strips to balance PH.

The recipes are as follows.

Pyments
Coffee and Vanilla Pyment www.homebrewtalk.com/f80/coffee-vanilla-pyment-301272/&usd=2&usg=ALhdy28oFFLYXx5sxaRXalTxWz52gXS_Ww

plain concord pyment racked on oak chips http://justnopleasingyou.wordpress.com/tag/pyment/


Braggot
Hefty Braggot http://forum.northernbrewer.com/viewtopic.php?t=24948
Ginger honey braggot of my own recipe

Melomel
Joe's Ancient Orange Mead https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f80/joes-ancient-orange-mead-49106/

Cherry Vanilla https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f80/cherry-vanilla-melomel-161411/

Black'n'Blue Melomel https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/blackberry-melomel-gold-winner-77506/

Other
Plain sak mead. http://www.gotmead.com/forum/showthread.php?t=18200

Fat Basset Cyser Bochet https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f81/fat-basset-bochet-cyser-cider-burnt-honey-253733/index2.html

Dandelion Metheglin https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f30/dandelion-metheglin-147603/

Sounds like an interesting experiment. My batch of joam(though a little sweet) was very good, and so easy to make. It's got me hooked. I have an assortment of melomels, methaglins, three traditionals and a pyment. I also have a few 'cross breeds' between the types, including a cherry chipotle that's looking gorgeous. Have fun with your experiments and your very fortunate to have honey at that price.

I will say, regarding yeasts, I'm not happy with how bland ec1118 leaves a finished product. 1116 will do the job just as well and leave a much more flavourful end product.

Subscribed! Interested in what recipes you like best. I've never made mead, but it's on the "to brew" short list.

Definitely doesn't sound like a bad idea. Congrats on he good deal I've been wanting to split a batch like you plan on for a while now, but I haven't had the time. Good luck!

Don't worry about the recipes, just buy as much honey as the chap will sell you.

It won't "go off". Even if you take a while to work out what you actually want to make, and it crystalises, that doesn't matter you just warm it slightly to re-liquify it....

The price is too good to miss.......

Very nice! I'm interested to see where this goes.

BobTheAverage said:

So I found honey for only $14 per gallon.

My other idea was to ferment these all in plastic gallon water jugs from walmart with balloons over the top.
-147603/[/URL]

Click to expand...

That price is awesome! On the subject of the gallon jug method: I did not find a balloon that would fit a wide opening and not fatigue / eventually fail. My solution - to cut a grommet hole with an exacto in the cap and drop an airlock in. Working perfectly.

MisterZ said:

That price is awesome! On the subject of the gallon jug method: I did not find a balloon that would fit a wide opening and not fatigue / eventually fail. My solution - to cut a grommet hole with an exacto in the cap and drop an airlock in. Working perfectly.

Click to expand...

An equally good method......actually better than a ballon.

Once its settled down with the ferment, I'd still suggest you topped it up.

How do you get a tight seal between the airlock tube and the plastic lid? I see a black thing that looks kind of like an o-ring.

BobTheAverage said:

How do you get a tight seal between the airlock tube and the plastic lid? I see a black thing that looks kind of like an o-ring.

Click to expand...

It's a grommet you can get at any brew store for 40 or 50 cents.

Good plan for introducing yourself to mead--looks like you've covered every major style. Although I prefer to coin the term floramel for meads flavoured with flowers.

So I threw together the Hefty braggot. I chose this one to do first because I had the yeast on hand. The recipe was all grain and I thought that this would be easy peasy with only a 1 gallon batch size. What I did not think about was how small and crappy my kitchen is. My brewpot is somewhere else and I had to split the mash up between two pots. The small size of the pots meant that the temperatures were hard to control on my crappy stove. I finally got what seemed like an acceptable result out of the mash, but I was fooling myself. It wound up only contributing .023 to specific gravity. :-( Next time I try all grain anything I will be more prepared.

What I did not realize about this recipe going in was just how ridiculously hopped it was. There are 5 oz of hops instead of the 2 oz you usually see in most beer styles.

Pictures to follow later.

Photo time

Not the most appetizing mead at this point. But who gives a crap how it looks.

Edit: Thanks to HokieBrewer for showing me what to do with the image thing.

Fixed the image for you

So i have roughly 4 gallons in a water bottle. Honey, EC-1118 and water.

So life has gotten in the way recently but here I am back with another mead. The gallon of Cyser Bochet is sitting in the fermentor. I cooked up two pounds of honey instead of the usual 1 pound the recipe called for. Pics to follow soon.

Just enough honey to cover the bottom of the pot. Now turn on the heat.


The honey starts boiling pretty quickly.


The entire honey cook time was roughly 6 minutes. The color started dramatically and rapidly changing around minute 4 and by minute 6 my whole apartment was filled with acrid smoke.



The last two images show my mead in the fermentor. The only difference between the two is that the second one has the honey in it. The whole thing is very very opaque. I later filled it up and stowed it away. I will take a stowed picture soon.