Pumpkin Spice Mead

Hey all,

Recently, I've gotten into making mead. I have made 2 batches, a show mead and a JAOM, thanks to all y'all's help! Anyway, i love pumpkin spiced things, so i thought, what better thing to pumpkin spice than mead? I didn't search through the forums for a pumpkin spice mead before because i wanted to try my hand at making a recipe. So, this is my first recipe, tell me what you think this should be a sweet dessert mead where you can really taste the pumpkin spice! Also, this will be fermenting in a pumpkin for the first week!

Ingredients (1 gallon)
1 packet of bread yeast (so it stays sweet)
3 pounds clover honey
1 cup brown sugar
2 pounds pumpkin puree
3 sticks cinnamon
1 leveled tsp of nutmeg
1 tbsp. vanilla extract
1/2 gal. water and enough water to fill up to 1 gallon.

Process
Warm up water and add honey.
Put in pumpkin and add all ingredients.
Pitch yeast at room temp
Rack after a week into carboy(or alternative)
After clearing, bottle until next fall


Anything that you guys can add? I look up to you all and hope to learn from you. Should i adjust the ratios? Different yeast? All that jazz Thanks in advance

I would use an ale yeast instead of the bread, since you want it sweet. However, running your recipe through a brewing calculator, I'm getting a good 18% potential ABV (1.142 SG)--i.e. a standard wine yeast would leave you some residual sweetness (as long as you don't go with 1116/1118). If you want it lower abv than that, I say omit the brown sugar, and use maybe 1/4 cup molasses in it's place (for the flavour) (which should bring it down to around 15% potential ABV).

If it were me, I would use fresh pumpkin (and roast it), bring it up to a full three pounds, and boil it to extract the flavours...that way there is less solids in the must. If you carve a jack-o-lantern you can get all you need from scraping the insides...

Spices: If you aren't concerned about particulate matter (since you are planning on ground nutmeg), I say to use full on pumpkin pie spice. Otherwise, I don't have much to say, other than that will probably be too much cinnamon--try 1 stick, and add more in secondary if you want.


Hope that helps, and happy brewing.

In addition to the pumpkin some folks put in some baked sweet potato as well. Haven't tried this style yet myself tho.

You probably wanna add your spices in secondary instead of up front. They don't have any sugar for the yeast, so you risk in primary for the fermentation to blow the aromatics out of the mead. I would also guess, based on what I've read, that 1 cinnamon stick should be sufficient.

I like the idea of this, but have yet to pull the trigger and start my first mead. I am so overwhelmed of do this, don't do that, when to do this, when to do that, you cant do this... that i am paranoid to try!

Do tell me more when you get this recipe rolling. I am very interested in it!

Hello, this is my first post. I am new to homebrewing, and this year I finished a nice 10 gallon batch of hard cider. Half of it was huckleberry flavored and some was peach.

I think I am going to try this recipe with some of the suggestions recommended: i.e. one stick of cinnamon, molasses instead of brown sugar, baked pumpkin and pumpkin spice.

My question is, would I be better to add both the pumpkin and the spices in 2F? The reason I ask is that with my huckleberry hard cider, the flavor of the huckleberries seemed to get sort of washed out by the end, and all that was left was a tartness. Ideas?

I would add some pectine in there to help with clarification. I would also use a vanilla bean rather then extract. Soak it in some rum for a week and use that. Most extract is fake. Careful with it though. I used one bean in 1/2c rum in 5 gallons and you can really taste it. Cut the vanilla bean in half and scrape out the seeds into the rum.

I would also use a pie pumpkin not the jack o lantern pumpkin. More sugar in it jack O lantern pumpkins are very starchy. Roast it and caramelize it a little so not all the sugar is fermentable. You can also use butternut squash. Higher sugar content.

Its been 7 years how did this come out? looking to make a mead for Thanksgiving (2021)

SunnyVoid said:

Its been 7 years how did this come out? looking to make a mead for Thanksgiving (2021)

Click to expand...

Wondering the same thing, trying this recipe out as well!

Cmoneyyy17 said:

Wondering the same thing, trying this recipe out as well!

Click to expand...

Considering this was his only post & he hasn't been back since, I have my own doubts about how good it must've come out. Seemed like too much sugars & too much cinnamon for a one gallon batch.

Here's a link to a pumpkin cyser that came out rather nice
Thread 'Pumpkin Cyser' Pumpkin Cyser