Excellent article on the art & science of Honey & Mead

Hello, All.

I've been brewing beer for about 4 years now off and on and am just now looking into mead. It looks far easier than beer and less tempramental in the way of sanitization - even if it takes months to ferment and age rather than weeks. I'm currently deployed to the desert, so I'm a month or so away from starting my first batch . However, the long-term fermentation and low maintainence is appealing in the fact that I can get a batch going and leave it for 4-6 months at a time without requiring the wife to babysit it.

Anyway, I ran across an excellent that was very informative - if a little scientific - on honey and mead making. Check it out at:
http://www.solorb.com/mead/danspaper.html

Of course, the host site has a host of mead-related info like most sites, but this article was fairly unique.

Enjoy...

Yep, I learned a thing or two after reading it, too. Wish I had read that about a year ago! I've made just 3 meads so far and -- mistakenly -- used Montrachet in each one. What a mistake. When racking, each one had a decided sour off taste that I'm hoping will disappear after complete (18 months) aging, but now I'm worried it's the Montrachet. Also made two pear wines last year, both sour and yucky off flavors. At first I thought it was because the fruit was a little under-ripe before I put it in must, leading to lack of flavor, but, nope, you guessed it: Montrachet yeast!

Montrachet is now banned from my musts.

I've probably put 35 pounds of honey into sour meads. Live and learn, but I'm getting some more and will make a couple of small (1-gallon) batches and try some K1V and ICV D-47, Flor Sherry, and maybe some Wyeast liquid port wine yeast.

I remember that article was sent out to everyone last year or the year before.

I've posted this before http://www.oregonbrewcrew.com/ The Great Mead Experiment compares six yeasts. The thing I found most interesting is the Sweet Mead yeast resulted in the driest mead.

The OP's post of the original article is great. Very informative.

Wow, this is extremely interesting.... Thanks a ton!

Thanks. Dan and I had a lot of fun with that. You might want to look at this, too. That's the first part of the article, which is in three parts.