Hopped mead!

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I am interested, has this been tried before?

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I think it says it will begin to ferment in 3 days. So it does not mention length of the ferment time. But can't be long with enough honey in a 5 gal batch to get you to 6% ABV at best.

This being a more traditional old school recipe the bread was most likely a whole wheat bread. Yeast was not commonly stored in a dry form but rather there were slurries that where kept in jars and active by mixing flour and sugar while changing out the liquid with it every so often. Yeasts were often cultivated from the skins of berries and other fruits. So for this you may just want to use a yeast slurry from a wine you make prior to this and spread the yeast cake onto some home made bread.

Sounds like fun.
 
I have never made a wine. I started brewing beer in September, so I am a newbie. Could the yeast from a beer batch work well? Or should I take the easy route and get some mead yeast? Thanks for the help and sorry I edited the first reply. I am new to posting on threads and don't want to hijack a thread or become "that guy". Thanks for the help!
 
I've never tried making one, but I had a Cascade dry-hopped mead from Brothers Drake Meadery in Columbus, OH. It was very good.
 
Drunken0ne said:
I have never made a wine. I started brewing beer in September, so I am a newbie. Could the yeast from a beer batch work well? Or should I take the easy route and get some mead yeast? Thanks for the help and sorry I edited the first reply. I am new to posting on threads and don't want to hijack a thread or become "that guy". Thanks for the help!

I am by no means offended by the unintentional pseudo-hijack, but you may have better luck at getting relevant responses if you post your question as an independent thread. Cheers, and good luck!
 
I've made many hopped, carbonated "ale meads" at around 5.5-8% abv. Some with d47, some with nottingham, and the best one with coopers ale yeast, which usually I hate. I've used spices in them too, like ginger, cardamom, juniper, lemon. The one I made with coopers had a tiny bit of ginger in it. It wound up tasting exactly like a witbier. It was weird. The rest had a more mead character. I was usually using a golden wildflower honey that came from orchard blossoms and sweet clover, mostly. I did a buckwheat one too that was nice. With D47, I had a little trouble with H2S despite lots of nutrients, but it went away in the bottle. Since the stuff finishes dry, you have to be careful to do a short boil. No more than 30 minutes and not too much more than 2 oz, I usually don't boil all of it. Even then some of it was too bitter at first. Age helped a lot. the only one that was good soon was the coopers one, which was my first experiment with this. You could say I've been chasing it since. All with good results, but it was never the same as that one, which was a witbier if nobody told you otherwise. And with that sucky yeast.

I've used hops as a bittering agent in sweeter meads too, like slavic peoples will do, with good results.
 
Kind of on topic, and about pitching on top a beer yeast cake: I recently racked some skeeter pee, which was pitched on top of some trub, and it worked out pretty well. What I got was a nicely hoppy lemon drink, somewhere between apple juice and iced tea in color. I'd imagine a pilsner shandy would taste a lot like it. So, long story short, I think pitching on a beer yeast cake would be a cool thing to try with mead, but you should expect to pick up some flavor from the beer, and that's how I'd start out trying to hop mead if I were going to hop mead. It seems like you get some benefit of boiling the hops without boiling the honey, and I'd feel a lot safer about not overhopping.
 
It seems that I should read up on making mead before I jumped into this. Well I didn't and now have the impatience of a guy with no beer in the pipeline. I went against the recipe and decided to go and do something stupid. I went on my own. Here is what I did.

12 lbs honey as 2 qts ended at 1.034
1/2 pound of cascade hops
5 gallons water
1 pack Nottingham yeast as I couldn't wait to get coopers LHBS was out

I boiled 6 lbs of honey in 2 1/2 gallons of water for 25 minutes. I added the hops 10 minutes into the boil. Cooled it to 70, then added water to make 5 gallon mark, and I hit 1.034 on the hydrometer. Thought for 2 maybe 3 hours that I made a wine not a beer. That's when I added the extra 6 pounds of honey. 1/2 pound of hops at 1.034 seemed like a bad idea even if I am a hophead. Well, it was the greatest smell, kind of a sweet tea. I will let you know in about 3 weeks how it turns out. Oh, I ended at 1.080, I hit the wine mark but fear the Nottingham yeast is not strong enough. Thinking about throwing another package in, but also thinking about waiting the 3 weeks to see where it end up.

Feel like a kid right now, is it finished? How about now? Now? What about now? Ok has to be done now? No no, son we just made it Saturday and you may have 5 months for aging!
 
Be advised that honey does not have nutrients like beer wort so you should probably add some. Look up SNA (staggered nutrient addition).

I bet it will be good when it is finished.
 
Ok so yes 1/2lb, but here is the story behind the madness. I was looking at an old cookbook that was handed down. There was a recipe in the book and I was going to follow it. The recipe called for half pound of hops and 2 quarts of honey. It was a shame to only add 2 quarts, when my wife likes to drink. My grandfather told me once "Happy wife, happy life!" Today i tested it and i was at 1.010, and my 8 year old told me it smells like bananas. I think the Nottingham was not the way to go. I am going to cold crash it to drop the floaties, and then rack it. I will update with a picture when I get it into the jug.

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