I'm a university student in Scotland and I've just purchased the equipment necessary to brew 5 gal of... well, SOMETHING. I decided to give mead a shot after i tried a bottle of Lindisfarne mead, which, i understand, isn't precisely traditional mead but is pretty good. I have a few general questions about mead production, and this forum is far and away the best resource i've found so i've decided to abase myself before the brew-gods and ask for guidance.
I've purchased two yeasts, Gervin No 3 Yellow Label Wine Yeast(A champagne yeast) and Gervin B Wine Yeast. I've also bought wine finings, Tronozymol, tartaric acid, and campden tablets. hightest's guide (
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f30/sticky-mead-making-faqs-83030/) makes use of the finings and tartaric acid, which i haven't seen in any other recipes. I'm unsure as to what yeast i should use (the gervin B advertises a "fruity bouquet" and i've seen the no.3 yellow label in a few mead recipes) and if any of you experienced brewers make use of wine finings and tartaric acid. Also, when preparing the yeast, do you guys, as a rule use some sort of nutrient/yeast enhancer pre-must?
For cleaning/sterilizing, I'm planning on using Bru-clean and the campden tablets. I've heard some bad stuff about campden as a sterilizer, are these naysayers correct? Would you recommend campden as a post-fermentation additive?
My understanding of the brewing process is as of yet incomplete, so i've probably made some glaring errors in the above text and my first batch is liable to be an alcoholic abortion, but i'm very excited about this project. Any help you you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
For a better guide of gervin yeasts, there's a better guide at
Muntons (they own the gervin brand now). Personally, I prefer the Lalvin brand yeasts, I have to get them mail order as the local HBS down here doesn't stock them, but they're useful because there's a hell of a lot more info about them floating around (more later)
Campden tablets ? nothing wrong with them...... I use Ritchies sanitiser, which is bleach based, for DJ's and buckets, but for day to day "working sanitisation" I use 6 campden tablets crushed and 1 teaspoon of citric acid made up to a pint. Oh and when you're in the process of racking and clearing, it's normal to add 1 campden tablet every other racking. That's too prevent oxidation and kill off any possible spoilage mechanisms...
With mead, you're gonna have, probably, 2 issues. First, is access to decent quality honey. This is because us lot in the UK don't have real access to a market like the chaps and chapesses in the US do, unless you can afford some serious shipping/postage costs. Supermarket cheapo **** is Ok if you're making a flavoured mead i.e. pyment, cyser, melomel, etc as the flavour of the fruit/spices/herbs/whatever will over ride the honey flavour.
Have you still got the bottle from Lindisfarne ? look at the ingredients and you'll see what I mean. I seem to recall from my unscientific mead test/review last year, that Lindisfarne has apple juice or something like that in it.
You need to have a hydrometer and a cheap plastic testing jar/tube is also handy. Oh yes, and I notice you mention enough kit to make 5 gallons of something...... a bucket, I take it..... well that'll be fine for conducting the actual fermenting, but you're really gonna need glass as well, to age the mead (watch the ebay listings for demi-johns as that's usually where you'll find them the cheapest - most of the auctions are "collection only" due to the cost of shipping glass i.e. very bulky and usually expensive - the transport would help as you can often find reasonably priced stuff but you might have to drive to collect).
The second thing(s) to consider are time and money. 5 gallons of mead ? well you'd be thinking between 3 and 3 1/2 lb of honey per gallon, hence the money thing - if you can find somewhere that sells honey in bulk it's usually cheaper (you'd have to search to see if there's a bulk supplier locally) and the time reference, well yes you can make mead reasonably quickly, but to be drinkable, you're looking at, at least 6 months ageing, if not longer.
If you have transport (I understand what it's like as a student i.e. shortage or readies etc) then if you could locate a bee keeper locally who still has honey in stock from this year, ideally for a "traditional" mead you're best suited using "Raw" honey, because it's untreated/unprocessed etc. You give your location as Scotland, so you might even find some "Scottish Heather Honey", but it's often quite expensive.
Right, yeasts again. Now there's a lot of info about yeast around, but it's either not available locally, or it's not available in home brew sized packs.
For instance, over at
Gotmead, not so long back, we were looking to find out what yeast was used by the late Brother Adam, down at Buckfast Abbey (where they make the tonic wine). We found out that he used, originally, "Maury yeast". Now, I couldn't find out who made it, but it's only now available as Lalvin D21 in 500 gramme packs (so probably out of the question). Laterly, it seems that he'd used Gervin Varietal E, and while it's listed on the Muntons site, you'd either have to locate somewhere that sells it or sells Lalvin K1-V1116, which is the same yeast - and is probably easier to locate - it's one of the yeasts I use, it's very good stuff).
There's a lot of info about making meads out there, though a lot of the best guidance is in "out of print" books - for instance, in Ashton & Duncans "Making Mead", they mention that the best results for acid during the making of mead is a mix of 2 parts Malic, to 1 part Tartaric. Plus they, as well as others, say that you should really be using the strongest flavoured, darkest coloured honey you can get. As far as I can find, that'd be Buckwheat honey, but it's a bugger to get hold of, or quite expensive.
If you do use cheap supermarket honey, you can achieve acceptable results but you'll still need to age it. My first attempt about 3 years ago, was with cheapo tesco's honey and I used Youngs high alcohol/Dessert wine yeast. It produced acceptable mead after about 12 months of ageing it in bulk.
A few handy links ? Well you know about here, I've already linked Gotmead for you. There's good general advice for wine making (including mead) at
WinesatHome, which is based in Yorkshire, so could provide info about some of the more general supplies available in the UK (at least a couple of members in Scotland, so even more local advice is possible). Plus there's a **** load of links
at my blog.
That lot should give you some info to look into and be getting on with. Hope it helps.
regards
fatbloke
