Christmas Mead with Fruit and Spices [Help]

Tomorrow I plan to start brewing a batch of mead that will be ready in time for Christmas. I've only brewed once before, I made lager using a homebrew kit, so I don't really have a clue what I'm doing. I also have no brewing apparatus and a budget of approximately nothing (the ancient druids didn't have fancy brewing equipment either so this shouldn't be a problem).

I'll write out my plan of action and, if you want, you can give me pointers on how to optimise the chances of me having a batch of delicious, spicy, fruity mead by Christmas.

Ingredients:
~10L hard tap water, ~2Kg honey; 500g muscovado sugar; oranges, lemons, plumbs, root ginger and blackberries chopped; raisins and dried currents; allspice, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg, dried chilli and mixed pepper corns crushed; red wine yeast (high alcohol tolerance because I like to get drunk at Christmas (Lalvin EC-1118 maybe if I can find it))

Apparatus:
Huge saucepan, muslin bag, hose, 1L swing-top bottles

Method:
Half fill saucepan with water and add honey and sugar.
Bring to a gentle boil.
Add fruit to saucepan.
Fill muslin bags with spices and add to saucepan.
Boil for 1 hour then allow to cool.
Remove fruit and spices.
Add yeast to pan, cover with lid and leave in the airing cupboard for 1 month.
Make a sugar solution, add to saucepan and stir gently.
Siphen into bottles, seal and leave in the cold, winter shed until Christmas.

So the main problem I recognise with my method is that I am not using a carboy or an airlock. Will the pan lid and layer of CO2 be enough to stop oxygen entering the brew? Will airborne microbes wreck my mead? (what did people do before Louis Pasteur?) I didn't plan on using a chemical steriliser either because I just don't like the idea of drinking bleach and, again, the ancient druids were probably filthy; I'll will, however, sterilise everything with boiling water.

Unless you mean Xmas 2016, this might not taste too good this Dec 25....could be done fermenting in a month, likely not totally, would not recommend adding more sugar solution and bottling so early...it seems you know what areas you're lacking in, why not step up and do a more proper job (although, yeah, fermented beverages have been made forever with less than sanitary techniques). Unlesss you have an autoclave or something, the best you can hope for is sanitized, not sterilized, and relying on boiling H2O is maybe slightly better than nothing, but...overall, chances are slim this will turn out tasty by Xmas '15, if at all. Sorry, just mho

fuelish said:

Unless you mean Xmas 2016, this might not taste too good this Dec 25....could be done fermenting in a month, likely not totally, would not recommend adding more sugar solution and bottling so early...it seems you know what areas you're lacking in, why not step up and do a more proper job (although, yeah, fermented beverages have been made forever with less than sanitary techniques). Unlesss you have an autoclave or something, the best you can hope for is sanitized, not sterilized, and relying on boiling H2O is maybe slightly better than nothing, but...overall, chances are slim this will turn out tasty by Xmas '15, if at all. Sorry, just mho

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How long do you think I should let it ferment? Maybe I could stick a balloon in the steam hole of the saucepan lid and wait until it stops inflating? If It's not gonna be ready for Christmas this year, I might leave it a while until I can afford some proper equipment. I suppose I can use a sterilizing solution if necessary... No need to be sorry, thanks for the reply.

What do you think of the recipe, sounds nice, right?

We just bottled a Xmas mead using Apple juice concentrate and mulling spices and fall honey. Will get a few months of aging before the holidays.

I mean, yeah, could be passably drinkable by Xmas.....BUT, if you drink it over the holidays, you'll have no idea how much better it will be NEXT Vmas....I've made a few quick meads (abv 7%-ish, sparkling melomels - a peach, a black- and blue berry, and a ginger root) that've been quite good after a few months....couple months to ferment, a few months to fully bottle carb.....the peach has become my "house" mead for my wife - she loves it, she won't touch my more inyense stuff (like oaked ginger habanero.....MMM MMMM mmm )

Just do the jaom its christmasy and might be drinkable by then

Urkelbot said:

Just do the jaom its christmasy and might be drinkable by then

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I was looking at that. I'd probably use proper yeast if I was gonna make it, can't see the alcohol content getting very high with bread yeast.

By the way, I've abandoned the saucepan idea. Ordered a 5 gallon glass carboy off amazon with an airlock and everything. I also found an apiary near my mum's that sells 3lb tubs of raw honey for a really good price; I'll be buying four of them so I have enough to make a full 5 gallons of mead. Exciting stuff.

For 5 gallons of mead you will need between 12.5 lbs and 15 lbs of honey. That will produce a mead of between 12 and 16 % alcohol by volume - bone dry.

I made a metheglin for Christmas giving on 6/26 of this year it is now bottled and tasting pretty nice. Your recipie has a lot more going on than mine did, but your ingredients sound good. I can tell you that pots sitting around even with lids on can grow mold and other organisms inside. You are right of course about things not being so sanitary way back when, and I imagine their meads, wines and ales weren't always the best. �� sanitized gallon jugs and sanitized balloons might be a low cost alternative, that will better keep infection away. Just some thoughts, hope that helps. I'm pretty new to this as well, my third small batch of blueberry melomel has finally cleared and has nice legs, which I was pleased to see just yesterday.

bernardsmith said:

For 5 gallons of mead you will need between 12.5 lbs and 15 lbs of honey. That will produce a mead of between 12 and 16 % alcohol by volume - bone dry.

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Hmmmm... 12 lbs + 500 g of muscovado sugar should be ok though? Want that Christmasy molasses flavour. Also I'll be leaving room in the carboy for foam. I'm using ec-1118 which has a tolerance of 18%, more honey do you think?

Hoppy2bmerry said:

Your recipie has a lot more going on than mine did, but your ingredients sound good. I can tell you that pots sitting around even with lids on can grow mold and other organisms inside. You are right of course about things not being so sanitary way back when, and I imagine their meads, wines and ales weren't always the best.

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A bit too much going on maybe maybe. I've ordered some yarrow and burdock root to stick in there too. I think all the pungent spices might overpower the subtle honey flavour... I'll see how it turns out. I think I'll use sterilizing solution actually, it would be a shame to waste all this time and money making rancid mead. Blueberry mead sounds amazing. I'm pretty excited about trying new recipes. I went blackberry picking today and I'm making 5L of wine with it.

Hi Futret - and a belated welcome.
I guess my approach would be to make a very simple mead if this was my first attempt and I would want to get to understand how yeast behaves, how honey behaves, and how the fermentation of simple sugars play out before I started increasing the complexity of my meads. Adding more and more complexity through the addition of sugars and spices and herbs will mean that if there is a problem (and I don't necessarily mean a catastrophic problem but a problem of poor flavor, or color, or clarity) you will be unable to pin down whether the problem is located in an ingredient or in your process. Or which ingredient or what part of the process.

To put this a different way, I would urge you to treat mead making as if you are engaged in an important scientific experiment - You want to design the experiment to be as simple as possible with all unnecessary complexity removed, and you want to be able to control every variable except the one you are observing or testing and its effect or impact on an outcome you can reasonably predict. But hey! this is your call, your mead.

Hi bernardsmith, thanks, seems like a friendly place

I like to live dangerously. I'll make another batch of simpler mead when I get paid in a month or so.

A bit too much going on maybe maybe. I've ordered some yarrow and burdock root to stick in there too. I think all the pungent spices might overpower the subtle honey flavour... I'll see how it turns out. I think I'll use sterilizing solution actually, it would be a shame to waste all this time and money making rancid mead. Blueberry mead sounds amazing. I'm pretty excited about trying new recipes. I went blackberry picking today and I'm making 5L of wine with it.

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The guidance I had from an online source was to use small amounts of spice as in 1-2 whole cloves per gallon of water in the mix. That was too subtle for my taste so I added some to the priming sugar solution and simmered a while. It all depends on what you like in a drink. As long as your flavors all go together I say go for it.
The blueberry has been a bit of an adventure... I have gone from flat and a hint of bitter to cough syrup back to a hint of bitter, but clear with legs. So I'm going to oak it and see if that takes care of the bitter flavor. A friend sampled it with me and liked it, so that's a good sign. Would enjoy hearing your tasting notes as you get this one going.

Hoppy2bmerry said:

...
The blueberry has been a bit of an adventure... I have gone from flat and a hint of bitter to cough syrup back to a hint of bitter, but clear with legs. So I'm going to oak it and see if that takes care of the bitter flavor. A friend sampled it with me and liked it, so that's a good sign. Would enjoy hearing your tasting notes as you get this one going.

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A wine that tastes a little like cough syrup suggests that the acidity may be a little too low. But you say that it bobs between cough syrup and being bitter. Have you measured the TA?

bernardsmith said:

A wine that tastes a little like cough syrup suggests that the acidity may be a little too low. But you say that it bobs between cough syrup and being bitter. Have you measured the TA?

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I meant to ask about acidity; I live in a hard water area so I wondered whether it would be better to use bottled water instead of tap water. I imagine that the acidity of the fruit will bring the pH down a bit but what about when I make a plain mead?

Honey is notoriously unstable when it comes to pH and yeast. The pH can rocket and then crash so you may want (if you can ) to monitor it...

bernardsmith said:

Honey is notoriously unstable when it comes to pH and yeast. The pH can rocket and then crash so you may want (if you can ) to monitor it...

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Testing PH is something I haven't done, but the next time I get to the brew shop I'll get some strips... The funny thing is the cough syrup flavor followed the addition of lemon juice ... Citric acid. Thanks for your thoughts on this. Right now I have racked the blueberry into a gallon jug with oak and a quart with no oak to condition a while before I bottle.

I'm drinking the hot must with vodka right now. It tastes f-ing nice.

OHVolsfan23 said:

We just bottled a Xmas mead using Apple juice concentrate and mulling spices and fall honey. Will get a few months of aging before the holidays.

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That’s a really good choice. I have tried it too once with mulling spices and honey. But instead of getting the mulling spices from outside, I prepared it with good spices and herbs that I bought from Horton Spice Mills store in Canada. I got a good mixture of the mulling spice recipe from my friend and I thought of trying it myself at home. To be frank, it tasted so good and was really happy with the result of the drink. You could also try bottling it with homemade mulling spices.