Recent content by gayleygoo

Thank you for the informative post on yeast, as a relatively new meadmaker I don't know much about using yeast to enhance the characteristics of the mead, although most of those you have listed are not easily available to me there are some I will keep my eye out for. As far as I'm aware...

Is that burnt honey mead? I tried a burnt honey cyser a while back, it got drunk within a few months so none left to try some properly aged stuff, but I would like to try that again :) I'll add them both to the to-do list! Didn't Canada get a whole load of warehoused maple syrup stolen a...

Also, I wanted to make an Acerglyn, with maple syrup. That's rare stuff here in Ireland/UK, and most commercial syrup is just sugar syrup with maple flavouring. I priced up a 5 litre batch (1 litre maple syrup, 1lb honey, yeast etc) using the cheapest 100% pure maple syrup I could find online...

OP, I felt the same way before I began making mead. I thought that surely the recommendations to use good honey were surely just "honey snobbery" :o and used cheap supermarket honey (about £2 per pound). It had no smell and not much taste, and didn't make a nice mead, although it certainly got...

That capsumel is a lovely colour! I feel the need to point out though, that Daenery's title is spelled "Khaleesi" :)

Hubby found me a book called Irish Traditional Cooking, which has been a wealth of information for much of my recent cooking. I thought I'd share with you the recipe it gives for making mead, though I don't recommend the bottling procedure! " Boil eight quarts of water in a preserving pan and...

whoops double post!

I use a one gallon water bottle or glass demijohn for bottling small batches from. Well, they're 5 litres capacity, but you get those "gallon" bottles of apple juice in the US, so one of those would do. I rack from the FV to the bottling bottle, and then into bottles from there. I've racked...

A forest fruit melomel I started on New Year's day :) I wanted this to be a bit quicker drinking than the other meads I've got on, so it was bottled quite early. Tasty though, I'll try to store some of the bottles for a year or more. I'm tempted to do up some nicer labels, now that I've...

A week after racking, there are still some curds floating on top of mine. Finings didn't bring them down, I think I'll just have to rack carefully a few times to try and get them out. I really have no idea what the abv is, as I don't know how much honey or water I added in total, and not...

I saw a recipe once for a Golden Syrup "NotMead", (I assume our golden syrup is something similar to your corn syrup, basically sugar in liquid form) which had spices added to make a methligin kinda thing. Maybe some oranges and spices would add a nice flavour?

I racked this today, it was rather fiddly as the curds liked to move around a lot. There was loads of crap left over at the end, it looked so gross I didn't even wanna touch it, never mind eat the stuff. It's in a 4.5l DJ now, with a large amount of headspace. I lost track of how much honey...

When making (hard) cider, sugar is a flavour diluter, it just ups the abv and takes away mouthfeel of the cider too. I dont add any sugar or water to my apple juice and the SG is usually about 1.040, I don't want it any higher than that unless I'm making apple wine and it's gonna be left for a...

Day 6 and I think it had finished fermenting (I didn't take a hydrometer reading but there was no airlock activity today, yet there was yesterday!) You can see in the pic it has mostly separated out. Wow that's a lot of sediment. After I took the photo, I added another pound of orange blossom...

So it might take a little longer but should clear eventually? The thought of drinking something that looks like alcoholic milk is enough to make me want to boke. I think it's doing fine though, heres a pic! It needs another pound of honey. I used a cheap supermarket honey (No...