Yeah Buddy, your own honey tastes better anyway. Have you made a whole hive mead yet from the combs? I crushed a bunch of foundationless comb and am making a traditional out of it, it smells amazing. Also trying D47 for the first time with it. WVMJ
Honey costs
- Thread starter podz
- Start date
Help Support Homebrew Talk:
Honestly I've only just gotten into any type of home brewing so I haven't had the opportunity to do anything above normal. We run foundation in all our hives just because we're a fairly good sized operation and don't do anything differently than trying to get as many barrels as possible. But I can't wait to do more.
Mozart
Well-Known Member
I recently took a similar approach.
I wanted to make some mead for the Thanksgiving and perhaps Christmas holidays, but never having made it before, and never having tasted any commercially produced mead, I didn't want to do a full 5-gallon batch. Why spend all that money and tie up one of my larger fermenters for that much time on something I'm not 100% sure I'm going to like?
Instead, I picked-up two 1 gallon glass carboys, and last Friday put two gallons of Joe's Ancient Orange Mead in them. Per the recipe, these should be ready in 2 months, give or take, which will put me in mid August. Plenty of time to make some more (and even tweak the recipe) for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays if I like the results.
And if it turns out I don't like mead? (Though I suspect I will or I wouldn't have made it) I now have a couple of one gallon fermenters that I can do experimental batches, or a dry apple cider, or anything else I want to try but aren't quite sure I want to commit 5 gallons to.
Cheers!
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" 
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 drunk and might have helped if I'd left it to age longer (it had 6 months at least).
If you use cheaper honey (though if you can, don't go for the very cheapest), you can use other things to add flavour like fruit, spices, apple juice etc. You can also use a little expensive honey to sweeten the mead after fermentation, rather than using lots of expensive honey to ferment, and maybe losing the nice aromatics you paid for!
The way I see it is that a cheap bottle of commercial wine costs me at least £5. Even using very expensive honey, mead will hardly cost that! I'm now happy to spend about £15 on a 5 litre batch of mead, which gets me 6 1/2 standard wine bottles of mead for about £2 each - much cheaper than any commercial wine and way more special It takes a long time to ferment and age mead, so the initial investment is all the more important -you don't want to open a bottle of your mead after a year or two, and wish you'd used better honey!
If you can, don't think of it in terms of 5-gallon batches. That's way too expensive a thought for me, unless someone hands me a huge bucket of honey! Single gallons are easier on the pocket, and less to worry about if the mead doesn't work out. You can also afford to experiment.
A beekeeper might be the way to go, but where I live they sell their produce like it's liquid gold (well it almost is!) and even directly from the bee(farm?) it's never going to be cheaper than commercial blended honey.
Got a birthday/other gift-giving event coming up? Ask for honey!
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 drunk and might have helped if I'd left it to age longer (it had 6 months at least).If you use cheaper honey (though if you can, don't go for the very cheapest), you can use other things to add flavour like fruit, spices, apple juice etc. You can also use a little expensive honey to sweeten the mead after fermentation, rather than using lots of expensive honey to ferment, and maybe losing the nice aromatics you paid for!
The way I see it is that a cheap bottle of commercial wine costs me at least £5. Even using very expensive honey, mead will hardly cost that! I'm now happy to spend about £15 on a 5 litre batch of mead, which gets me 6 1/2 standard wine bottles of mead for about £2 each - much cheaper than any commercial wine and way more special
It takes a long time to ferment and age mead, so the initial investment is all the more important -you don't want to open a bottle of your mead after a year or two, and wish you'd used better honey!If you can, don't think of it in terms of 5-gallon batches. That's way too expensive a thought for me, unless someone hands me a huge bucket of honey! Single gallons are easier on the pocket, and less to worry about if the mead doesn't work out. You can also afford to experiment.
A beekeeper might be the way to go, but where I live they sell their produce like it's liquid gold (well it almost is!) and even directly from the bee(farm?) it's never going to be cheaper than commercial blended honey.
Got a birthday/other gift-giving event coming up? Ask for honey!
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... £38!!! Nah thanks, I'll stick to the mead....!
![Craft A Brew - Safale BE-256 Yeast - Fermentis - Belgian Ale Dry Yeast - For Belgian & Strong Ales - Ingredients for Home Brewing - Beer Making Supplies - [3 Pack]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51bcKEwQmWL._SL500_.jpg)
MarshmallowBlue
Well-Known Member
Hey W, just gave me the greatest idea. A Maple bochet with vanilla beans and oak. Good lord it'll be great. Going to have to open up my extensive "to do" Tome.
I used to think honey was $$$ til I looked up maple syrup and saw that it was $$$$$, Mind you at one point I had the really good stuff from a year my father did maple syruping, but that has long since been eaten. Most syrup (like 75%+) is produced in Quebec btw.
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"
If you use cheaper honey (though if you can, don't go for the very cheapest), you can use other things to add flavour like fruit, spices, apple juice etc. You can also use a little expensive honey to sweeten the mead after fermentation, rather than using lots of expensive honey to ferment, and maybe losing the nice aromatics you paid for!
This gets back to my original post in this thread. A lot of the store stuff ie heat stablized (driving off aromatics) or cut with corn syrup, again cutting the amount of aromatics. If going for a mead then best is 100% honey, but doing some of the other styles that are going to have more over riding flavors (like fruit, or spiced) cutting the honey with sugar probably won't be as noticed. Again, if they honey is at an acceptable price, I recomend that, rather than making a invert syrup.
MarshmallowBlue
Well-Known Member
Yeah, If you're going to use Top $ honey, you should make a no-heat traditional to really let it be the star.
Maple syrup didn't used to cost like that. As with many other food items (Tuna, Crab, etc), the Japanese can be blamed for driving the costs sky high. They are willing to pay crazy high prices for things they like, and as such a disproportionately large percentage of the world's best food gets diverted directly to Tokyo. I live relatively close to the largest king crab fishery on the planet. There is a far greater possibility of seeing a shooting star in the summer (where our sunlight lasts 23-24 hours) than seeing crab at my local supermarket or restaurant.
Not only that, but the Canadians deliberately control the maple syrup price by warehousing very large amounts of the stuff in order to create artificial global shortages.
I love globalisation. Not.
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 few months ago...? That'll teach them for hoarding it
The Maple syrup might also be facing suburbanization. Basically you have certian trees that grow in a certian climate that produce syrup. and you really can't do it in other areas. The sap runs best on frozen nights with thaw days (so like Feb and March).
Much like the alaskan crab, you can only get it from that area.
As for the warehousing, that was to help the farmers, which it does some, by keeping prices stable, the farmers can avoid price shock and not have to store it themselves. This does help keep them in business, a good thing if we want to enjoy sap/syrup.
huesmann
Well-Known Member
Actually, buying 5 gallons at a time is easier on the wallet in the long run than buying in smaller quantities...
You don't need (or even want) to use the really expensive Grade A maple syrup. Grade B actually has more "mapley" flavor, which is really what you're looking for when you want to make an acerglyn. Although Grade B is still considerably more expensive than honey, IIRC.
Yes, yes it is. I've looked. Half gallon - is $40 (amazon, grade b, I don't know anything more than that didn't bother with the reviews). 1/2 gallon of honey could go for as little as $25, although probably closer to $30, depending. Grade A maple I think I've seen at $55 for 1/2 gallon.
That would be a blast. I'm in Wyoming. I had two five gallon buckets of it, which didn't heat up very fast. I gave them a couple hours in a bathtub of hot water before i decided to get elbow deep and start kneading it into the water. That is something everyone should experience.
huesmann
Well-Known Member
Yup. If memory serves, a gallon of Grade B cost me $75 when I made my acerglyn. I usually buy a 5 gallons at a time of Dutch Gold honey, for about $145 shipped, which is the best price I've found.
Similar threads
