Looking for specific recipes and advice.

[Lucas Aubergine]

So I recently dug out my old mead equipment and bought some other stuff online to get started again, my local homebrew shop closed down so no way to locally get anything new sadly, and I decided to dust off this old account as well. Now when I tried making mead nearly 6 years ago I always seemed to have trouble with it. The mead I made never tasted all that good to me and the reviews from friends and family seemed kinda like lies, I worried the mead had gone bad or gone sour or that I just messed it up.

So this time I wanna try and do better and I wanna try and make mead even I'd wanna drink. So I was looking for Melomel Recipes that act kinda like a fruity drink at the bar, strong flavors that essentially mask the alcohol flavor. I was thinking of doing a Blackberry or Strawberry Mead to start, a nice big 5 Gallon Batch so I can make use of my big jug and bucket. I've also been curious about something lemon flavored but i'm afraid of the acidity killing the yeast or making it harder to ferment. So any suggestions there would be appreciated.

Lastly any beginner advice is greatly appreciated. I live in a trailer and have a very small sink so it's hard for me to sanitize properly, I think that was my issue in the past was improper sanitization since back then I just used hot boiling water. I grabbed some sanitization stuff for mead/brewing online to hopefully fix this issue. My equipment includes two 1 Gallon Glass Carboys (Bottle Necked so not great for Melomels involving whole fruit.), one plastic 5 Gallon Carboy (Bottle Necked), One 5 Gallon Bucket, one hand pump Siphon with a bottle filling attachment, one ABV/Gravity Reader, two old water airlocks (I'm not sure if theres ever a time when you should replace them, they're plastic and about 6 years old but I cleaned them.), and a few chemicals I need to look at when I get home to remember the names of. I bought sanitizing stuff, some yeast, some nutrient, and some energizer.

Anyways if there are any questions I can answer to further help I'm happy to. Thank you all for reading and I hope I can do better this time around.

 

[madscientist451]

Honey is somewhat pricey, make 1 gallon test batches. Look up the TONSA protocol, my mead got way better when I used that method. Make a base mead and add flavors after fermentation, that’s what many professionals do. Martinsburg? What state?

 

[Lucas Aubergine]

Honey is somewhat pricey, make 1 gallon test batches. Look up the TONSA protocol, my mead got way better when I used that method. Make a base mead and add flavors after fermentation, that’s what many professionals do. Martinsburg? What state?

West Virginia. Closest store is about an hour drive or 30 miles away. old store used to be barely 20 minutes away.

 

[An Ankoù]

I make quite a lot of mead, I look at the alcohol tolerance of the yeast I'm going to use and calculate the amount of ordinary, cheapest, real honey to ferment to a level approaching that abv assuming the final gravity will be 1000. I say real honey, because some of the stuff on the market isn't honey at all, it;s a mixture of honey and golden syrup. When the mead has fermented out, I start feeding it with good, nice-tasting honey, I leave about a month between feeds to ensure that all of it ferments if its going to ferment. When it has completely stopped, is completely clear and of the required sweetness, I bottle it.
Mead takes about a year from fermenter to glass. It improves on keeping.
Mead also needs loads of yeast nutrient, which is added at the beginning , but there;s nothing wrong with adding a bot more towards the end, just to be sure. It also needs a bit of acid to balance the flavour- lime or lemon juice is fine, but don't overdo it. You can adjust the acid towards the end when it is no longer covered with the sweetness of the honey.

 

[Lucas Aubergine]

I make quite a lot of mead, I look at the alcohol tolerance of the yeast I'm going to use and calculate the amount of ordinary, cheapest, real honey to ferment to a level approaching that abv assuming the final gravity will be 1000. I say real honey, because some of the stuff on the market isn't honey at all, it;s a mixture of honey and golden syrup. When the mead has fermented out, I start feeding it with good, nice-tasting honey, I leave about a month between feeds to ensure that all of it ferments if its going to ferment. When it has completely stopped, is completely clear and of the required sweetness, I bottle it.
Mead takes about a year from fermenter to glass. It improves on keeping.
Mead also needs loads of yeast nutrient, which is added at the beginning , but there;s nothing wrong with adding a bot more towards the end, just to be sure. It also needs a bit of acid to balance the flavour- lime or lemon juice is fine, but don't overdo it. You can adjust the acid towards the end when it is no longer covered with the sweetness of the honey.

I was wondering, would macerating the berries in sugar and letting them set for a week to turn into a syrup work better as a way to flavor the wine? Would it be safer as well since theres no berry solids to go bad? I could probably make a lot of syrup like that without much issue.

 

[An Ankoù]

I was wondering, would macerating the berries in sugar and letting them set for a week to turn into a syrup work better as a way to flavor the wine? Would it be safer as well since theres no berry solids to go bad? I could probably make a lot of syrup like that without much issue.

In truth, I don't know as I've never tried adding berries to my mead. I like the flavour just as it is. What you suggest sounds as if it should work, though.
I do make raspberry beer, though, where I make the beer, rack the nearly finished beer into a new fermenter and add the raspberries. It's important to stir the "cap" of fruit back into the beer daily to stop it going vinegary. When finished, there is no pulp left, it all gets digested by the beer. Whether the same would happen with a wine, I don't know.

 

[Dan O]

Where you haven't made anything in 6 years, I would suggest making a one gallon batch in a two gallon food grade bucket, (picture of the label that should be on the bucket attatched)available @ both Home Depot or Lowes, (ironically in the paint section).
Raw honey is expensive, too expensive to put 15 lbs into a bucket & have it not be good or worse, not drinkable.

A word of caution with strawberries, they're known for throwing off flavors resembling band-aid or plastic when used for too long in primary.

Blackberry & strawberry require copious amounts of fruit to achieve the fruity kind of drink you're looking to make.
I have found the formula that works well for me to achieve this type of flavor is 6 lbs of fruit/gallon of must. 1/3 of the total weight in primary, then pulled when the fruit loses its color & goes to mush, (typically around day 7), rack to a clean vessel, stabilize with potassium metabisulfate and potassium sorbate, wait 24 hrs., then add the remaining 4 lbs of fruit for 7-10 days, checking daily for tannic values after day 7. Once the fruit has lost it's color, you're basically extracting tannins from the seeds and skins, which can qickly overwhelm if not checked daily.
The chemicals to stabilize are potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfate. Stabilizing is key to flavor retention & to prevent any viable yeast from reproducing.

Brewing in a bucket is key here. Also, a brew bag is essential for cutting back on racking losses.
Equally important is to make sure you punch down the fruit & make sure it stays wet twice a day until you remove it. Once it starts to dry, it will want to grow mold...bad for mead.

As @madscient mentioned, TOSNA 2.0 or 3.0 works wonders for making a much better mead. Good sanitization practices are a no brainer for reducing the risk of introducing infection. StarSan is my preferred sanitizer, but it's not a cleaner. It's just a food grade sanitizer. There are others but some are only cleaners, different than a sanitizer.
The plastic airlocks start to degrade/ breakdown after several years, just keep an eye on them for any visible leaks of cracks. If you do wind up having to replace them, you can get most everything brew related you need on Amazon nowadays.


I hope this helps you. Welcome back to the community. If you need some links to any equipment, I have several, just ask.
Happy meading

 

[madscientist451]

I was wondering, would macerating the berries in sugar and letting them set for a week to turn into a syrup work better as a way to flavor the wine? Would it be safer as well since theres no berry solids to go bad? I could probably make a lot of syrup like that without much issue.

The flavor and aroma of berries and other fruit is lost in the fermentation process. See my answer above. I've been there & done that with all kinds of fruit. You will be way more satisfied if you add flavors after fermentation is complete.

 

[MightyMosin]

I have found the formula that works well for me to achieve this type of flavor is 6 lbs of fruit/gallon of must. 1/3 of the total weight in primary, then pulled when the fruit loses its color & goes to mush, (typically around day 7), rack to a clean vessel, stabilize with potassium metabisulfate and potassium sorbate, wait 24 hrs., then add the remaining 4 lbs of fruit for 7-10 days, checking daily for tannic values after day 7.

I haven't thought it out this well, but I have to agree with this, specifically the amount of fruit needed.

 

[bernardsmith]

Rather than simply macerate the fruit on sugar, you might consider first, freezing the fruit hard, then allowing it to thaw. The ice crystals in the fruit will tear apart cell walls and the amount of juice that you can extract will be far more easily extracted. You MIGHT want to then make an "extract" from the fruit, by macerating them not on sugar but in say, vodka. you would add this extract AFTER you finished fermenting the honey and that would preserve the flavors by not allowing the CO2 produced by the yeast to blow off the flavors and aromas. Alternatively, you could add the fruit to the secondary. This has two advantages. The first is that the yeast are not going to be as vigorous in the secondary (you will have racked many off) and you are now asking the alcohol to extract flavors and not water (the primary)

 

[Reccos0515]

So I recently dug out my old mead equipment and bought some other stuff online to get started again, my local homebrew shop closed down so no way to locally get anything new sadly, and I decided to dust off this old account as well. Now when I tried making mead nearly 6 years ago I always seemed to have trouble with it. The mead I made never tasted all that good to me and the reviews from friends and family seemed kinda like lies, I worried the mead had gone bad or gone sour or that I just messed it up.

So this time I wanna try and do better and I wanna try and make mead even I'd wanna drink. So I was looking for Melomel Recipes that act kinda like a fruity drink at the bar, strong flavors that essentially mask the alcohol flavor. I was thinking of doing a Blackberry or Strawberry Mead to start, a nice big 5 Gallon Batch so I can make use of my big jug and bucket. I've also been curious about something lemon flavored but i'm afraid of the acidity killing the yeast or making it harder to ferment. So any suggestions there would be appreciated.

Lastly any beginner advice is greatly appreciated. I live in a trailer and have a very small sink so it's hard for me to sanitize properly, I think that was my issue in the past was improper sanitization since back then I just used hot boiling water. I grabbed some sanitization stuff for mead/brewing online to hopefully fix this issue. My equipment includes two 1 Gallon Glass Carboys (Bottle Necked so not great for Melomels involving whole fruit.), one plastic 5 Gallon Carboy (Bottle Necked), One 5 Gallon Bucket, one hand pump Siphon with a bottle filling attachment, one ABV/Gravity Reader, two old water airlocks (I'm not sure if theres ever a time when you should replace them, they're plastic and about 6 years old but I cleaned them.), and a few chemicals I need to look at when I get home to remember the names of. I bought sanitizing stuff, some yeast, some nutrient, and some energizer.

Anyways if there are any questions I can answer to further help I'm happy to. Thank you all for reading and I hope I can do better this time around.

I'm pretty new to making mead myself but I started out with blackberry actually following this recipe, maybe you could pull from it for your own;

Primary (for a 1.32 gallon carboy)
- 3 lbs Honey
- 1 1/2 lbs Blackberries
- 3 tbsp Black Tea
- 1 Packet K1-V1116 yeast
- 1/2 tsp pectic enzyme
- 1/2 tsp Fermaid-O Nutrient
- ~1 Gallon Spring water

Secondary
- Stabilize with Campden tablet, then 24hrs later Potassium Sorbate
- Backsweeten with ~1 3/4 cups of honey

With the above recipe you should start with about a 1.100 gravity and hit around 13-14% ABV which gives you room to backsweeten while keeping the mead above 10%. For the honey Costco Kirkland brand is great, cheapest per oz but still really good. For the blackberries I used the frozen great value brand from cub, using frozen helps with sanitization which you mentioned as a concern. the Black tea is to add tannins and it was just a fruity loose-leaf black tea I had lying around.

For newbie related things I had to learn (especially with this first batch):
- I made this before I knew about Tosna, so I didn't do staggered nutrient additions, after trying it on my next batch I would recommend it.
- I lost a lot of mead from the first batch trying to rack to a different vessel so I could wash my nice carboy and put the mead back in there, Having a second carboy of the same size for racking is a requirement at least for me going forward.
- When backsweetening I got a tip that made it a lot easier for me, heat an equal amount of water to the honey you want to add (i used my electric kettle), stir them together in a separate container (like a measuring cup) then add that to the mead. Made combining the honey and mead wayyyyyy easier

 

[bernardsmith]

Curious about the amount of honey you are considering for backsweetening. One cup of honey supposedly weighs 12 oz and 3.4 of a cup will then weigh 9 oz . You plan on adding 21 oz of honey (in wine making and cooking - despite the use of "cups" and "spoons" in the US, a far more accurate approach uses weight (lbs or kg). If one pound of honey dissolved in water to make 1 US gallon increases the gravity of water (from 1.000) to 1.035, then 21 oz will increase the gravity to about 1.055. And 55 points of sweetness is VERY sweet - desert wine sweet. You may want to bench test your mead to determine how sweet you want it, given its ABV, acidity and tannic levels.

 

[beren]

There’s a really good mead discord if you want to chat with people, some content producers also hang out there. There’s a really great website called meadtools.com. That can give you nutrients schedules, and things like that.

I think the current wisdom is that almost all yeast can ferment pure sugar up to about the same alcohol percentage, and with some techniques, you can get it slightly higher.

 

[Lucas Aubergine]

Where you haven't made anything in 6 years, I would suggest making a one gallon batch in a two gallon food grade bucket, (picture of the label that should be on the bucket attatched)available @ both Home Depot or Lowes, (ironically in the paint section).
Raw honey is expensive, too expensive to put 15 lbs into a bucket & have it not be good or worse, not drinkable.

A word of caution with strawberries, they're known for throwing off flavors resembling band-aid or plastic when used for too long in primary.

Blackberry & strawberry require copious amounts of fruit to achieve the fruity kind of drink you're looking to make.
I have found the formula that works well for me to achieve this type of flavor is 6 lbs of fruit/gallon of must. 1/3 of the total weight in primary, then pulled when the fruit loses its color & goes to mush, (typically around day 7), rack to a clean vessel, stabilize with potassium metabisulfate and potassium sorbate, wait 24 hrs., then add the remaining 4 lbs of fruit for 7-10 days, checking daily for tannic values after day 7. Once the fruit has lost it's color, you're basically extracting tannins from the seeds and skins, which can qickly overwhelm if not checked daily.
The chemicals to stabilize are potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfate. Stabilizing is key to flavor retention & to prevent any viable yeast from reproducing.

Brewing in a bucket is key here. Also, a brew bag is essential for cutting back on racking losses.
Equally important is to make sure you punch down the fruit & make sure it stays wet twice a day until you remove it. Once it starts to dry, it will want to grow mold...bad for mead.

As @madscient mentioned, TOSNA 2.0 or 3.0 works wonders for making a much better mead. Good sanitization practices are a no brainer for reducing the risk of introducing infection. StarSan is my preferred sanitizer, but it's not a cleaner. It's just a food grade sanitizer. There are others but some are only cleaners, different than a sanitizer.
The plastic airlocks start to degrade/ breakdown after several years, just keep an eye on them for any visible leaks of cracks. If you do wind up having to replace them, you can get most everything brew related you need on Amazon nowadays.


I hope this helps you. Welcome back to the community. If you need some links to any equipment, I have several, just ask.
Happy meading

Thanks for all the advice. I did end up doing a 1 gallon batch to test my recipe and to try out newer methods I didn't try when I first started. It's clearing up now but it seems the benozate slows down hard once the mead is about 2/3rds cleared. Cloud of particulates is slowly sinking but it'll likely be another week before I can rack.

I ended up using a strawberry syrup using the korean method of Cheong (Leaving fruit in an equal weighted amount of sugar and leaving in the fridge for liquids to be pulled out into the sugar.). I added some lemon and lime as well and honestly the syrup is the highlight of this experiment I've done it's amazing.

The mead has a 15% ABV after using around 4.5lb of honey and the L-D7 (I think) yeast. It's really powerful the alcohol flavor, burns a bit like whiskey but with time that'll mellow out. You can taste the sweet strawberry thanks to the backsweetening I did with the syrup. I highly recommend doing this with mead over putting solid fruit. 10lb of Strawberries netted me about 5-6 32oz jars of syrup and only costed around $50. Thats enough to flavor a lot of mead.

All in all I'm happy with the product and I hope to move up to a 5 gallon batch next so it's ready for summer. Then I'm likely to try a Maple Syrup Mead for the fall and winter. I'll be visiting here often for advice. Thank you again!

 

[Lucas Aubergine]

The flavor and aroma of berries and other fruit is lost in the fermentation process. See my answer above. I've been there & done that with all kinds of fruit. You will be way more satisfied if you add flavors after fermentation is complete.

What i ended up doing was making a Cheong, a korean method of fermenting berries into a flavorful syrup. However I didn't let it ferment I just let it turn into a very frangrant and flavorful syrup. I highly suggest it as a way of back sweetening a batch of mead after fermentation seriously!

 

[Lucas Aubergine]

Rather than simply macerate the fruit on sugar, you might consider first, freezing the fruit hard, then allowing it to thaw. The ice crystals in the fruit will tear apart cell walls and the amount of juice that you can extract will be far more easily extracted. You MIGHT want to then make an "extract" from the fruit, by macerating them not on sugar but in say, vodka. you would add this extract AFTER you finished fermenting the honey and that would preserve the flavors by not allowing the CO2 produced by the yeast to blow off the flavors and aromas. Alternatively, you could add the fruit to the secondary. This has two advantages. The first is that the yeast are not going to be as vigorous in the secondary (you will have racked many off) and you are now asking the alcohol to extract flavors and not water (the primary)

I'll have to give this method a try eventually but the Cheong syrup I made seemed to work extremely well. The only thing I'd change is adding more lemon and lime to increase the sour/bitter notes since the sweetness from the sugar and strawberries is way too overpowering if you're not careful, you can smell and faintly taste the lemon and lime though and if I perfect it I think it'll be great.

 

[Lucas Aubergine]

There’s a really good mead discord if you want to chat with people, some content producers also hang out there. There’s a really great website called meadtools.com. That can give you nutrients schedules, and things like that.

I think the current wisdom is that almost all yeast can ferment pure sugar up to about the same alcohol percentage, and with some techniques, you can get it slightly higher.

Whats this discord called if you don't mind me asking?

 

[beren]

The Mead Hall, it was in the Reddit wiki or somewhere. https://discord.com/invite/the-mead-hall-627621875408961537

 

[keystonehb]

StarSan is my preferred sanitizer, but it's not a cleaner. It's just a food grade sanitizer. There are others but some are only cleaners, different than a sanitizer.

+1 to this, you mentioned earlier that you thought you had a problem sanitizing, star San is super easy to use. Your equipment does not need to soak just remaining wet for a minute or so can do the trick. Plus you can store it in spray bottles for a couple weeks for easy spot sanitation.

Also as a personal preference I recommend to people to shoot for 9-12% abv. It’s a good balance of alcohol while not being too strong that you lose subtle notes

 

[MightyMosin]

you mentioned earlier that you thought you had a problem sanitizing, star San is super easy to use. Your equipment does not need to soak just remaining wet for a minute or so can do the trick.

Iodophor also works well and doesn't foam, which is nice if you are using a keg/carboy cleaner. I alternate, periodically, between Iodophor and Star-San so that I am not promoting a bacteria getting resistant to one or the other

 

[Maylar]

Also as a personal preference I recommend to people to shoot for 9-12% abv. It’s a good balance of alcohol while not being too strong that you lose subtle notes

+1 on that. It's also far easier to do final sweetness or acid adjustments if your nose isn't burning from alcohol.

 

[beren]

Not sure that things can get resistant to either of them. They are both pretty strong.

 

[MightyMosin]

I hear you, but anti-biotics are pretty strong and its amazing what selective pressure can force as a response.

 

[beren]

Those are not antibiotics.

 

[MightyMosin]

But they are an analogy