My First Mead

[Bobbo404]

I made a mead off a youtube video.
I know.
But after, probably watching the video too many times to admit, i carefully diagnosing the recipe and even briefly chatted to the guy who made the video, i have made it!
Took me a few weeks to get the ingredients from a few different places. I wanted to go local with my honey, but the expense seems to quickly rise when looking in that direction. I hope next time i can use local honey. Also, maybe trying to buy honey in the late winter/soon-to-be-spring in Wisconsin is a bad time to buy it. The OG came out to exactly what i was going for, 1.042 on the head! I got a first little taste of it when taking the OG, Super excited to see what it becomes!

Im thinking next time i want to make the mead again but with a 2nd fermentation and add blueberry! But i try not to get a head of myself.

 

[Dan O]

I made a mead off a youtube video.
I know.
But after, probably watching the video too many times to admit, i carefully diagnosing the recipe and even briefly chatted to the guy who made the video, i have made it!
Took me a few weeks to get the ingredients from a few different places. I wanted to go local with my honey, but the expense seems to quickly rise when looking in that direction. I hope next time i can use local honey. Also, maybe trying to buy honey in the late winter/soon-to-be-spring in Wisconsin is a bad time to buy it. The OG came out to exactly what i was going for, 1.042 on the head! I got a first little taste of it when taking the OG, Super excited to see what it becomes!

Im thinking next time i want to make the mead again but with a 2nd fermentation and add blueberry! But i try not to get a head of myself.

Welcome to the community....& the most addictive hobby on the planet! . You say your OG was 1.042?
What is the batch size?
How much honey did you use?
Honey gives roughly 35 points of sugars, per pound, per gallon of must. Example...3 lbs of honey (3×.035=.105), so your SG for 1 gallon would be 1.105.
For an OG of 1.042, that would imply you put in 1.2 lbs of honey. Is this correct? Are you looking for a low ABV mead? Could you have put in 4 lbs of honey & misread the hydrometer?

On the note of honey. Yes, when you buy it a pound @ a time, it can be very expensive. Most apiaries (bee keepers) will sell bulk honey for a discounted price & while that purchase will be more money spent, you get a bigger discount on the price per pound of honey. Once you buy bulk, you don't go back.. Besides, once you start making mead, you're going to go through a lot of honey anyway . You'd be surprised how fast a 60 lb (5 gallon bucket) disappears.
Hope this helps.
Happy meading
This is my current...ahem...predicament

 

[Bobbo404]

Im doing a 5 gallon batch and i used 6 pounds of honey. Im pretty sure its supposed to be a low abv recipe. This is my 3rd homebrew. So far, very addicting! haha. Next i have a imperial red ale to brew, but if i fall in love with this mead im sure i will start looking for a large quantity of honey hahaha.

 

[bernardsmith]

The thing about mead is that honey performs two very different roles. One role is in providing the fermentable sugars for the fermentation. Six pounds of honey dissolved to make 5 gallons of must means that you are using 1.2 lbs of honey per gallon and as your figures suggest the SG is likely to be around 1.042 (35 points from 1 lb and 7 points from the 1/5 of a lb) .
The second role honey plays is the role of providing flavor. If you make meads with fruit (melomels) or herbs /spices (metheglins) then some or much of the flavor is going to come from the fruit or herbs. But if you are making a traditional mead (using only honey, water, yeast and nutrients) then all the flavor is to come from the honey ... and if you dilute (AKA dissolve) 6 lbs of honey to make 5 gallons of mead you really have very little flavor producing material (water does not have a great flavor profile in a wine). Hydromels (low alcohol or short meads as they are sometimes called) can be delightful but often you need to find a very flavor-rich honey OR you may need to back sweeten the mead with a flavor-rich honey OR you might want to carbonate the mead so that it resembles an alcoholic seltzer - with the carbon dioxide bubbles exploding the flavor molecules on your tongue.
As Dan O suggests many mead makers might choose to use about 2.5 - 3 lbs of honey for each gallon of mead. And not all flavor-rich honey costs a mortgage. Your supermarket might carry orange blossom honey and that varietal is not a spear carrier. It can hold the spotlight no problem. Clover or wild flower tend to be great vehicles for other flavors (in my opinion) and buckwheat can either be delightful (west coast) or else taste like garden soil (east coast): the very first mead I ever made was buckwheat (east coast) and I am still too afraid to try that honey again...