simple mead with fruit

[blueLion]

a primitive wild ferment

1.get raw honey, water [not tap], fruit [optional]
2.put fruit in gallon jar [or larger]
[if using dried herbs, make a tea then pour it with herbs into jar, let cool to room temp]
3.combine ~1 part honey with ~4 parts water [more or less]
4.pour honey water over fruit
5.stir well & cover jar with cloth
6.stir well at least once a day [unless ferment is very active]
7.when ferment slows down after about a week, decant & age in bottles or drink green mead
[burp bottles to prevent excessive build up of pressure, or use an air lock]

options: foraged fruit & water, root veggies & herbs, save yeast at bottom of jar/bottle to jump start new batch

supplies: gallon pickle jars, twine or rubber band [to fix cloth to jar], ladle, funnel, strainer, grolsch flip top or kombucha bottles

 

[RPh_Guy]

2.put fruit in gallon jar [or larger]

I'm not so sure you can simply a melomel to such a degree. The amount of fruit, and how you process it, can have a tremendous effect on the product. Same goes for "herbs". It's not really one-size-fits-all for ingredients or whatever you feel like throwing into the fermentation vessel.

I'd caution anyone trying to follow such a generic recipe. There are so many thing that can go wrong.

 

[madscientist451]

No yeast nutrient? No go-ferm when rehydrating yeast?
Since I've been using the TONSA SNA method my mead has really improved.
Sure, you can keep things simple, but its really not that hard to make good mead if you follow a few easy steps.

 

[pdhirsch]

I did something very roughly similar a few years ago and it turned out well. I had a few small plastic bottles of apple juice in the back of the fridge, leftover from backsweetening cyser. They had been there for a while and I had no immediate plans to make more cyser, so I decided to drink them.

I noticed a whoosh! sound when I opened one of the bottles. Evidently it was starting to ferment, inoculated with who knows what yeast that it picked up who knows where. I was curious, so I bought a half-gallon jug of preservative-free apple juice from the grocery store. I poured off some juice from the jug to make room, and then I poured the small bottle of fermenting juice into the jug. I put a rubber stopper with airlock on the jug and sat it in the corner of the basement (ambient temp about 64 degrees according to my notes), and it slowly bubbled away for about a month. No other nutrients or commercial yeast or anything. (Course this was becoming hard cider not mead, and apple juice has significantly more nutrients than honey water does).

Anyway, it fermented down from 1.042 to 1.000, so it was about 5.6% ABV at the end. The taste was quite acceptable for such a simple process -- very apple-y but still very drinkable. We just poured it directly from the fermentation jug into glasses when we drank it, rather than bottling it -- there was only a half gallon so it didn't last long.

I wonder what would have happened if I had added a pound or so of honey to that apple juice. I've also thought about mashing up some raw windfall apples (there are several apple trees in my neighborhood) and letting them sit in an open pot to ferment, then pouring off the juice (presumably converted to hard cider) after a month or so.

I think it would be a lot easier to do this kind of thing with fruit juice, or fruit juice plus a small to moderate amount of honey rather than honey water alone, specifically because of the nutrient situation.