Some help with mead, please

[saneus]

Hello everyone,

I posted this in the beginner's forum as well, although I am not, strictly speaking, a new brewer. I've made a few 5-gallon batches in my Poland Spring water jugs, and had to leave it alone for a while for school. Now that I'm looking to restart, I'd like to put some of my practices under this forum's scrutiny to refine my process, which I have become rusty at.

1. My airlock is a clear plastic tube sealed onto the top of the Poland Spring glass bottle. I then clamp the end of this tube into a pot of water, so that it should only allow CO2 to escape without letting air in. Besides the fact that this is not a properly manufactured airlock - is there anything wrong with this setup? Is there any other easily jerry-rigged airlock that could do better? And yes, I understand that my bottles will leak minute amounts of oxygen into my drink - I've come to terms with this

2. To cut down on costs, I use several 5-lb bottles of honey from the local low-grade supermarket per batch. They are store-brand. My understanding has consistently been to boil the hell out of this honey (while stirring to prevent caramelization) to scum off waxes and preservatives and chemicals and etc... With honey of this sort, would there be any advantage to NOT boiling the hell out of it? Does anyone know of a different, cheap source of higher-quality honey in NYC?

3. I only use recipes for water-honey ratios, as well as to generally understand how much of a particular ingredient might be appropriate in a 5-gallon batch. I've generally experimented with a wide array of different spices, putting no less than 10 of my choice into any batch I make. I've lately started noticing that mead (and wine recipes in general) ask for a rather simple blend of spices, asking for no more than 3 or 4 different types. Is there a disadvantage to using a broader mix? Chemical interactions I should avoid?

4. I am intrigued by the thought of experimenting with fruit-flavored meads, but do not understand the recipe/portion ratios behind them. By how much should I decrease the amount of honey in my wort if I am adding fruit sugars? Should I peel them? How much fruit should I add? What if the fruit is not the sweetest? I read in one place that freezing a fruit to break up its cell walls may improve the taste in the final product, but also that exposing the juices in the fruit to oxygen too early will oxidize the juices. I am stoopid at chemistry, and so I cannot make a judgment on my own in this case.

Thank you very much, everyone! I am looking to get back into brewing, and want to start on a better foot, as I am aware that my current setup is sub-par. I will improve it when my money allows me to.

 

[Kauai_Kahuna]

1. That is what most of us call a blow off tube, and is fine for primary fermentation. Once it is no longer pushing out Co2, you want a better complete seal via a good bung and air lock. They are cheap, so buy some!

2. Honey is getting very expensive, but I make a lot of meads from store bought mass honey. Most likely they will not win any awards, but they still taste really good. If they are sealed, you don't need to boil the honey, boiling drives off a lot of the aroma and delicate flavours of honey.
I just dump them into the pale add water, nutrients, etc, pitch yeast and it goes well.
Can't help with cheap prices locally, I just keep my eyes open for good prices.

3. I rarely add spices to my meads. I'm just kind of set in my ways.
If you want to experiment, I would add spices after everything is fermented, rack into some 1 gallon jugs and spice.

4. Same answer, until you have a good idea of what you like, and then step it up to a full 5 gallon batch. Some people always add the fruit in the primary. I do also, but after primary fermentation has slowed to a crawl, then I add the fruit for a week or so, then rack it off to secondary.

Hope this helps.

 

[TheRabidKumquat]

2) Buying in bulk would be cheaper than multiple 5# jars. If you can get honey straight from the apiary, it will most likely be cheaper per pound than at a store, and will be of a greater quality than the store bought stuff. Check out honeylocator.com

Like Kahuna said, you don't need to boil the honey. It's safe, and you'll lose some nuances in the honey. The store bought stuff is most likely pasteurized anyways. Boiling the raw honey defeats the purpose of buying quality, raw honey.

3) I would think that having a bunch of spices in the mix might unbalance the final product. Or, at least, you might not be able to detect all of the ingredients.


4) Adding fruit adds water in addition to adding more fermentable sugars. I usually don't change the amount of honey I add when I'm making a melomel (fruit mead). But I will usually make a larger volume of must, since the fruit muck will cause me to lose some volume during racking. How much fruit you add, and when, is up to you, and will depend on how much of a presence you want from the fruit.
I usually will do the freeze, thaw, and mash up method. Mash the fruit in the bag it's stored in just before pitching, if you're worried about oxidizing the juice.

Be sure to leave yourself a decent enough headspace if putting fruit in primary, and be sure to break up the fruit cap a few times a day. Unless, of course, you enjoy cleaning ceilings, walls, floors, etc. The cap will trap in the CO2, and if you don't break it up to allow the gas to escape it will build up and BOOM.

1) If you are worried about oxidizing your fruit, why do you seem "content" to risk allowing your entire batch to be exposed to oxygen?? Buying a better bottle or two, or glass carboys, a couple stoppers, a few airlocks, and maybe a primary bucket (especially if making melomels) might seem like a bit of money, but those won't allow oxygen to seep in if sealed right. I've used 5 gallon water jugs, but only for brief aging. If I'm going to age anything longer than a month, I use either a glass carboy or better bottle.

Also, you might want to pick up a hydrometer. It's invaluable and you can recreate batches a lot more accurately than lbs/gallons. Honey's sugar content will vary, so 3# this year might give you a different specific gravity than 3# 2 years ago. You'll also be able to track the progress of your fermentation, just how much alcohol is in your brew, how much sugars the fruit did contribute, and you'll know if you run into troubles during fermentation.

 

[newbee]

Hi Saneus,

No expertise to offer on the mead-making process, but some on the honey (as a beekeeper) =). If what you bought is 100 per cent honey, it won't contain perservatives or (artificial) chemicals - honey is of course a complex chemical mix in its own right, as is our much beloved C2H5OH. Honey is the only natural foodstuff that won't degrade in its original state, so it just doesn't need any extra preservatives etc. That goes for ordinary blended honey as well as for top-grade beekeepers' honeys. As Kahuna and Kumquat say here, though, you'll get much more interesting flavours and aromas from the latter as it shouldn't have been heat-treated (pasteurised). As for wax, if there are the tiniest elements of wax left in it'll just float to the surface to be filtered off later in the fermentation process. Beeswax is absolutely harmless, so no worries about boiling the hell out of it (all that does is wax-coat your cookware - bleugh!)

Now I have to add a word of caution, because of what I know from fellow beekeepers in the US about problems with honey labelling laws and imports. On my side of the pond nothing can be labelled as honey if it's got any added ingredients and some US states take the same (sensible!) view. However, I know there's an ongoing problem with stuff getting into the US adulterated with cheap syrups and being labelled as honey. So perhaps the very cheap stuff should be treated as 'possibly-not-real-honey' and avoided for the purposes of mead-making. If it's got sugar in it, it'll certainly ferment, but if those sugars weren't processed by bees in the first place, your end result won't be mead.
Suddenly the labelling laws I so often curse because of all the info I have to supply seem to make better sense...

 

[Fletch78]

newbee, do you know of any "household" ways to tell if the honey is pure or syruped? I read on Gotmead that you can put it in the refrigerator and if it crystalizes, it's pure. However, of several varieties I have, only one crystallized in this fashion (also the cheapest brand, surprisingly.) Do you know of any other methods of testing? Thanks!

 

[saneus]

Thanks newbee, that's pretty interesting. My stuff is cheap, but I don't think it's cheap enough to be that adulterated stuff, which I've encountered as well. However, I too wonder if there's some sort of method to test it at home.

As for everyone else - thanks for all the help! The first thing I intend to do once I have some money on the side is to get glass carboys. Until then, I will take all of this advice about fruit meads into consideration. Thanks!