One of the great things about the internet is the ease that everyone is able to get in touch with one another. In my search for other mead makers showing off their inventiveness and passion for mead, I have found Will Kalif. His website on Mead Making is http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/index.htm and if you are interested in all things medieval, his blog http://www.castlefiction.com/heroicdreams/ is a great source. There are some really good articles and loads of information on his mead making site. Both sites are on my blogroll on the bottom right of my website.

However, what really sets Will’s stuff apart are his instructional videos. His YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/epicfantasy?blend=1), has good mead making video, among others.  There are other cool things that Will has created that have to do with medieval weaporny, etc. However, what really caught my attention was his video on making a mead inside a coconut. I never thought about using anything other than my buckets and carboys. This is truly a cool idea. I have posted the video below.

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Posted by admin on October 27th, 2009 :: Filed under Mead, meadmaking

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As I have stated before, I started homebrewing with beer. I strictly brewed beer for over a year. I enjoyed the process, the multitude of ingredients, combination of ingredients, and how it was cheaper to brew a huge batch of quality beer for less than picking it up in the grocery store. I had many batches turn south for one reason or another, but from reading and testing, less batches had to be thrown out. There really is nothing worst than dumping 5 gallons of beer because of your mistakes. I started with extract brewing and moved up to partial mash brewing (grain heavy). The fact that I was a homebrewer first makes more sense as the store continues.

About a year into homebrewing, Ben mentioned the ease of making mead. A fan of literature, especially of Norse Mythology, I knew of the existence of mead, but never saw it in stores. Admittedly, I did not seek it out with gusto, but that it was a common drink of yesteryear, I knew. Ben purchased about  4 to 5 lbs of local honey, I had some ale strand of yeast lying around (I can’t even remember the exact strand), and there were those buckets. I don’t think we boiled the honey at all, but I can’t recall all the steps, as I was not taking careful notes of my procedures and ingredients at the time.

So, we mixed the ingredients together in one our the homebrewing 6 gallon buckets and let it sit for 2 weeks. . . Ellipses to signify the first major mistake. I know you are wondering why this is the first mistake. I was using an ale strand of yeast that I did not create a starter with to have an entire civilization of yeast active before pitching, and I did not have any nutrients or energizers when pitching the yeast. Therefore, it would take the yeast longer to become active, and the yeast would not finish processing all of the sugars into alcohol after 2 weeks. I believe the only reason that any of the sugar was processed is that the yeast was White Labs and had enough little guys to get the process moving, and the relative low amount of honey to process did not hurt. These are just conjectures, and I may be wrong.

Two weeks after first pitching the yeast, we bottle the mead. Being homebrewers, we decided that a little fizzle in our meadizzle was appropriate. I went there and I’m staying there. The same amount of corn sugar that we used to carbonate the beer was used to carbonate the mead . . . Here is where all the bad things converged and became an explosive, messy concoction. All my homebrewing beers (a.k.a. bottles and bottles of beer) was stored in the pantry of my apartment.

After about a week or two ( the exact time eludes me), my roommate at the time went into the pantry to retrieve some morsel of food, and the second he closed the door there was a muffled “pop” followed immediately by the sound of shattering glass and something hitting the pantry door from the inside. Carefully opening the pantry, a mead bottle had shattered. We quickly closed it and another bottle shattered. Over the course of the next few months (could have been longer), our pantry had became a game Russian Roulette with mead bottles when something was desired from the pantry. It did enhance horror movies. Also, there was a sweet, pungent, sticky smell that emitted from the pantry.

More explanations:

Carbonating a fermented beverage is done by allowing the residual yeast to create carbon dioxide in an air  tight container. When filling bottles of homebrewed beer, a space is left to give the gas some room, otherwise it will create enough tension to pop the top of bottles and sometimes explode, although this is rare. How did I unwittingly create Mead Bombs?

1. As stated, I didn’t let the yeast finish fermenting.

2. Adding the same amount of corn sugar for carbonation of mead.  So there was already a lot of sugar left from the honey from my quick fermenting process, and adding a lot more gave each bottle a lot of sugar to consume. This created an over abundance of carbon dioxide, which created over pressurized bottles and that lead to explosivo.

That was a fun trip down memory lane.

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Posted by admin on October 12th, 2009 :: Filed under homebrewing, meadmaking, yeast

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This post is an update to the Applenoon Delight journey.

I have been away for awhile, although many things have been happening. There is another post that I am working on that was suppose to be finished prior to this post, but life happens. It will be forthcoming in the very near future. For now, Applenoon Delight has completed the hard part- it is a mead! It finished fermenting after 2 weeks. Sometimes I allow for the fermentation to occur a little longer, but I felt with the minimal “bubbles” from the airlock, and my busy schedule the time was right to allow the mead to age.

So the Applenoon Delight has been moved to the secondary fermenter. First, you can see that the honey at the bottom of the carboy has been “eaten” by the yeast. I was unsure are of what would occur since I did not mix the apple juice and honey together well.

I first cleaned out the carboy that is the secondary fermenter very well. I also cleaned the racking cane, tubing, funnel, spoon, rubber stopper, honey jug. You may be thinking, “Rob, why are you cleaning some much stuff to move the mead from one container to another.” Glad you asked, I am making another 6 gallons of Applenoon Delight with the same yeast. Reusing yeast is a way to save on cost, and since you are sanitizing might as well sanitize enough equipment to make more mead. The important pieces of equipment here are the racking cane and tubing.

The racking cane is a hard piece of plastic that you attach tubing to for easy transferring of mead from one place to another. In the past I have used an auto-siphoning starter, but over the years it was lost, stolen, destroyed, pooped on (one of these is true), so I have reverted back to using a regular racking cane. Some people just use tubing and curl it slightly to minimize transferring of sediment. I prefer the control of the racking cane. I slightly tilt the primary fermenter to have all the mead on one side was I siphon it out towards the end of the process.

You can see in this picture that I have placed the primary fermenter higher than the secondary. Gravity is your friend in this endeavor. Once the flow is started, gravity does the rest with ease. You do not want the flow to stop and start, creating air pockets and bubbles. Depending on the length of tubing you need to have it full stretched out, no “u” shapes in the tubing from primary to secondary. The tubing in the secondary fermenter needs to be placed at the very bottom or along the side of the carboy because you do not want to aerate the mead. It has finished fermenting, and some yeast will travel with it; remember yeast needs oxygen to help with the conversion process, so minimal aerating is a must. To start the siphoning I use the “sucking” process (I have no idea if they refer to this process as such, but overtly homosexual writing makes me giggle like a 10 year old boy). I suck on the end of the tubing to start the siphoning process. Here you can see me cleaning my mouth of bacterial, so as not to contaminate the mead.

In this picture I have taken a little and poured it into a glass. It had a very warm, alcoholic taste to it, but underneath I could taste the beginning of a very tasty Cyser. Part 2 will follow with the reuse of the yeast.

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Posted by admin on August 4th, 2009 :: Filed under Applenoon Delight, Cyser, Mead, meadmaking

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