An Adventure into Mead

For a while I've been thinking about mead. Now I don't actually drink so you may be thinking why the hell is she thinking of making mead? If you didn't already know I'm a beekeeper and I enter my honey into local and county honey shows, this means you always end up with random jars you've kept 'for best'. You also tend to top up your own jar of honey when bottling which is normally a mix of different batches and never looks it's best as it has bubbles, bits of wax and sets funny. Anyway I've ended up with a few of these jars and some are more than a couple of years old, even though honey doesn't really 'go off' it does degrade so they're not sellable, I was thinking what do I do with them and then it struck me- mead! In making a batch I'll not only put my random jars to good use I'll also have mead to enter into this years honey show, or next years as apparently it gets better with age!

I then set out on a google expedition to find out what I needed and how to do it and there is a LOT of information out there! There is also many different versions of mead- not only is there dry and sweet, there's Cyser, Hydromel, Metheglin, Hippocras, long mead, quick mead sparkling mead, oaked mead- honestly the list goes on forever. The saying 'ask 3 beekeepers a question you'll get 5 answers' also seems true of mead makers, most likely as I suspect most mead makers are beekeepers! I decided on a sweet mead- a fairly simple recipe of honey, yeast and water so surely not much can go wrong?! 

I also decided I didn't want to make gallons of the stuff, especially on the first try, so eventually found a small batch American recipe. I then went to find a mead yeast, I nearly gave up at this point- there are SO many recommendations literally millions and none of them have straight forward names they're all letters and numbers, there's lots of words I didn't understand nor really had the want to! I then stumbled across what looked like a winner Mangrove Jack's Mead yeast for all mead types- BINGO that sounds like my sort of style. I purchased the yeast along with 2 plastic demijohns with airlocks from Brew2Bottle (who I highly recommend- they're reasonably priced and arrived super quick and really well packaged).

all the equipment ready to go and my odd jars of honey

So then I set about making it, I put filtered water on the stove, added the honey and I think I simmered it for around 30mins. I scooped the 'scum' off the top and then let it cool for a while. I then aded it to the demijohn and added the yeast, shook it up and added the air lock. Simple.

adding the honey to the warm water

the 'scum' that rises to the surface

the finished mead ready to go into the demijohn

It started bubbling within 24hours and is still bubbling away 4 weeks later. I have no idea how often it should bubble but it's around every minute and a half but if I listen I can here it fizzing away constatnly so hopefully it's working. It's sitting in my cupboard, was originally next to my designer handbags but I've moved it as I was worried of potential mead explosions (which I don't think will happen now!). I'm going to leave it for around 6/7 weeks, if it's still fizzing I'll pop it in the fridge to kill the yeast. I don;t actually know what I have to do then so I'll google that later!