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The Assembly of The Elder Troth would like to welcome you to our website. Please click on the links to the left to enter the relevant area of our site. Heil and welcome to the Articles section of the Assembly of The Elder Troth website. Here you can find items written by many wide and varied folk. The idea is to provide a venue for discussion, debate and education amongst the folk by giving people an individual flavour to the information provided. Every article here is the work of its' author. Copyright rests with the Author, reproduction is prohibited without the authors permission. Mead Making Basics - by Tyrvald Bjornganga I don't intend to try and impart every tiniest morsel of information there is about mead making here, but I do hope to give folks enough to get started on their own brewing. I do not profess to be a master of this craft, or art, for it definitely isn't a science, but I have had a few years experience, and some rave reviews to the brews I've made. Not every brew will turn out perfect, but there is an old saying that applies to mead making… "Time cures all ills" Never forget that cat-pee today could be liquid gold in a year's time! I am very much against the practice of adding chemicals to mead. Many folk I know add yeast nutrients to get their brew going, then other chemicals to kill of the yeast, then yet more chemicals to make it drop clear rather than age it. I'm dead set against this, as each and every one of these chemicals detracts from the taste of such a wonderfully natural brew. What is mead? Mead is an ancient alcoholic drink made from fermented honey and water. Sounds pretty simple huh? Well I would hazard a guess and say that it probably was a pretty simple beginning for mead. Imagine Thog had a half-full water skin when he came across some wild bees and after a few stings got himself to their honey. Not having anything to put it in he drained it into his water skin. The mix of honey and water somewhere along the way picks up some wild yeast strain and bingo…Thog's water skin is slowly expanding…and the stuff tastes great! Thog leaves it for the rest of the trip home and shares it around and everyone goes all silly. And they want more. After several experiments at making cat's piss, Master Brewer Thog hits the spot with another success and the world's first meadery is off and running! So at it's most basic, mead is diluted honey, which has been fermented. There are literally millions of permutations to the basic idea of honey plus water plus yeast plus time equals mead. And everyone makes it differently. Myself, I prefer to avoid adding anything to my meads to make them clearer or speed up or slow down fermentation. I heartily recommend the "time cures all ills" approach to making mead. Mead is NOT like brewing standard home brew beers and ales. Mead takes time, and quite frankly the longer the better. It's not uncommon to have a brew that looks and smells awful at its first racking, tastes awful at its second racking and is one step away from going down the toilet…yet leave it for a few months or even a year…and it's liquid gold! Different types of mead Some of the most common variations on mead area as simple as adding a few spices to the brew. Or even a mixture of herbs and spices. Others use various other ingredients to provide taste, colour and sugars for the yeast to eat. Things like berries, fruit mash, or fruit juices and the like are all proven and perfectly acceptable additions to a mead brew. Different types of mead have earned so many different names over the centuries that they are almost impossible to classify. Such names as Cyser, Pyment, Metheglin, Medeglin, Meddlings, Mythogel, Melomel, Mytomel, are all used for variations on the basic theme of mead. One of the easiest to produce however is spiced mead. It simply involves adding various spices to the brew as it is being prepared. Drinking Mead Various types of mead can be drunk either warmed up, chilled or at room temperature. Various traditions point to mead being mulled or heated before being drunk. I can heartily recommend this. Warming a spiced mead will enhance the taste of the spices, chilling it will enhance its sweetness, and at room temperature it will taste of a blend of both. Buying Mead Mead is commercially available in Australia. It is made by at least two commercial meaderies in South Australia. Chateau Dorrien in Tanunda, SA, manufactures the "Martin's Mead" product lines. They produce several different types of mead, which are all quite drinkable. Maxwell's Mead in McLaren Vale, SA, produce their Maxwell's range of meads including "Honey", "Spiced" and "Liqueur" varieties, all of which are perfectly acceptable. Meads are not always easy to find at your local bottle shop though. In the area I live n there is only one liquor shop which stocks it. You may have to ask them to order it in for you and may even have to buy it by the case. More reason to make your own, I say! What You Will Need Ok, you've been convinced now to join with Thog and Sons Meadery and become a mead brewer. What do you need to get started? Well we have a lot of advantages over Thog and his waterskin made out of a goat's stomach…but the basics are still the same. Let's first have a look at the equipment we'll need…below is a table showing most of the equipment needed and some of the alternatives…
Now that you have the basic equipment you are ready to look at making your mead. You are going to need some basic ingredients. These are fairly easy to come by and the honey itself is the only part that is going to be expensive. Lets go through them… Honey Honey, yep, made by bees, is available at your local supermarket in a blended and purified and homogenized and pasteurized and Loki-knows-what-else-erized form. And really, it's bloody expensive to go and buy 60 or more little jars of the stuff! So have a look through your local yellow pages and see if there are any places that deal in bulk quantities, or even get in touch directly with beekeepers - there's a yellow pages section for them! I get my honey from a bulk distributor who acts as an agent for the beekeepers. The advantages here are threefold.
On average at the time of writing honey is selling in bulk for around $4-$5 per kilo depending on type. Some of the more exotic honeys are over $8 per kilo. Sticking with your basics, such as a garden blend, clover, blue gum, or Lucerne Honey should keep costs down. Water Water is important here. Where as Thog has to put up with what ever is in the local water hole or river, we don't. I strongly recommend using spring water. There's so much less chemical crap in it - unlike Thog's water hole, which may well have mammoth crap in it! The water you use will reflect on the taste of the finished product. I often wait till the supermarkets have the 10 litre casks of spring water on special and grab them. Also our local South Australian brewery has a purified spring water dispensing station where you can take your own container and buy by the litre, I think it's about $0.20 per litre. There always seems to be a queue of home brewers lined up so it must be ok. I have also noticed similar machines in service stations…though I haven't tried them yet. Spices and Herbs Ok, think about this…How much is too much really? Well I can attest that 40 grams was too much ground cloves into a 28 litre brew. The taste and smell was over powering. It had to be racked a second time, and I added 20 grams of ground cinnamon and about 6 cinnamon sticks, plus about 5 grams of nutmeg. A month later I was considering tipping it down the loo…but remembering my own advice, I left it for a few more months and WOW! It came out great! So think, you can always vary your recipe, there's nothing wrong with experimenting with herbs and spices, just remember to write down what you did incase it works and you want to do it again! Your herbs and spices are easily obtainable from the local supermarket. Best value for money is to go for the ones that are simply in the little heat sealed sachets. They are a lot more economical to buy than the jars. You are paying for a thin piece of plastic and it's contents by weight not a glass jar or other heavy container and its contents by weight. The quality of the herbs and spices I've bought in the plastic bags is as good as the more expensive ones…and often they are fresher as there is a higher turn over. Yeast Ah the engines of mead making! The microscopic V8's of alcoholic beverage production! Their job is to eat the sugars out of the honey, breed, and fart alcohol! Unlike Thog who had to experiment with "what the smeg made that first lot go bubble?" We know that it is yeast and we can readily obtain the little buggers in a dormant state. Dormant? Yes they are in a dormant state when you buy them. Heat, though not too much, wakes them up and they wake up cranky and hungry! There are so many different types of yeast you can use for mead making… Go along to the homebrew section of your supermarket and you'll see 2 or 3 different types of yeast, informatively labeled along the lines of "ale", "beer" and probably "brewing". Hmmm….go have a look at what a home brew shop has though and you'll be a bit dumbstruck as they often have hundred of different types of yeast. All with different tolerances for temperature, alcohol, different life spans and different rates at which they work. To tell the truth, I've had damned fine results using plain ale yeast, champagne yeast and wine yeast varieties. The only risk with the supermarket varieties is that they can easily have been on the shelf for absolutely ages and can have died altogether, where as the home brew shop is likely to keep the dormant yeast in a fridge, keeping them dormant but alive. So what ever you go for in the way of yeast, just remember that fresh is best. It may be a little more expensive to buy a couple of sachet's from the home brew shop, but at least it's not taking the risk of just pouring dead yeast shells into a brew. Chemicals Ok, this is where I get on my high horse and state that there is only one chemical you should need to make mead. Sterilizing Solution! Apart from that Thog had it right. You don't need to add all sorts of chemicals to a brew. But you do need clean gear. A bag of sterilizing powder from the home brew shop will set you back about $5.00 where as a nice plastic bottle of the same stuff might cost you twice that at the supermarket. Either way, you need the stuff to sterilize EVERYTHING that will come into contact with your mead. Remember to rinse things thoroughly after though. Now lets look in depth at some of the equipment. Fermenters The main item you are going to need is a fermenter. This is basically any airtight container to hold the mead whilst the yeast do their job. The plastic fermenter barrels you can buy at supermarkets and home brew shops are perfect for the job. They have screw on lids with large rubber seals, grommeted holes for an airlock and a tap. Some are nicer and have litre scales marked up the sides and stick on thermometers as well. Others are nothing more than a big plastic bucket with a lid and a tap. However I can recommend that whichever way you go life will be easier with a fermenter that has a tap come time to rack the brew…and yes I'll explain racking later. There are many alternative ways of doing the fermenter. I have a friend who has spent hundreds of dollars on huge glass fermenters, which seem to be a rather expensive way of doing things. Every batch requires the large rubber stopper to be replaced and the standard airlocks can be a bit tricky to use with them as them. On the other end of the scale another friend brews her meads in large heavy-duty plastic bags which she stores in those $5 plastic storage crates. She uses a length of hose taped securely into the wired off open end of the bag, then passed down into a jar of water taped to the side of the storage crate for an airlock. Hey, it works. Brewing Pots I have used a variety
of different methods to actually boil up a brew, but there's just no beating
a damned solid stainless steel pot. Remember though that you might be
making mead with say 10 litres of water, but how much volume is the honey
going to add? Hmmm. Something to think about. I can recommend hunting
around the bargain stores though and picking up a couple of 20-litre stainless
steel stewing pots. They go great for this as they are both thin enough
to heat the contents fairly quickly but sturdy enough to handle the weight
of your brew, and make sure you get ones with handles! Hydrometer A hydrometer is a useful tool for determining the alcohol content of your mead. It consists of a lead weight inside a glass float. The top of the float is elongated and has various gradations marked on it. The one you are interested in is "Specific Gravity". When you first make the mead pour some into the plastic tube that they hydrometer comes in and note down the specific gravity. Do this once you rack the mead the first time and at any time you rack it again. Not the SG's each time. When it has finally cleared and aged and you think it's ready to go, do another reading. There's some complex math's involved in calculating the alcohol content but the easiest way is to use a lovely little program called Promash to do it for you. You can download it from Promash's website. Airlocks Because we don't want our mead being invaded by all sorts of germs and nasty bugs we need to use an airlock on the fermenter. This is a relatively simple device, which forces the built up gases to escape by bubbling through water. Of course, nothing can get back in that way. This is good. There are a variety of different ones available at the supermarket or home brew shop, ranging in complexity and price. But if you are really stuck a piece of hose and a jar of water will do the trick. Yeast starter bottle I have found the best results have occurred when I have started the yeast off separately to the main brew. I do this in a specially constructed yeast starter bottle. Made by washing and sterilizing a 1.25 litre coke bottle and then putting a hole in the lid. I then fitted a grommet to the hole and added a simple supermarket airlock. I usually get my yeast going after I have made up[ my brew and leave both over night. Then the next morning I pour the yeast goop into the mead, stir like buggery and then seal the fermenter as quickly as possible. How To Do It! Now that you have all of your equipment and ingredients ready to go…let's do it! Firstly, sterilize everything! Absolutely everything that will come into contact with your mead and its ingredients must be sterilized and rinsed thoroughly. Next get your pot/s on the stove and start boiling that water. When you are doing large batches such as I do this can actually take quite some time. Once the water is starting to get toward boiling and those first few whisps of steam arise, stir in your herbs and spices if you are using any. Doing this will probably delay the boiling of the water but that's ok. Continue to watch the pot/s as when the water boils you are going to have to be ready to pour in your honey. When the water does come to the boil, add your honey slowly, stirring it into the water. Keep stirring, as you really need to dissolve it as best you can. If you tip all the honey in at once, you are likely to end up with a big lump of it on the bottom of the pot, which will burn and caramelize. This is not good! So add the honey slowly and keep stirring until it is either all in there or the honey starts to collect on the bottom of the pot no matter how much you stir. Don't worry about leaving any honey over, we'll use it too! Bring the honey/water/etc, mix (called must - don't ask me why, I haven't a clue!) to the boil again. This will take a considerable amount of time, as the boiling point of the water honey mix is actually about 140 degrees C. One thing you will
notice is that as the must heats up the surface starts to develop as thick
brown scum. This is ok, it's all the crap from the honey and spices etc
that cant dissolve into the water. You can use a spoon to clear it off,
or, as I do - use one of those little net things for chasing fish around
your fish tank that you can get from the pet shop for a couple of dollars. Once the time/smell is right, turn off the heat, de-scum the must and cover it with a cloth. Let it stand and cool over night while we get the yeasties ready to rock! Ok, our yeast is all sealed in their little sachet and as dormant as can be. We need to wake them up, but remember earlier I said that they wake up hungry and cranky…well this is where our yeast starter comes in! Use some of your spring water to make a cup of strong (2 teabags) jasmine tea for each ten litres of must you have. Stir a couple of tablespoons of your honey, yes you have some left, its coating the inside of the container, into each cup. Allow the tea to cool slightly till it's just warm. Pour the tea into the yeast starter bottle (funnels make this easier and less messy!) and let it sit a few minutes, then try adding the juice of a lemon or even another citrus fruit like orange or lime…hey, this isn't an exact science, feel free to experiment! Last of all pour in your yeast. I'd recommend a 6-7gramm sachet for each ten litres of must. Put your thumb tightly over the top of the bottleneck and shake the living daylights out of it! Then add a little more spring water and repeat the shake. You want the bottle to be about ¾ full. Then cap it with the airlock lid. Make sure you fill the airlock with water to the lines marked on it. This goop should almost immediately start frothing and be bubbling through the airlock within an hour. If after a couple of hours this hasn't started, check the seal of the lid, grommet and airlock. If they are ok, you may have gotten dead yeast. Make another bottle, keep this one just incase and make a new starter with fresh yeast. Leave the yeast and must over night. The next day, carefully de-scum the last of any crud to rise out of the must and then pour it carefully into your fermenter. I'd advice leaving it for an hour or two to settle a bit. Then pour in your rampaging yeast solution. Rinse the yeast starter bottle out with some spring water and pour that into your brew as well. Then lid and airlock your fermenter. Within a few hours your brew should be bubbling. If it doesn't you can warm it up a bit. Ideally you want the temperature of it to be in the low to mid 20's on the Celsius scale. This could mean moving it into sunlight, or adding a heater belt to the fermenter. Heater belts cost around $20 and are an electric belt that wraps around the fermenter. You control the temperature by moving it up the side of the fermenter to heat less mead, or lowering it to heat more mead. Your $2 stick on thermometer is an absolute blessing here! Be careful moving your brew, it's heavier than it looks! Fermentation Then comes the second most difficult part of mead making, waiting for the primary fermentation to take place. Depending on the amount of honey, temperature and about a gazillion other things, you primary ferment will run days, or weeks, or even in some cases, months! How do you know it's done? Easy! The blooping from the airlock slows right down to just a few bloops a day or less. This can mean one
of several things. The first two reasons are good. This is how it should work, they either run out of sugar to eat or poison them selves. The honey itself, held in suspension in the water, is, so a chemist once told me, made up of two linked chains of molecules, one is a sugar and the other a protein. The yeast eat the sugar chain and the protein is left in solution. Eventually the proteins settle out of solution and this is evident as the mead slowly changes from a thick cloudy looking concoction to the clear colour we are used to drinking. However the by-product of this process is alcohol. Different type of yeast can tolerate different amounts of alcohol in their environment before it poisons them. Leaving their dead shells or husks in solution. They too will slowly drop out of solution into the sludge slowly forming at the bottom of your fermenter. The second two are not good reasons for it to have stopped, and this is where your stick on thermometer is so useful. If you think it might have gotten to cold, place the mead somewhere warmer, or adjust your heater belt if you use one. It may take a few days to a week or even more to see if the yeast recover. If they don't seem to, that's ok, never hurts to make a new yeast starter and throw it in to see what happens. If you think the temperature may have gotten too hot, like over 30 Celsius, then you really need to find somewhere cooler to store your brew. Bathrooms, laundries, the service pit in the garage, any where the temperature can be at a fairly constant mid 20's. Oh, and make a new yeast starter and throw that in. Racking Once you are fairly certain that the fermentation has slowed or stopped for the right reason, its time to rack the brew. This is where the secondary fermenter is needed. And also where taps on fermenters come in so handy! Without them you need to stuff around siphoning the mead out of one fermenter into the next. This is a simple process really. The mead in the fermenter is divided into three layers. Scum at the top, brew in the middle, and sludge at the bottom. We want the bit in the middle. Depending on the quality of your honey, the sludge may well be below the level of your tap. If not simply place the fermenter on a table or bench and elevate the tap side. Let it settle for a few hours and you will be able to see the sludge move towards the lower side. Place your sterilized and rinsed secondary fermenter under the tap and just start the brew tickling in. Don't open the tap fully yet. As you let the mead out the airlock is going to bloop and try to suck air in. Slowly release the seal of the fermenter lid but keep it in place. You want to allow air in but virtually nothing else. This process of racking takes a while but is also an ideal opportunity to take an SG reading and a taste sample…quality control I call it! Once the scum and
sludge are left in the first fermenter, you need to lid and airlock the
secondary. Then comes the hardest part of mead making. The most frustrating
too… Put it somewhere out of mind and just check that there's still water in the airlock once a week. Don't be surprised to hear the occasional bloop every now and then as fermentation continues at a much slower pace. Sooner or later it will seem to have miraculously changed over night. One day it will be cloudy and yuck looking but still giving the odd bloop from the airlock, and the next time you check it, it will not be blooping at all and have changed to a rich clear colour. The temptation here is to bottle it right away. You can, but you need to be sure you want a box of grenades in your house! My strongest advice with any brew is that the longer you leave it to age in the secondary fermenter the better it is going to taste. It's not uncommon to leave a brew to age for a year or more. I know one guy who started making mead about 5 years ago, he's aiming for smoothness of taste to his brews…he hasn't bottled any yet but he starts a new batch every six months! Bottling Now however is an ideal time to get your bottling operation started though. It'll probably take you a while to organize enough bottles but that's good. Gives the mead a bit more time to settle down. One of the best solutions I have ever found were the old 1 litre glass coke bottles. You can buy a bag of a hundred PET screw on lids for them at a home brew shop for about $10. However good bottles can be found at home brew shops and some continental supermarkets. Any bottle you can reseal once opened is a good idea. I personally use 300ml buddy coke bottles, 750 ml cider bottles and occasionally those bottles with the wire leaver action ceramic stoppers. Friends who brew swear by plastic bottles as they are less inclined to grenade if the fermentation kicks off again...they just swell up out of shape. However I prefer not to bottle a mead until I am sure that the fermentation has well and truly stopped and it has aged till it tastes nice and smooth, and has no cloudiness to it. However you decide to go with your bottling, just remember to clean and sterilize your bottles, then rinse and dry them before bottling. I always try to label and save a couple of bottles of each brew. I put them away and forget about them. To be brought out and drunk in years to come. When they have well and truly aged to become a drink fit for the Gods! HOME
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