Mead

Having harvested a modest 11kilo of honey this year I needed something to do with it. I don't eat that much of the stuff really, sometimes drop a spoonfull in a jasmine tea, use a little in cooking and have the occassional honey sandwich but I'm not really going to use 11 kilos of the stuff in a year. I had planned to flog some of it but instead I've given away about half of it and figure I'll leave that venture till next year. This year I decided to make mead.

Mead is basically a fermented drink made from honey. People seem to think of it as a honey wine and I'm happy to go along with that. If I'm in York I occassionally buy a bottle from the Jorvik Centre. Apparently mead was a popular drink amongst vikings as any viking metal fan will attest -just go to a rock night and look for someone hairy drinking lager from a plastic cows horn, he'll tell you. A quick look on Wikipedia tells me that mead production seems to go way back to 7000 BC China. I gather it was a popular drink in Olde Englande and if I was going to make up a plausible sounding theory as to why from the top of my head, based on no research at all, I'd assume that the climate here is better suited to farming honey more than vinyards.

I did a little research on the net (where else?) and looked at a few mead recipes. From this I cobbled together my own recipe based more or less on what was to hand. Here's my mead recipe for your delectation:

Mead Recipe
Ingredients:
Roughly 1360g of honey
4 pints of water (and then more later)
1/2 teaspoon of allspice
1 cup of strong black tea
One peeled and mashed up orange
Yeast

Method:
Boil up the 4 pints of water with the honey, throw in the allspice and mashed up orange. Make you cup of black tea -I used 3 bags in a coffee cup for this, no messing about there, pour it into the mix, boil it for ages -well one hour at  least. Pour it into a sterilised Demijon. Realised there's loads of space in the demijon so boil up some more water to top it up. Let it cool. Throw in the yeast. Pop on the airlock and sit back. When the bubble slow to one per second or less filter it into bottles, slap a cork in and leave it a few months before drinking.

Why tea? The tea is added as a source of tannins. Apparently the tannins are important for flavour, given that tea didn't reach England till around the 1650's I'd assume something else was used for that -or maybe olde meade in the UK never had tannins at all.

Equipment you'll need are a Demijohn, an airlock, wine bottle, corks, something to sterilise the demijohn and bottles, funnel, something to filter the mead, you'll also need yeast. I got all the wine making stuff from Wilkinsons in town. The airlock sounds a little scientific but it's just a plastic tube with a u-bend in it that you add some water to, this lets ait out as the yeast releases CO2 but doesn't let it back in. It's simple but works.

So with my recently sterilised glass and plastic ware I boiled up the ingredients and popped it into the demijohn. It took a very long time to cool and eventually I resorted to running cold water over the sides of the demijohn to take the heat away. This seemed to do the trick and I added the yeast. About ten minutes later I touched the demijohn and found it still seriously hot though so I figured my using water to draw heat off had only affected the outer mead and the glass rather than cooling the whole lot. I suspect the heat will have kiled most of the yeast so after letting it cool I added some more. At this point it was too late to pop out for brewing yeast but a biology teaching mate who used to make wine and mead herself told me yeast is all prettymuch the same so some baking yeast I'd had in a cupboard for years got dropped into the mix, actually the proper name for the mix seems to be 'must' -now you can impress friends, family and colleagues with your knowledge of mead making jargon..

The 'must' promptly turned bright orange and started to bubble. I was quite surprised by the intense orange colour, it looked very chemically -like some kind of industrial waste or a kids drink from the 80's.

Fermenting Mead. It went the colour of Kia Ora.

I set it to ferment next to a windows where it would be warmed by the sun. After a week or so the colour calmed down. Whilst the mead was fermenting you could seeand hear bubbles passing through the water in the airlock. When the bubbles slowed to one buble per second or so it was time to remove it. There's different ways to do this, some people filter it into another demijohn to sit some people put it straight into bottles. I opted to bottle it. By the time fermentation had slowed there was a layer of dead yeast at the bottom of the container and I think it's this that you want to get the mead away from.

There's all kinds of clever filtery type stuff you can use and ideally the mead shouldn't be areated so the normal method seems to be to siphon it from the demijohn into the next stage. I decided to use coffee filters for this. I sterilised a plastic bottle to filter the mead into so I could then decant it into wine bottles later. Initially I used Melitta 1x2 micropore coffee filters simply because that was what I had to hand. However it took hours to filter thorough. I decided to get a second funnel and some Melitta Original 1x4 filters so I could have two loads of mead filtering at a time. The mead shot straight through these filters and came through all cloudy. So I used two of these filters at a time which worked rather well -albeit rather slowly. The process was so slow that I wound up filling the filters then putting clingfilm over the tops and around the bottle necks and leving them over night. It took literally days to filter my demijohn. I then decanted the now surprisingly clear mead into wine bottles and corked them. Obviously this way isn't ideal as the mead gets exposed to air which I gather isn't a good thing but it's new to me and seemed to work. Oh and apparently it's not called 'bottling' it's called 'racking' -I think people just make up terminology for the sake of it.

Hivemind and Me Mead

Looks pretty good doesn't it? For the first batch I used the very pale honey and for the second batch I used the darker stuff. In the second batch I also added Rooibos teabag to the tea just for variety -well it's good tea so maybe it'll be good mead. I sampled the meads whilst bottling -I mean racking- them and found the mead made from darker honey was very dry whereas the pale stuff was really sweeet. For the first batch I'd used plastic corks but my pal with the mead making knowledge advised me they're not always as good for keeping air out as a cork cork so for the second batch I acquired a corking tool (Wilkinsons again) and some corks made from trees. The real corks also look more aesthetically pleasing.

Mead

After racking the bottled mead is then place in a wine rack or someplace else out of the way for a few months to improve. I'm not entirely sure of the chemistry or biology involved in this ageing process but I gather that there may still  be some fermentation going on in the bottles if  any live yeast made it through the filtering but eventually the alcohol level will kill anything living in there, hopefully anyway. the bottles are meant to be stored on their sides to keep the corks damp -the wet cork expands, doesn't really matter with the plastic corks, and any sediment in the bottle will sink and adhere the the side of the bottle. I've noticed that more sediment seems to have made it into my first batch, I'm also not entirely convinced of the airtight seal of the plastic corks. In a couple of months time I'll give it a try and see how it's worked out.

Worker Bees