Botchard

I've previously made a few Meads and Melomels and broadened my repertoire to include Banana Wine. This year I decided to have a go at making beer so I bought a used copy of Beers & Stouts 6th Edition (1995) by C.J.J.Berry from eBay. It's subtitled Full Instructions for all types of Beers, Stouts and Lagers. When he says all types he's really not kidding, there's even a dead rooster beer recipe in there. One thing that caught my eye was Honey Botchard. A beer strength Mead. Never heard of it? Me neither. A quick Google search shows me very few people have and the two references to it I found both mentioned Berry's recipe. It looked very simple to make too with only 5 ingredients including the water and takes about 6 weeks to reach drinkable.

I decided to give it a go and strayed from Berry's directions slightly. The recipe calls for 30g Hops, 560g Honey, 4.5 litres water, yeast and yeast nutrient. It's pretty basic but probably a good place to start and I'm sure any eager home brewers out there will be able to tweak and build on it.

I didn't know anything about hops. Not a thing. Now I know a little. But not a lot. There's a huge range of Hops and using them yields different flavours and aromas to suit different beers. I opted for one called Columbus or Tomahawk from eBay. This hop has 14.3% Alpha Acids. I don't really know what that means. Might be important though. It's described as a "high alpha variety" and is "used as a bittering hop with an intense aroma." I actually picked it because the name reminded me of the time I found a toy tomahawk on nightclub floor. At £2.25 for 25g including postage and packaged as a sort of huge tea bag  for ease of use it's an experiment with low financial risk.

For the honey I had half a 250g jar of my own set honey I'd been working through and a very granulated jar of liquid honey I'd kept back from a previous year. Doesn't matter that one was set and one was granulated liquid, they'll both melt the same.

Botchard ingredients minus yeast nutrient

First step is to boil up some water and simmer the hops for about half an hour. I used that £1.10 for 5 litres bottled water from Tesco. It's cheap, it's water, and probably has less crap in it than what comes out of my taps -Hull is riddled with lead pipes.. people don't really talk about it. I poured half the bottle into a huge saucepan I'd sterilised earlier and threw in the Tomahawk teabag, when I heard it boiling I turned the heat down then started making a 23 litre batch of beer, reracked two demijohns of Banana Wine and one demijohn of Kiwi Melomel. By the time I was more or less done I figured a half hour must have passed, although it was probably more like 90 minutes. If you really know your stuff there's a lot of complex calculations about steeping hops -how long on what temperature and so on you can do but I don't so I just left it till I'd finished doing other things. Using a sterilised spoon I whipped out the now huge tomahawk teabag -it'd  expanded a lot  in the liquid, and turned off the heat. Once the used hops were cooled I removed it from the bag and gave to my chickens but they weren't interested. I'm not too surprised really it smells pretty gross and tastes bitter as hell.

Berry says to actually simmer the honey for the same 30 minutes the hops are in but I did want to compromise the quality of the honey, I spooned the honey in along with some cold water and gave it a stir then left it to dissolve. Some mead recipes talk about boiling honey up as part of the process which I did with my first batch of mead but after a little more reading I stopped doing it and never had a problem. It does seem a bit pointless using a high quality raw honey if you're then going to ruin it by boiling, might as well use some cheap supermarket honey that's already been compromised by heating if that's your plan.

Once cooled Berry says to strain the liquid into a demijohn, I guess that must be to remove the hops, he wrote the book in 1963 so I guess compressed hop pellets prepared in teabag type things weren't the norm back then, so I decided to skip the straining. As I poured it into the demijohn I did notice some tiny particles in the bottom though. Once in the demijohn I threw in some yeast and yeast nutrient -he doesn't say how much of either so I went with a teaspoon of each, if there's not enough yeast I expect the yeast will just make more anyway, not so sure about the nutrient so I just crossed my fingers. The full demijohn didn't look very impressive to be honest, just a gallon of murky brownish water.

I appear to have made a gallon of dishwater.

Berry says to ferment it for 10 days in a warm room before bottling and leaving somewhere cool for a month. I left it in an upstairs room to stay warmish. After 10 days I was seeing about a bubble per second in the airlock and the liquid had lightened in colour to something approaching real lemonade and was starting to clear as sediment fell to the bottom of the demijohn. I topped up the water level a little with more bottled water. In total I used nearly 5 litres.

Into the fridge, looks like orange juice now

Moving a few shelves I put the demijohn complete with airlock into the fridge and left it overnight to drop the temperature then the next day I stirred a leaf of gelatin dissolved in bottled water by zapping it in a microwave a few times. You can buy finings but they're mostly just gelatin with a price hike although I think one the chemicals I use with my Harris Quickfine Filter for the meads is Isinglass. I gather what happens is the bits of yeast, proteins and whatever that are suspended in the liquid somehow bind to the gelatin as it sinks to the bottom of the demijohn, then you siphon the drink out leaving the sediment behind.

Berry says to siphon it into flagons which I think are the ceramic cider bottles Windy Miller in Camberwick Green used to drink his very strong homebrew cider from before passing out every week (they don't make kids programmes like they used to) but I don't think it really matters as long as you use a bottle that can contain the pressure of a carbonated drink without exploding or firing off it's closure. That rules out wine bottles but there's plenty of options still, beer bottles, cider bottles, plastic fizzy drink bottles, Champagne bottles, Prosecco bottles -they'll all do the job.

I used a bottling wand I'd removed from it's tap and attached to a regular siphon to fill the bottles. I just shoved the wand onto the end of the siphon's plastic tap. It didn't fit very well though and after it slipping out and losing drink on the floor I decided to hold the thing together whilst I used it. Next time I'll just attach a bit of hose to the wand for a better fit on the siphon tap. When it's working the wand is very easy to use and better than the Buon Vino Super Automatic Bottle Filler I've used before.

Bottled Botchard

I pressed some saved some Leffe Bottles into service and a half litre beer bottle. I could've actually filled 6 75cl bottles is there hadn't been some spillage along the way. Ooops. A note on bottles: they come in a variety of colours but brown provides the most protection from UV light for the contents, green provides less protection and clear provides none. I also gather the darker glass provide mores protection than lighter coloured glass. The proliferation of green bottles seems to be because they're cheaper and easier to make  then brown ones.

Corking Belgian Beer style bottles is a little trickier than regular wine bottles or capping beer bottles. The cork only goes half way in and then needs a metal cage attaching, they also use a wider cork than wine bottles. I watched a youtube video on how to recap belgian beer bottles then ordered champagne corks and cages and and a two lever corker online. The corker isn't really meant for wider champagne corks but it works. I had a practice run following the tutorial on an empty bottle and found the cork got pulled up a bit when removing the corker so I wound up putting them a little further into the bottle than required to compensate for that. I just used a pen to twist the wire cage tabs tight. Some labels were hastily knocked up in P-Touch Editor, printed on the thermal printer and slapped on the bottles. Almost got them straight. As these aren't for sale (no alcohol license) I didn't bother looking at legal labelling requirements.

Can see my reflection in those.

After bottling they were then left upright in an upstairs room for the remaining yeast to ferment the priming sugar an carbonate the contents. It should only take a week but as I'd used a little gelatin to clear the drink there was less yeast in the bottled Botchard than if I'd followed the original recipe so I gave it a fortnight to carbonate.

Berry recommends ageing it somewhere cool after carbonation but I was in a hurry to test it so after thirteen days I popped the smaller bottle into a fridge and left it overnight to cool. Whilst waiting I killed a little time by engraving a beer glass with my Dremmel, idle hands and all that.

In the bottle the Botchard was very clear but there was no way to tell if it was carbonated or not till it was opened. Carbonation was very successful. You probably can't tell in the photo due to condensation on the glass but the botchard came out crystal clear. Whilst it's made with hops it's still a mead rather than a beer. I think it probably qualifies as a Methyglin due to the presence of hops. The finial product is a light refreshing drink a little closer to Champagne than beer. I'm not sure of the alcohol content as I didn't bother checking the specific gravity at all during the making but I gather fermenting honey tends to ferment more completely than regular sugar so yields a higher alcohol content.

First glass of Botchard!
I can also cross glass engraving  off of my bucket list now.

I now need to put the remaining bottles someplace cool and dark to age. As they're closed with corks they need to be someplace the corks wont dry out and shrink which rules out using a fridge for long term storage. I'll probably put them in the brick outbuilding as my homegrown potatoes, onions, garlic and so on seem to last very well in there without shrivelling up. They'll need to be stored upright as the priming sugar is fermented in the bottle so as with any live beer there should be a little sediment in the bottom of the bottle.

So there we have it. An extremely easy drink to make and another reason to buy Honey, if you needed one. I think you could probably use a single pound jar of honey for a one gallon batch. Now to think about scaling up the recipe for a five gallon batch...

Cyser or "How d'ya like them apples?"

In December 2011 I was given a tub of windfall apples in exchange for a tin of beeswax polish and decided to try making Cyser, apple mead. I looked at Cyser recipes on the internet and the one in Andy Hamilton's Booze For Free before piecing my own together. It seems there's as many different ways to make cyser as there are worms in apples.

Windfall apples from Newbald

Initial Ingredient List
4.5KG Apples
150g Sugar
10 Sultanas
2 Cloves
1360g Honey
Another 680g Honey to add later
1.5 Litres Water
1 Teaspoon Pectolase
1 Teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
1 Sachet of Wine Yeast

First thing I did was put the apples through a juicer. It took a while to chop up and juice the apples and twice I had to stop and clean the machine out as the pulp clogged it up and and it started to whine.

Juicing apples exactly how subsistence farmers in days of yore did.

Eventually when they'ed all been converted to liquid I added 2 cloves and 10 sultanas and boiled the lot for 10 minutes -mainly to kill anything living in the apples, some of them had been quite lively having spent a while on the ground. It tasted a little tart so I added 150g of sugar to the mix.

I decided against boiling the honey (some people do, some people don't, some people says it damages the honey, some people say it doesn't) and heated up half a litre of Tesco's spring water whilst the four 340g jars of Tesco's cheapest Clear Honey loitered in a bath of hot water. Once the honey was good and runny I poured it into the water using topping up the jars with more water to rinse out the last dregs and adding that to the pan too. Gave it a stir till the honey looked to have dissolved.

Next up I poured the honey and water mixture into the demijohn and added an orange I'd chopped up and mashed. I didn't want to wait all day for the apple and sugar solution to cool so I ladled that in and after adding the pectolase and yeast nutrient I sat the whole thing in a sink half full of cold water to cool. An hour later it'd cooled and there was about an inch of air space at the top. This bit of air is called headspace by brewers, and my lack of it turned out to be a problem later. I gave it a quick stir with a sterilised chopstick, added the yeast, waited 15 minutes then gave it another stir like the sachet said to before putting the airlock on.

Freshly racked and looking a little opaque

24 hours later fermentation was happily underway but unlike the meads and cranberry melomel with this fermentation a load of froth was produced and the pulp had risen to the top of the demijohn pushing liquid and froth out through the airlock so after a quick clean up and rinsing out of the airlock I decanted some of the liquid into a a milk bottle with a foodbag rubberbanded to the top and sat it and the demijohn in a plastic tub in case it happened again. Looking at a couple of brewing website the froth is apparently called kraeusen, I was happy to call it froth but there ya go. Anyway it should only present a problem for the first few days but, as I read, if the pulped fruit blocks the airlock the pressure from the buildup of CO2 can crack the demijohn.

Cranberry Melomel on left and Cyser on the right.

Four days later the majority of the pulp had sunk into the  liquid so I was able to pour the contents of the milk bottle back into the demijohn. I had a little taste of the dregs in the milk bottle and  and can honestly say it was pretty sweet, however that gave no real indicator of the final flavour as the stuff was still full of sugar the yeast had to consume.

Whilst the fermentation is going on bubbles can be seen in the water in the airlock. A fortnight after starting the fermentation the bubble had slowed quite a lot so I decided to rerack it, removing the liquid from the bits of apple and the lees (dead yeast). You're meant to do this with a siphon but having had a try and finding the siphon kept dropping lower into the demijohn than I wanted (need to get or make some kinda clip to hold it in place) I wound up pouring it through a couple of coffee filters sat in a sieve in a funnel in the demijohn. Not the best way to do it as ideally there should be minimal aeration..but it worked.

After an hour of painstakingly slow filtering it began to flow through the filter faster and I realised one of the coffee filters had a hole in it. D'oh! I figured the heavier stuff will still have been near the bottom of the bottle and not gone through the hole in the filter. So I whipped out the filters and in replaced them with a sheet of kitchen roll, one of those thick one's that claims to act more like muslin than paper -a claim it seemed to live up to. The liquid came through this much faster than the coffee filters and I was able to finish that in a matter of minutes. I was left with a kitchen roll full of yucky looking thick yellow apple pulp and a demijohn of uniformly pale orange liquid.

I left this alone for a couple of months before re-racking again then gave it another two months and sampled the cyser again. Things had really changed in there. This time it was really dry. The yeast had had a great time turning sugars to alcohol leaving it a little dry for my palate so I figured I'd need to backsweeten it later. There seems to be two different ways to back-sweeten. One involves waiting till the fermentation has stopped then adding syrup or honey as required, the other is to just add the syrup or honey and hope the yeast will die off due to the rising alcohol content before consuming all you've added. I went for the second way, as it sounds easier' after all I could back-sweeten it again later if need be. I added the last two jars of honey filling the space left from previously being reracked and put the bung and airlock back on.. Looking at the air lock I could see fermentation was still going on as bubbles slowly made their way through. Eventually the bubbling stopped and I sampled it again, too dry! This makes me wonder if Tesco's cheapest honey is maybe cut with some kind of sugar syrup which the yeast was better ale to break down than the sugars found in real honey. Anyway I was going to have to backsweeten it again, on the plus side the alcohol content was up.

Harris Quickfine filter. It's not quick.
But it does filter rather well.

At this point I'd acquired a Harris Quickfine Filter from an auction. It's a filter system that's unfortunately no longer made but going by the wine making forums is one of the best filters around but also the slowest. You make up a small bucket of whatever you're brewing add 3 chemicals then pour this into a cloth filter which you top up as it runs through till you've filtered everything. It's painstakingly slow. We're talking leave it overnight kind of slow. Came out good and clear though. :) Potent stuff too going by the sample I tried, I really to need to get one of those gadgets for measuring alcohol content.

If your wee looks like this, drink more water

As I mentioned I'd decided to backsweeten it again, but I didn't really have space in the demijohn for it so I split the cyser between two containers and added some 1:2 sugar:water syrup -yep same stuff I feed the bees in spring. Popped airlocks on both vessels in case fermentation restarted then left it a while. The glass demijohn contains a sweeter cyser than the plastic one -more sugar syrup in that one.

Cyser backsweetened an split across containers

A month or so later I filtered it a last painstakingly slow time and decided to bottle it. Having acquired an automatic bottle filler I decided to use that. After a few trial runs with sterilising solution and then water to get it clean and figure out how it worked I soon had the cyser bottled and ready for corking.

Racking to bottles. Woohoo!

I started the project in December 2011 and bottled it in July 2012. In November 2012 I opened the first bottle. I may have been a little heavy handed with the final backsweetening giving me more of a desert drink but certainly enjoyable.

Also in December 2011 I started making a Cranberry Melomel. This ran more or less parallel with the Cyser fermentation, you can see the dark red demijohn full of Melomel in the fourth photo down in this post. Like the Cyser I reracked this a few times slowly running it through the Harris Quickfine. Here's a picture of it somewhere along the line, looks a little nicer than the the demijohn of gore it started out as.

Cranberry Melomel

The end product is a very pale pinkish liquid and tastes fantastic. Whilst I'll be tweaking my Cyser and Mead recipes in future this one is spot on. The flavour is meant to change over time and I still have most of the mead, cyser and melomel ageing in bottles at the moment. The mead and cyser look identical but following the fizzy mead cork popping fiasco I'd moved the mead back into demijohns and eventually reracked the remainder into green bottles, otherwise I'd now have no idea which was which.

Cranberry Melomel and Cyser.

Mead Revisited

A few months ago I made some mead, I did one batch in September and one in late October and had racked both batches straight into wine bottles. By early December there was a little sediment visible in some of the bottles so I decided to rebottle them (or 'rerack' them to use wine maker parlance) to clean them up a bit. After opening each bottle's contents was then passed through a coffee filters into a sterilised bottle and then corked with a real cork -no more of those crappy plastic ones. I was surprised to find that 2 of the bottles were fizzy. A little research, and by that I mean 2 minutes on Google of course, told me this meant the mead was probably still fermenting in the bottles which isn't a huge problem although it might affect the mead's final pH, otherwise it could mean bacterial fermentation which can ruin the bottle. Quite blatantly I'm no expert but the fizzy stuff tasted pretty fine to me so I went ahead and assumed it'd going to be ok. I sampled the normal mead and was pleasantly impressed by that too.

When I uncorked the fizzy two there was a pop and fizz due to the pressure that'd built up so I hoped, in my layman way, that they won't build up enough pressure to break the glass bottles and decided to periodically check the corks on those bottles weren't being pushed out. If they are being pushed out I'd be recorking them rather than pushing the corks back in. Eventually the alcohol level should kill off any remaining yeast in there.

Twenty days later I was surprised to step in something wet on the dining room floor. My first thought was to assume the fu-flipping cat had got bored with her tray and decided to try somewhere exciting and new to pee but looking down I realised one of my mead bottles was missing it's cork. I pulled out the bottle. It was one of the two that'd been fizzing when I reracked them before. There was about a glassfull left in it so I did the sensible thing and poured the remainder into a wine glass and drank it. It was still very fizzy and also really dry, would've been better chilled. Anyway that important task completed I wondered where the cork had gone. Didn't take long to find it. The cork was on the far side of the room where it's come to rest against the skirting board. It must've left that bottle at high pressure and I was probably lucky the glass didn't break. After cleaning the floor and the wine rack I located the other bottle that'd been merrily fizzing when it was reracked and stuck it in the out building, my logic was the cold temperature (early January at athe time) would slow down any biology still happening in there and help keep the CO2 dissolved.

Two days later I found another wet patch on the dining room floor. Same place as before. As before I quickly got a wine glass and poured the remainder in, unlike the previous bottle this one was really sweet. I guess fermentation had either still been going on when it was rebottled or it'd restarted soon afterwards General tinternet-consensus seems to be to add some crushed campden tablet and Sorbitrate to kill off any remaining yeast or other bacteria. I don't know what sorbitate is but I did have some Young's wine Finings that I'd picked up and had a vague idea that it probably does a similar job. So donning safety goggles and the thick leather gardening gloves I use to stroke the evil bugger of a cat that lives in my house, I carefully opened each bottle one at a time expecting an explosion of broken glass and fermented honey. My cunning plan was to drop in some crushed campdem tablet to stun any yeast then use the finings in small doses to kill it off. However all the other bottles were flat, including the one that'd been fizzing when I rebottled it. I recorked them all as I went and hoped it didn't impact upon the mead too much.

I guess that the second bottle to pop whilst it had been flat at the time of rebottling had resumed fermentation shortly afterwards. Meanwhile the in second bottle that had been fizzing the yeast eventually died off and the fermentation stopped before anything too explosive happened. I noticed that the second bottle to pop it's cork had some visible sediment in it and doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this probably meant the yeast was breeding in the corked bottle for a while.

So what've I learned? Bugger all. Just kidding. I now know to leave the liquid in a demijohn under an airlock for a longer prior to racking to bottles. Racking straight into bottles too soon was evidently a beginner's error. I've also learnt that you can't really predict where fermentation is going to restart hence the second bottle to pop it's cork not being the one I expected. Something else I pondered was the different tastes of the two bottles I'd tried, one was dry as a desert and the other one sweeter. I think the first bottle was from the first batch I'd made up using the paler honey and the second from batch with the darker honey. So that's another thing to bear in mind for future brewing projects. Now I'm two bottle's down and a little bit wiser.

Fruit Mead, Melomel

Okay so I made up some mead previously, just for the sake of using up some honey rather than anything else. I've sampled it, and it's going rather well. Since then I've read a bit more about mead and discovered fruit meads. Yeah basically mead made with fruit in it. The 'proper' name for this is Melomel. The name could be from latin as mel mellis means honey and mellitus can mean honeyed or it could come from greek in which meli means honey, or perhaps some long forgotten brewer named it after his ladyfriend Melissa -I guess we'll never really know.

So fruit and mead... I was swapping a tin of beewax furniture polish for a box of apples. I'd made apple sauce with the previous box but this time I decided to try making an apple Melomel. Whilst waiting for the apples I went and bought yeast, pectolase and a few other bits I figured I'd need. I no longer had enough honey for the mead, gave most of it away lol, so on my way home popped into a supermarket to buy some more. Whilst there I spotted half price cranberries. So on a whim I bought them and decided to make a Cranberry Melomel, relegating the Apple Melomel for another day and another post. As with the mead I concocted my own recipe based on the many existing recipes floating about on the internet adapted to what was available to me. The fruit can be added before or after the primary fermentation, which ever you use affects the final flavour in different ways. I opted to add the fruit right at the start because it just sounded easier.

I purchased a kilo of cranberries but only used 500g having noticed people seem to be using less cranberry than they used other fruits. Going by other recipes I'm still using quite a lot of cranberries for the volume I'm making.

This lot will become a Cranberry Melomel

Cranberry Melomel Ingredients
1.36 KG Honey -four jars of Tesco's cheapest is adequate I reckon
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 pack of yeast
500g Cranberries
2.292 Kg sugar (I was going to use 2KG but had a bag to finish off)
One teabag
Packet of yeast
1/4 teaspoon of yeast nutrient
5 litres of water -I didn't use all five, when the demijohn's full enough just stop adding it -this isn't rocket science...
1 teaspoon of pectolase

I boiled up the cranberries with the sugar in some of the water in one pan and in another heated some more of the water with the honey to dissolve it. To get as much honey as I could from the jars after pouring them into the pan I filled them with water and left them a while before pouring that out into the pan with the too. I also steeped a teabag in a little water whilst this was going on. The more surface area of the fruit available the better so once the cranberries had softened I got out my hand blender, dipped it in and turned it on to liquidise them.

Blending the Cranberries
-WTF? Another picure without any bees in it!?

That done and all the honey dissolved in the other pan I ladled the contents of both pans into the demijohn via a funnel along with the tea I'd made. To help mix it all up I alternated a ladle of one with a ladle of the other. Then after letting it cool enough that it hopefully wouldn't kill the yeast I poured a little water into a bowl, warmed it in the microwave briefly then dropped the yeast and a teaspoon of yeast nutrient into it along with a teaspoon of pectolase. -Cranberries are high in pectin and pectolase  is an enzyme that breaks this down. Gave it a shake to mix it all up, slapped in a bung and airlock then sat the demijohn to ferment out of the way. It looks like a demijohn full of blood.

Demijohn full of gore

I originally used some bread yeast in this batch but a couple of days later after reading up on alcohol tolerancess of yeasts I added some wine yeast too. The main difference between wine and bread yeasts seems to be the level of alcohol tolerance, bread yeast which will probably have a lower alcohol tolerance than a wine yeast will and so die out when the alcohol is content is relatively low whereas the wine yeast should carry on making alcohol far longer giving you a stronger drink. In theory one yeast will eventually dominate the must and I'm assuming it's going to be the one with the higher alcohol tolerance.

When I made mead before I boiled the must but there seems to be mixed ideas about the merits of boiling the honey pror to using it. Obviously boiling will kill the majority of bacteria in the must however it's unlikely there's going to be any in the honey anyway what with it being hygroscopic and all -meaning any bacteria or yeast trying to set up house in it is going to die of dehydration pretty sharpish. The downside is that this boiling may loose some of the properties of the honey we want to keep -although brewers seem a little vague about what these are referring to flavours and aromas rather than chemical constituents. I did boil the cranberries and their sugar up as I although I'd washed them I'd still expect some bacteria to be hanging out on them.

I didn't use as much of the water as I'd expected as I hadn't really given any thought to the volume of the honey (D'oh!) and the cranberries themselves will have also taken up a lot of volume too. After a couple of days I could see tiny bubbles rising as the yeast does it's thing converting sugars to alcohol.When the fermentation was in full flow I could see the pulpy part of the fruit moving to the top of the liquid. This can form a cap causing CO2 and heat to build up under it which isn't particularly good for the yeast, and it can go mouldy, so whilst this was happening I was giving it a bit of a swirl on a daily basis to dissipate it.

After 2 weeks the bubbling slowed to about one every 3 or 4 seconds so I decided to remove the fruit pulp. For this I just poured it through a seive into a funnel in the top of the empty 5 litre waterbottle, cleaned out the demijohn and popped it all back in again. This isn't the best way though as it means the liquid gets more aereated than you'd want. I also topped up the liquid level with some springwater and now the liquid is bubbling away again without the cap of fruit matter on top

As I poured it through the seive I noticed there was some stuff the consistency of jam so I added another teaspoon of pectolase whilst I was at it. I actually gave the liquid a taste as I reracked it and can report it tasted excellent but semed more like a port tye thing than than a wine drink. This may change as I rerack it to remove sediment and add a little more water each time and the yeast continue to turn the suger to alcohol. Now I'm going to leave it a couple of weeks in the corner of a room before reracking it with the syphon to remove it from the sediment -or lees as they're called. If I read it correctly the sediment is dead yeast and can affect the flavour of the finished product if the mead is left in with it for too long.

A note on demijohn's for the more thrifty out there.The water I used came in a 5 litre bottle from for £1. The bottle is food grade plastic and can be used just like a glass demijohn.Ok so it may not be as aesthetically pleasing as glass vessel but it's more or less free and probably a bit more robust if pressure builds up in it than a glass one would be. Just get an airlock grommet from a homebrew supplier, drill a hole in the lid and stick an airlock on. In fact whilst looking for the grommet online I found homebrew suppliers selling the same bottle but with different colour lid and handle as a plastic demijohn for considerably morea than I paid for this one full of water.

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