I use to brew beer years ago and now I'm going to start brewing mead, mead is brewing with your primary source of sweetener is honey.

I was wanting to know if there are any other in here that brew there own liebations and whats your best brewed drink.

My first two batches will be made with coffee, I'll be using my kona chocolate macadamia nut witch should produce some uneek flavors.


Cheers

I've only brewed (draught) beer, but I've been doing it for over 35 years. My waistline is living proof.

It is just a very basic kit brewed from wort which comes in a can, add sugar and yeast, keep temperature at proper levels, just in a 30 litre (~7.5 US gallons) fermenting vessel inside an old wooden tea chest, using a heating pad except in hotter times in summer.

I've never tried to measure the alcohol content, but I would guess it is around 4%. It costs about 30 cents a longneck bottle to make (30 x 750ml bottles) a batch - it has actually got cheaper since I started!

The kits used to come pre-diluted in giant plastic casks inside a big cardboard box; you just added 4 litres of boiling water, mixed it and added yeast, and pricked holes in the top of the bag. Once I woke up in the middle of the night and realised I'd forgotten the holes... the bag was drum-tight with all the trapped CO2 and only minutes from bursting! Never made that mistake again.

I've never done it from scratch... jumping up and down on the hops, etc, whatever the purists do. It's just cheap peasant beer, but good enough for me! My friends give me stick for drinking the local West End Draught brew in cans, but I've little experience or interest in "exotic" beers, some of which I honestly don't like much (Heineken, etc).

However, I fell in love with Thomas Kemper Hefeweizen when I was in Seattle.

I wonder how big of a mess a 30L bomb like that would make ? LOL

I'm using only 1 gallon or a little under 4L for my fermentation jars. With beer its called "wort" with mead its called "must" once you've pitch your yeast. If you don't use a hydrometer how do you know when your fermentation is done ?

With a mead the ABV can run upwards of 18% with a good champpagne yeast. I got some lalvin 1118 which will do the job. I want to try their D-47 I hear it works great with fruits.

Brewing is a lot of fun and the pay off is a nice cold one.

Cheers

Chawker wrote:I wonder how big of a mess a 30L bomb like that would make ? LOL
If you don't use a hydrometer how do you know when your fermentation is done ?

I shudder to think of the mess - and I bet the bag would have burst, and NOT simply the plug popping out, releasing the built-up CO2 with no mess!

I just wait until the head subsides and the mixture clears visually (normally 5 days), and then bottle the brew after adding sugar to each bottle to get the carbonation.

Good luck, enjoy and cheers! I've never actually had mead - only read about it in fantasy books!

Chawker wrote: With a mead the ABV can run upwards of 18% with a good champpagne yeast. Cheers

+1 on the champagne yeast! About 20 or 25 years ago my friend and I made a few 5-gallon carboys of wild raspberry wine. We dissolved extra sugar into it after the squishin' was over, then brewed it with champagne yeast until it all died of alcohol poisoning... We had a small specific gravity chart for calculating ABV from before/after readings, but the wine started off-the-chart high and ended off-the-chart low. We made some conservative extrapolations and estimated 17 to 19% ABV. We entered it in the Western Washington Fair and got first place for home-made wine. I imagine it was because the judges got smashed from sipping it! We called it "Purple Haze", for obvious reasons.

A mead is simply 3 ingredients honey, water and yeast. Thats your "traditional" basis mead, "metheglin" a modern mead with herbs and spies.

If you choose to add maple syrup then its a "Acerglin" and if you choose brew with ftuit then its "Melomel".

And if you choose to heat your honey to evaporate water and darking the honey, its known as a "bochet".


Meads have been around for over 6000 years and is the oldest brewed drink. Its a honeny wine.

You can get a half gallon plastic jug, sterilize it , put in 1/4 of the volume of the container with honey add water shake the hell out of it add some yeast ( bread yeast will work) take a balloon and with a pin poke a couple holes in the balloon and put it over the opening on your jug. Wait 4 weeksto ferment and you have just made mead. You should age it for another 4 weeks after it clears up. Primary and secondary fermentations. Then drink up. It will get better with age.

Cheers

Thats a cool story geekhawk, first place ,thats awesome! I bet your original reading was above the 1.100 mark, it had to be if you retain sugar for sweetness. You had a winning addittude, getting the judges drunk. LOL

Yes your specific gravity was at or above 1.125 that is if it finished at 1.000 which would leave it very dry.

The way to determine your ABV take your starting gravity 1.125 and subtract your finishing gravity, you get .125 and divide by 7.5 to get your ABV.

1.125
-1.000
.125 ÷7.5 = 16.6666667% ABV


So yes, that was up there!!!

I don't remember the exact numbers (it's been a long time!) but I do remember that the final gravity was < 1.0. It wasn't a sweet wine, I'm not a big fan of those. One judge commented that it tasted a little too much like a grape wine, we figured he was expecting sweet and got dry instead.

They required two bottle per entry, one for judging and one for display at the fair. Then they collected all the display bottles and held a big post-fair tasting at a hall in Fife, WA (near Tacoma) where alll the entrants were invited to come and taste everyone else's entries. I went, but declined to try the jabanero wine! Ewww...

Ok, I've put together my first batch of mead last night. Its a "hydromel" meaning with fruit. Its a honey and watermelon mead. 2 1/2 pounds of clover honey with 1 oz of watermelon concentrate and 1 teasp. of of champagne yeast.

Today: everything is bubbling away just fine, one bubble per second. Now its just a matter of time.

Now you should get one of these to drink it out of!

https://www.alehorn.com/collections/tankards-mugs

Ale horns are cool but, its just not me. I'm more of a stein guy, its a germen thing.

My starting gravity was 1.095

It started to ferment by day two it stopped, with a quick stir and fermention pick back up and things are progressing fine. It seems to need some adjutation every morning for the first five days.
It looks like a jar of pineapple juice or grapefruit juice at this point, very cloudy. I getting a pair of bubbles every second.

I'll keep you posted. Cheers

Ignorance is bliss. And on this I am totally ignorant. I have 2 beer plants but never have used them. So need to learn. By plants I mean tubs that are a beer creator. I have the kits that came with the plants and they are probably outdated. I am thinking about doing that but my control of the temperature is a bit difficult. I was told that is important. I dont know.

72 degrees will work just fine.

Youtube has a lot of how to brew videos.

I'd love to brew some barley wine... anyone done that?

Hmm....I'm thinking like a old English without the hops ?

I've just got a bottle of karo corn sryup that I'd like to try in a mead, I suppose you could try a barley extract, in the form of a sugar extract. So yes, you could.

I guess the only difference between beer, malt liquor, and barley win is ABV? At least that's what the Googs is telling me.

A few years ago I did a Barley Wine taste test, had never heard of it, and threw a few back.

Little did I know they were like 10-15%.

Tough walk home.

Last night I made a new batch of mead for the play-offs. Its a acerglyn made with maple syrup.

One gallon batch

2 1/2 lbs clover honey
8ozs maple syrup
Water
Yeast

OG gravity 1.085

I plan on adding vanilla and tosted coconut flavoring.

Brewing nicely Cheers

3rd batch started.

Its a butter popcorn and butterscotch OG is 1.100 I used 2 1/2 pound of some Washington state honey blend of alfalfa, berries, clover, wildflowers. VERY good honey!

How I got the butter popcorn flavor in it is a state secret. LOL

Chawker wrote:Today: everything is bubbling away just fine, one bubble per second. Now its just a matter of time.

I think Oppie (J Robert Oppenheimer) thought this maybe, in early 1945, when Project Manhattan finally seemed like something would happen...