Can someone describe Mead?

Describe mead???? Ummmmm........ Indescribably delicious! I generally use about 7kg for a 23 litre batch, pure clover honey; ferment til ALL bubbling in the airlock ceases (can take a year), then sulfite it with campden tablets. When the tablets are completely dissolved, and the mead is perfectly clear and still not bubbling (another couple months) I rack it into a clean carboy and add sorbate/sodium benzoate, and also one clove per litre. After a few months the cloves will have swelled up and sunk to the bottom, leaving a clear mead with a dusting of brown on the bottom of the carboy. Bottle it at this point, sit back and enjoy how clever you are! :-) My last few batches of mead have taken the following time to brew and bottle:

13 months 15 months 16 months I am working on one right now that was brewed 3/23/04, and I am trying to hurry it up in time for Christmas, but that is going to be hard.... Wish me luck! Bob<

Do you use the clove for flavour or to clear the mead?

I have made several batches of mead, essentially following the recipe in The New Complete Joy Of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian. I have made Raspberry, kiwi, and strawberry from fresh fruit and blackberry from a wine kit concentrate. The raspberry is by far the best and the blackberry is still very good. The kiwi and strawberry lacked a flavour strong enough to stand up to the ginger and alcohol content (which I would guess to be 6 - 8% using the scientific "compared to 5% beer buzz").

The fermentation took about 5 months to completely finish and another couple of months to clear. I primed it with 3/4 cup of corn sugar at bottling to carbonate it. It is quite drinkable after 3 months in the bottle but improves with further aging. It finishes incredibly dry and nicely carbonated, not a hint of sweetness after 7 lbs of honey and the priming sugar - very refreshing in the summer and is nicely presented in a pilsner glass.

I will continue to make mead but only raspberry. The fruit (6 to 8 lbs), honey and other ingredients make the cost comparable to a 15L wine kit.

KD, if you will describe the flavor "vanilla" to me I will describe the taste of mead to you.

There are all kinds of mead and their flavors vary as much as do the flavors of wine. True mead is just honey and water (okay, with a little acid and yeast nutrients thrown in) fermented, so the true taste comes from the pollen of the flowers that the bees visited to make the honey. But most people don't make true mead. They flavor it with fruit, spices or something else. Go to

and scroll down to "Mead" to see what I mean.

Two differences between winemaking and meadmaking: (1) mead takes much longer to ferment, and (2) mead mellows out much more than most grape wines do with aging (this comparison is not true of none-grape wines, as almost all of them improve drastically with age). Thus, if you make mead, know going in that it will take longer to finish and should be aged once bottled.

Jack Keller, The Winemaking Home Page

Mead.... Well, I would certainly try some to make sure you like it before you make it. My nephew by marriage really wants to learn to make some. We had some over the summer - mead from Colorado. It wasn't to my taste, but my husband liked it. I think there is a rec.crafts.mead site isn't there? Darlene

When mead is young, it is rememiscent of rocket fuel. When it ages 5 years or so, it is still an acquired taste. At least straight dry mead. The only mead I made I liked was a lemon-lime one. Tim

Where abouts are you? Mead isn't something carried in every liquor store, but it may just be that you're hitting up the wrong one.

I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada. Our liquor stores are controlled by the government, most have the same stuff from store to store. :(

Hey, are any of you meadmakers in Nova Scotia?

KD

I live in New Brunswick - visit my daughter in Halifax quite frequently.

Really....hmmmm....will you be visiting her again soon? :)

KD

This weekend in fact.

have you ever added a little bit of lemon and honey to a cup of hot water, for coughs and things like that?

yeah, like that but not really. take out the lemon, add a bit of alcoholic tang, and make it a little less sweet.

you're welcome. ;-)

i make melomels, and they end up tasting an awful lot like the basic fruit but tend to have a sweeter nose and tongue-tip-taste.

Saul

A friend of mine commented that wine makes him more outgoing where mead makes him more mellow. I don't know if others would agree but I think I do.

Other than that, there are at least as many meads as there are wine as you can make any wine using honey as the sugar source and then it is a type of mead. You could even say there are more as there are many types of honey and each will give a different flavor.

Be adventurous and make some and try it. I make a lot of wines that I have never tasted. I could never fined commercial wines for lychee, orange, wild mustang, dewberry or a few others I have made in the last 18 months. It is a hobby. Try something new.

I will say that many people try to make mead and then decide they do not like it. Mead takes a long time to age. 18 months is minimum and 2 years is much better. People make a one gallon batch and have it all sampled up before it ever matures. Make a batch and put it back for 18 months before you ever try it. If you are interested visit

and the rec.craft.meadmaking sites.

Ray

Mead drinkers are all hippies, so it was probably the pot that went along with it that did it. ;-)

Brian

That is the style you are making. Use a larger portion of honey and a smaller portion of fruit and it will come out tasting more like mead with a hint of the fruit. A matter of taste.

Ray

Strangely, it seems to do =both=. I could =swear= it seems to bind with fine particulate matter and precipitate it out as a brown dust. This is something I've become aware of over the last few years. The flavouring is divine; I cannot imagine drinking mead w/o cloves, it is such a perfect match! Bob<

I have heard that 50 year old mead is very nice....