Recent content by viking1984

I have read that you can boil some raisins and add them in primary, or boil half a yeast packet in some water and add that. Both are supposed to work like a "nutrient" I guess. Never tried it myself, but have also made mead without nutrient before and had it turn out fine.

Welcome to a great hobby. Definitely read up on the basic concepts of brewing, but don't let in overwhelm you. It doesn't have to be as complicated as it usually sounds. As of the past few years I have been brewing one gallons batches of beer and it works great for me. This site has a ton of...

Hi there, I made a batch of blueberry mead, also adding the blueberries in secondary. I guess it depends on how much honey you used in making your mead, but I don't think there is any "right" amount of honey to add to any mead. It depends on your personal tastes. If after you remove your...

I have enjoyed cigars and certain pipe tobaccos before, but I think making a tobacco "tea" to try to brew bit your mead with or adding tobacco leaves to mead is a really bad idea. I had read in a farmers almanac many many years ago how a tobacco tea can be used as an insecticide, and I think...

2 liters is just over a half gallon. Find any gallon recipe and cut the ingredient amounts in half. For a 2 liter bottle I would just make a traditional mead. If you ferment a melomel in this bottle you will end up with even less mead once racked due to fruit taking up space. Personally, I would...

I added mint and a few other herbs to a small batch of mead. I made a traditional mead, then added the mint and herbs and let it sit for a week. This was just a very small amount of mead though, about a 750ml bottles worth that I added mint to as a trial, so amount of mint and time its in your...

By a soda tasting mead, do you mean very sweet? I am far from a mead expert, but I would use the frozen cranberries in secondary and add ginger in secondary also and let it extract the flavors until it reaches the flavor you are looking for. I have never used pectic enzyme, so I cant be much...

I am still waiting to try my first cherry mead, so hopefully it tastes enough like cherries. If yours is not to your liking, then you can try letting it sit on more cherries. You might also try back sweetening a little. I had made a peach mead with several pounds of home grown peaches I had...

Thank you for this input. The history of mead is something that is very interesting to me, and I have often wondered what the mead of our ancestors would have actually tasted like, since I think we all know it would be nothing like we have become accustomed to today.

This seems good compared to the original. I had planned on trying the same recipe soon, but a 1 gallon batch. I had made a cyser at the beginning of the year and added a 2 inch cinnamon stick in primary, as well as two more 2 inch sticks in secondary and left those in for a month or more and...

Excellent. Thanks for posting this. I love finding new types of honey to try for meads. I found it online for $9 a pound, $14 for a quart, pretty reasonable it seems. It sounds like this might be a perfect fall/winter type of mead. I'll definitely give it a shot. Thanks again.

This sounds like something I have been wanting to make. I had though about trying maple syrup with mesquite honey to see what I got. How much honey did you use in this? Also, what kind of a flavor did this end up having? The yaupon holly honey is less expensive than I expected, this may be...

I would let the batch that is tasting harsh age for another 6 months at least then try it. The harsh alcohol tones should have dropped some by then. At that point I would stabilize and back sweeten to your tastes, then bottle for guests (or whatever you were going to do with it). The one with...

It should be fine. Sometimes they ferment fast, sometimes they ferment slow. More than likely it took off fast due to high sugar content and being at a warmer temperature. You used 4 gallons of apple juice (I am assuming) and 10 lbs of honey. That's a lot of sugar. The churning look within...

Congrats to you and your wife, and also on your first batch of mead. It looks good so far. My first was also a cherry melomel which has been aging for almost a year. I wish I would have wrote down the date I actually started it, but I racked it the second and final time on 12/03 of last year. My...