Strawberry Pear Locavore Mead

We came home the other day to find a bushel basket filled with pears, good honest lumpy little things with all the blemishes that come from growing naturally. Dad planted those trees going on twenty years ago, and now there are more pears than he can find uses for, so he thought we might find a use for them. Well, even more of a use than all of us snacking on them like crazy as long as they last.

Pears from Dad's trees next door at Mellow Hill!

We immediately thought of mead, since it has been five years or so since I made a batch of pear mead. Rather than add oranges like last time, we decided to provide the citrus fruit content with a pound of gorgeous strawberries from the local farmer's market. Rather than add tea from across the world, we used shaved red oak bark, which has become my standard tannic acid additive. Straight from our own firewood stock is as local as it gets! 

We haven't gotten our usual bulk honey from Swan's Apiaries in Unity, but did happen to have some even more local honey (from Sidney!) found at The Green Spot, a wonderful organic market in Oakland. So except for some spices, this a wonderfully locavore batch of mead. Here's how easy it was...

Pears being prepped for mead...

We peeled and diced about three pounds of pears and started them simmering in a large skillet. To this we added the pound of strawberries and just a bit of lemon juice to help bring out the flavor. While that was all softening, we started mixing up the honey with water. This part is easy too. All we do is pour out the containers of honey, ten pounds this time, which will make a bit over two gallons, into a large kettle. Then measure two and a quarter times that much of hot water, and add that, stirring to dissolve the honey. Our tap water is beautiful well-water, so just hot from the tap works fine. If you don't have that luxury, you may want to heat up some good water from a spring or well. The hot water makes sure that you get all the honey from inside the containers.  Water measured at 2 1/4 times the honey by volume gives you a good estimate of the right balance of sweetness for a good semi-sweet mead. (If you use a hydrometer, you could fine-tune it to between 16 and 17 percent potential alcohol.) 

Pears and strawberries make great mead...

By this time a potato masher squished the fruit up beautifully, and we added that to the must. Finally we grated in a couple of teaspoons off of a chunk of red oak bark using a fine grater. If you don't have this, instead add two teabags of a standard black tea. Then some spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger), and it all went into a brewing bucket with a bubbler set up. We made sure it was well below a hundred degrees fahrenheit, and added a packet of Cote des Blancs wine yeast from Red Star. That's it. Now we simply wait for the yeast to make so much alcohol from all that honey that it dies off, let the sediment settle, and in two to four months we'll bottle and cork it, getting close to a case of mead if all goes well. This is our fourth batch so far this year. After decades of mead-making, I feel like I know what works best, what I like the most, and definitely have some varieties that I know I will always make. Still, there's always room for growth, and our recent shift to very local ingredients is a very nice trend. It will be better for us, and supports our local beekeepers and farmers!

Make Mead part 3

Mead Label sample, front and back

By now you'll have read parts one and two, and I hope started a batch of your own mead. If not, maybe you're collecting tools and ingredients, and will begin soon? The sooner you begin, the sooner you can have that well-stocked mead-cellar you've always dreamed about...

I've heard meaders describe many ways of dealing with the end of fermentation, settling, bottling, etc. A lot of those ways will work, so don't worry if you hear conflicting advice. I'm just going to describe how I do it, a method worked out for small-batch brewing through over a hundred batches during the last twenty-five years.

When you add fruit, spices, leaves, or any other solids to your mead, you have the option of removing what's left of the solids partway through the process, or leaving it all in until you pour it off. Some people add flavorings, particularly extracts and spices, after the fermentation is all finished. What I like to do is take out most of the solids, pretty much anything that's still floating, after three or four weeks. Then I close it back up, bubbler and all, and wait, without opening it again, until it's completely finished bubbling, usually at least another three or four weeks. This varies a lot, so don't worry if it's slower, as long as it's bubbling.

Bottled and ready for corks, Photo by Honey

When it's all done, it's usually cloudy with a couple of inches of sediment, made up mostly of dead yeast cells. I use a siphon hose, and carefully transfer the liquid into glass jugs, one-gallon wine bottles or something similar. I loosen the lids momentarily every day after that until there is no hiss from pressure-release, then I leave them alone in a cool, dark room to settle out. Depending on your recipe, this can take a
couple of weeks or a couple of months. Fair warning, some meads never really settle out. You can get additives to help with this, but I prefer to drink it as is, on the rare occasions that this happens.

Simple corker. Photo by Honey.

When you are ready to bottle your mead, line up enough wine bottles, use a funnel, and fill each bottle to the base of the neck, tipping the jug carefully so as not to stir up the sediment. fill bottles carefully until you start to pour sediment along with the mead, then set that jug aside and move on to the next. When all of the jugs are empty except for a bit of cloudy mead with sediment, pour them all together into one jug, and save it. It's not waste, honest! I'll come back to that.

Standard wine bottles take a "#8" cork, but a #9 will fit, just much more tightly. Of all the cork-setters out there, I prefer the simplest, which is hand-held, a plastic plunger through a guide that you just balance on top of the bottle, which is best braced on the floor between your shins. Soak the corks in warm water for at least five minutes, and they will work better.

Corking is this easy! Photo by Honey.

Making labels is fun, now that you can get full-sheet sticker paper, and color printing is affordable. I usually use a painting or photo that I like, add text over that, sometimes in a framed space, and fit six or eight labels to a sheet. Remember that the bottles should be stored in a cool, dark place, on their sides, and that ten-year-old mead should be re-corked if you want to keep it safely for even longer. 

Back to that jug of mostly sediment. Hang onto that, and when you bottle your next batch, add the clear top part of that jug to the sediment and cloudy part of the second batch. Same thing with your third batch, and after a while you'll have a big jug of Plonk, which is what we call the blend of settled-out dregs from several batches. It makes a fine table mead, or cooking mead. My Plonk label usually says something like, "A fine artisanal blend of meads, expertly concocted in our sink just last Tuesday."

Make Mead part 2

Mead Rule: 1 tea, 2 oranges per gallon.

In the previous post, we told you everything you need to know to get started making mead. Now we'll fill in some blanks, so you will understand more of what you're doing, and so you can adapt that recipe to your own tastes and style. First, about honey...

Honey is simply amazing, for many reasons. The amount of work and flight miles that bees put into every ounce is staggering. It can't spoil, all that happens is it hardens, and can be warmed to soften again. Local honey is considered by many to provide nearly magical healing and health-supporting benefits, partly because of the sampling of local pollen that is included. For the recipe we gave, we used Tupelo honey, just because we really wanted to try it, but usually we use our own locally harvested unpasteurized wildflower or clover honey. We encourage you to find your nearest apiaries and buy directly from them. You'll be getting local honey which will be a health boost for you, you'll be saving money over supermarket prices, and you'll be supporting an important local farmer.

Add yeast when it's cool enough!

As far as yeast goes, we use RedStar yeast, which is a dry wine yeast, costing pennies per packet, available at many home-brewing shops and health-food stores. RedStar makes several varieties, and we have gotten good results from the Cote des Blancs, or the Montrachet. There are many other options, just make sure not to use beer yeast or baker's yeast. Those will not be vigorous at the higher alcohol levels that you will need them for. We use one packet of dry yeast for up to three gallons, and two for up to six, the most that will fit in any of our carboys or buckets.

Wine yeast is most happy if you feed it grape juice. Since we're feeding it honey instead, we need to round out the nutrition in the must by adding a couple of things. You can buy yeast nutrients, but we like to use all natural ingredients instead. Since the two main nutrients that are missing from the yeast's diet are citric acid and tannic acid, we add citrus fruit juice and strongly steeped black tea. Our Rule of Thumb is this: for each gallon of must, add one teabag and two oranges. It really is as simple as that, and after you feel confident enough, you can certainly experiment. I have used oak bark for the tannic acid (it being locally grown), and strawberries, rose-hips, spruce tips, for the citric acid for the same reason, and you may want to use your own local alternatives.
 
The yeast will be added when you have everything stirred together, at the desired sweetness, and cooler than the mid-nineties fahrenheit. You'll keep it sealed up with a way for the gases to escape. Over several weeks, it will convert sugar and those acids to alcohol and carbon dioxide, which will be your signal about its activity. When no more bubbles occur, it's done. Just don't let the water evaporate from the bubbler. 

Some people use sulfites to stop the yeast activity. We believe that sulfites are unhealthy and prefer to let the yeast takes its natural course. The yeast will die off naturally when the alcohol is somewhere in the upper teens, +/- 17% alcohol. Then you pour it off into jugs to settle out, and bottle it when it's clear.

Reading a hydrometer for mead

You use the hydrometer to measure your mead's alcohol content. To do this you need to take two readings with it, one before you add the yeast, and one when the fermenting is all finished. There are several scales drawn on the paper inside the glass, all running vertically. You only need to read the scale that says "Potential Alcohol." To do this accurately, half-fill your column with mead that has been cooled to sixty degrees, and drop the hydrometer in. Read where the surface level comes to on the scale. That's all there is to it. Save that number, measure again when fermenting is all done, and compare the two numbers; the difference between them is your alcohol content!

Example: at the beginning, our batch measured 18.2. When it is all done, let's say it measures 2.5, that means there's a bit of honey left unused, so it's a little sweet. 18.2 minus 2.5 equals 15.7, which is the alcohol level, a bit stronger than table wine. 

Hydrometer's easy.

I like to start my mead with a potential alcohol of 17 or 18 percent. Before adding the yeast, I adjust the mix by adding water or honey so as to make it heavier or lighter, until it measures at the number that I want. If I put together everything, measure it, and it says it has a potential of 20 percent, then I add water a pint at a time because it's sweeter than I want. When I get it to measure 17 or 18 percent, that's when I stop, write it down for future reference, and get on with add the yeast and getting it into the fermenting container.  After you have some experience, and know better how dry or sweet you like your mead, you will have your own preferred starting point. 

What can we add to mead? Take chances!

What can you add to mead for flavoring? Basically, fruits, berries, and spices, all just depending on your taste. Some of my favorites have been apple (with apple pie spices), raspberry, chinese-5-spice, licorice, spiced date, pear, and blueberry. Thinking further outside the box, I've made very nice spruce tip mead, young oak leaf mead, sumac mead, maple sap mead, and then there are the braggots, which are mead that include malted barley or malt extract. Don't be shy about this, just be careful to avoid ingredients with preservatives (yeast is alive, remember), and to be aware of how much sugar is in what you're adding. Good luck, and happy meading! I'll post a part three about racking, jugging, bottling, corking, labeling, at least the way we do it here.

Make Mead, Part 1

Honey is an amazing food, and is what makes mead special

Making mead for over 25 years has been one of my greatest ongoing pleasures, and I want to show you how you can find the same satisfaction. Right away you can steep yourself in an ancient tradition, and start having your very own for the table, the fireside, gifts, or for your cellar to bring up as golden treasure years from now! Mead is a wonderful, ancient, magical beverage, essentially wine made from honey. Most people who have heard of it know it from the saga of Beowulf, and imagine mead-halls with vikings surviving winters with the comfort of vats of mead and roasting wild game. Varieties of mead have been made throughout history all over the world though. Africa, Australia, Asia...the Greeks even had a mead culture before wine caught on.

There are so many possibilities for flavors and styles that you could make a new kind of mead every year for life, and still have unexplored options. We'll show you how to begin, using the example of the Tupelo Honey Vanilla Mead that we just started. I'm very happy about this batch in particular, since it's the first time my Honey and I have made mead together! The kids were asleep, we both were coming off a long day, but we persevered, whispering instructions, trying not to bang the pots too hard, making magic by moonlight on a beautiful autumn evening in our little hollow...

Mead in the bucket, soon to be treasure in the cellar

First, let's talk about your equipment. What you need is simple and easy to find. If you have a big pot, like a canning kettle, that's perfect. A thermometer that measures from room temperature up toward boiling is helpful even though I don't recommend boiling your mead. A carboy (big glass bottle, often five gallons) or brewing bucket, with a bubbler (simple vaporlock), and a wine hydrometer, all available online and from brew-shops and health food stores all over, are the only specialty items you should have.

The bubbler is a simple tool that allows carbon monoxide to leave the fermenting container without letting air back in, by bubbling through water, either through an s-curve or out from under a little inverted plastic cup. The hydrometer is a tool that measures the specific gravity of your must (mixture that will become mead). You want to start the must at a certain level of sweetness, which means it is dense because there is honey dissolved into the water, and the hydrometer measures this accurately, at 60 degrees fahrenheit. Then, as the yeast converts the honey to alcohol, the must gets less sweet, more alcoholic, and less dense. Your hydrometer helps you know how close to finished it is, and how much alcohol you have. More on this later.

This plus water and patience makes mead!

Let's just start with the basic recipe. I can explain some of it as we go along. Here's what we used:
One gallon of Tupelo Honey, about 12 pounds.
About two and a half gallons of hot water (tap-water hot)
The juice of 7 clementines.
Three basic black teabags.
Two vanilla bean-pods.
One packet Cote des Blancs dry wine yeast.

Pour all of the honey into your pot. Then fill the honey container with hot tap-water, emptying it into the pot, twice. Next, put the three teabags into two or three cups of boiling water to steep. Squeeze the juice of the clementines (or oranges, but use five or six because they are bigger) into the pot. Cut the vanilla bean pods in half lengthwise, and scrape out all of the stuff inside with a knife, then add all of it to the pot, even the pods. (Keep out the yeast for now!) Stir until all of the honey is dissolved.

Getting the intense seeds from the vanilla pods for mead

If your water isn't hot enough, or if your honey is too solid to dissolve, you may need to heat it carefully on a stove, but don't do it if you don't need to.

If you want to keep things really basic, you are almost finished. Simply add the tea, let it cool to ninety degrees or less, and put in your carboy with the yeast, add on the bubbler, and wait. You'll make fine mead that way! If you want to fine-tune it a bit more, and have more predictable results, here's where the hydrometer comes in.

It helps to understand what's going on with the yeast. It's multiplying, living off of the honey and the nutrients provided by the citrus fruit and the tea. It's making alcohol and carbon monoxide, and the must is getting less dense (that's what the hydrometer measures), as it becomes more alcoholic. When it gets to something in the area of sixteen percent alcohol, the yeast will really be struggling. By then there will be a lot less sugar to live on, and the alcohol starts to make it hard for the yeast to live at all. It will reach a point where the yeast all dies, leaving behind a bit of unused honey and a lot of alcohol. Most wine yeast is vigorous only up to about that sixteen percent level. Bread yeast will not survive that long, which is why you won't use it to make mead.

Add oranges to mead for the citric acid, and flavor!

If you like a sweet mead, then you will want to start with something like 18-20 % "potential alcohol" on your hydrometer reading. There will be enough honey left when the yeast dies off to leave some sweetness in your mead. If you like a dry (not-sweet) mead, then you will want to start with something like 14-16 % "potential alcohol" on your hydrometer reading, or even less. To do this, you need to cool a small sample of the must to about sixty degrees, measure it in the tube that the hydrometer comes in, and add water if needed.

Harper and Honey's first batch of mead!!! <3

For example, when we made this batch, my first reading came to about 20% potential alcohol after we had cooled a quarter cup to sixty degrees and measured it. We added three cups of cold water, stirred, and measured again. We got just over 19%. Added two more cups of cold water, stirred, cooled a sample, and measured it at 18.2%. That sounded about right to us, so we stopped there. As soon as the pot had cooled to about ninety degrees, we poured it into the brew-bucket, added the yeast, and fitted the lid with a bubbler.

We'll comment on this batch as it progresses, and will follow up soon with a Part 2, some notes and observations that will fill in a lot of blanks for you, but this post should definitely get you started. Contact us with any questions, and happy meading!

The Mead Cellar

Back in the mid-eighties, I got it into my head to try to make mead, a beverage something like wine that is made from honey. I had read of mead-halls and such, and knew generally that it was an ancient and magical beverage, steeped in lore and slyly present in literature. Heorot, Hrothgar's mead-hall in Beowulf, was the location for the beginning of the saga, when Grendel burst in to slaughter the revelers. Tolkein referred to Meduseld (Old English for "Mead-hall") as the great structure built in Rohan. The Norse legend of Kvasir is a mead creation myth. Intrigued by these and other mystical references, I wanted to make some, emboldened by my father's lifelong hobby of making wine and beer. However, searching through bookstores and libraries for any information on how to make it yielded scanty results. I made the most of it, and through trial and error developed my own system, adaptable for many varieties, that produced mead ranging from good to splendid. Since then I have taught many people how to make mead, and a good number of them have gone on to produce really fine mead of their own. One even produced a very useful E-book presenting his variation of my brewing method, The Lore and Craft of Mead.

A mead cellar is a grand treasure.

This spiritual, magical craft has been a rewarding pursuit for me for most of my adult life, and last night I reached a milestone; I bottled my 100th batch of mead! Actually I got three batches out of their fermenting vessels and into gallon jugs for settling, and in the process realized that the four gallons of Licorice Blend Mead  were batch number one hundred. In a little over twenty-five years I have used a literal ton of honey. According to Wikipedia, a quart of honey is the product of about 48,000 miles of bee travel, just to put that into some perspective. Thirty-five million miles of bee-flight...

When I make mead, I am acutely aware of the sheer wonder of all that insect work that produced the honey that I am using, of the incredible number of blossoms that were visited and pollinated by the bees, the fruits and berries that grew from that work that are cousins of a sort to the mead that I am making. It is a way to be very subtly and intimately connected to the world around me, and feels nothing short of magical. Something that I believe strongly is that, since bees are such communal creatures, since the whole process that culminates in a bottle of fine mead is so beautifully woven into the natural world around me, I should make every effort to pay homage to the bees, teamwork, and the blessings of nature when I open that bottle. I don't drink my mead (other than testing as I work on it) alone. I drink it with friends, with family, taking a bottle as a host-gift, opening a bottle when someone comes through the door for my hospitality.

Newly bottled mead.

The other two batches that I worked on last night were a special batch that I made to share only with my Honey, which I find completely appropriate, the chosen bond of love being the ultimate teamwork, the ultimate magic, the ultimate blessing, and a batch of Oak Leaf Mead. The Oak Leaf Mead is a recent creation, taking a little-known craft of making oak leaf wine, and adapting it for mead.  I find it especially pleasing, a mead based on oak leaf tea made from early growth leaves. The flavor of the tea is subtle and earthy, a bit like some green teas that I've had, and the resulting mead brings even more subtlety and earthiness. It helps that oak trees are so much steeped (heh) in lore and myth, symbols of strength, portals, and honor.

Stay tuned for the occasional bit of mead lore, recipes, techniques, etc., mixed in with all the other interests here. What do you think? Maybe next time I bring a mead-treasure up from the cellar for a special occasion I can record the experience of opening and sharing it, reflect on the changes in my life since the year that I cellared it, and share a recipe or two.