Cup of Bliss and Snapping Sails

I have heard it said that a danger in songwriting is when your songs become too personal, too autobiographical. I can understand why that could be; I have written some songs at low points that, while very good, I'm not ready to share. When you're a sensitive songwriter-poet, one rocky spell, one terribly sad day, can send a song onto your pages that doesn't really represent your life. Some day I will share those songs, but not now. The "Wow. My Honey!" songs actually do represent my life, and I'm sharing those now. 

Cup of Bliss by Harper Meader

My song, Cup of Bliss, is an exception in a way, because it alludes to having trouble together. The line, "I don't know where we'll be tomorrow" really needs to be there, if only because it's true (and I know people deeply in love can relate) that my greatest fear is losing my Honey. What is also true, but couldn't be worked into the song, is that I know with my whole being that I can only be with Her going forward, or alone. More than anything, the song is about how as a poet I feel the depth and mystery of the world moving within me, demanding that I write it down somehow, that I sing it. Finding love has woken that side of me up in a way that I'm still coming to grips with. For me, the most powerful line, referring to a transformative dream that I will never forget, is "I'll keep my seat, the tiller-handle tightly held while the current rages."

The title, Cup of Bliss, is in fact a deliberate echo of Amos Lee, who is a major inspiration to me. My song is not really on-topic with his song, Cup of Sorrow, but that phrase has worked into my head far enough that it has become an important inner symbol of mine. It's hard to put into words, but the way we experience our world with those close to us is a cup that we drink together, and what kind of cup it is becomes an essential part of our shared experience. I'm truly blessed to share a cup of bliss.

For the musicians, I play this in standard tuning with the capo on two. Chords are Amaj7, A, E, Asus2, A7, and Ddim. I very much enjoy working with clustered chords that move together easily, and this set is very good that way.

 - - - - -

Snapping Sails by Harper Meader

When I first started playing mumblety-summat years ago, the music I most wanted to play was that of Gordon Bok, Stan Rogers, and Gordon Lightfoot. Whales and sails, hauling nets, hardened tars, schooners, clippers, sea-foam...oh, the language of sailing is so evocative, gut-level imagery for someone like me, with sailing in my genes! 

One day when I was practicing my way through all the love-songs that have come to me me recently, my Honey said, "You know, Harper, you really should write a sailing song since you love the sea so much..." I just nodded at the time, but one day at work, maybe a week later, Snapping Sails came to me, all in one sitting, and I like it very much. Of course, true to form, by the end of it, it's another love-song; I just can't help myself.

For the musicians, this one is dead easy. Standard tuning, using Am, F, Dm, G, and C. At the end of the chorus you'll need to do a little "add4" to the C chord with your pinky, and that's it. I play it two-fingered, but it strums well too.

The Glassblower's Breath and Magic in the Moonlight

"The way the scent of wild roses makes me want to pull her down, down by the ocean..."

Rumi, that seer and poet tormented by love, wrote often of the consuming power of ecstasy, the ecstasy sometimes of love, sometimes of simply touching the universe. My very favorite Rumi poem, The New Rule, has a couple of lines that have stayed with me my entire adult life. One is:

"Here’s the new rule: break the wineglass,
And fall toward the glassblower’s breath."

The other is right at the end:

"Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into,
And wind. No flag."

Don't worry, I'm not going to interpret mystic love poetry for you; I know what it means to me, and that's enough. My own song, The Glassblower's Breath, in comparison, is more accessible.  In it I'm simply reaching for the words to say adequately just how much my Love has changed my life, rescued me, brought me closer than I believed possible to that ecstatic love that Rumi knew. For her I'd surely smash the glass, and fall toward the Glassblower's breath!

For the musicians, I play this in standard tuning with a capo on only five strings at the second fret. The low note remains an E. I discovered partial capo-ing this year and have already written four songs that use it. You get the benefit of almost completely normal chords, with the added benefit of a dropped bass-note, really much cooler than it sounds! Chords are mostly variations of D, G, and A. One of these days I'll try to write up tablature for it. The bass run on the D chord is easier if you can fret with your thumb.

The second song on the CD, Magic in the Moonlight, is another of my favorites. I seem to write a lot of music late at night, sitting up in bed with my guitar, just barely touching the strings, while my Honey sleeps smiling. She tells me this is magical, that the music filters through into her dreams. All I know is that on a hot summer night, with the moon reaching through the window to light up the center of my world, words of love come to me powerfully, and that's where this song comes from.

"Oh, there’s magic in the moonlight,
When lovers sleep
With just a sheet
And a glass of water sweating by the bedside"

For the musicians, I play this with a two-finger pattern, standard tuning, capo on two. The chords are Am, Dm add 9, Em, G, Asus2, and F. It's a nice chord sequence, and not hard.

I hope you enjoy my music, and pass it on if you know anyone else who might appreciate it. My hope is to finance the next recording project by selling enough from this one. The songs waiting to be recorded are at least as good!

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!

Cordwood Masonry Acoustics

As I wrote last time, I'm excited (me, Mr. Mellow, excited, yup!) about the final appearance of some of my recorded music. Actually, 'excited' doesn't cover it; I'm having a hard time thinking about anything else, except for that new song I'm working on, which may be even better. The physical CDs just arrived, sounding great, and the cover art (photo by my Honey) came out perfectly. Since I can't think about anything else right now, I'm going to elaborate on this recording project.

Music from a cordwood masonry mead-hall!

I've been writing music for a long time, and in the last couple of years, after falling in love with my Honey, that creative impulse has just skyrocketed. Finding that my heart is where it belongs, finally, has been amazingly good for my writing and composing.

 Months ago I asked my friend James Lindenschmidt of Crafted Recordings, who has all kinds of recording expertise, for pointers about getting some recording done. To my delight, he offered to help out, volunteering his considerable skills, at least in part because he had been wanting to try some recording in our house. The mead-hall, our central room with twelve-foot-plus ceilings, cordwood walls, and an adjoining space with gracefully curved walls, has great acoustic qualities. 

His version of this may be different, but here's why I think the space is so good for music. Cordwood masonry is not flat. It has a combination of very hard and somewhat hard surfaces, curves, and little angled segments all over it. So while it bounces sound nicely (compared to a curtained room, for example), it doesn't sound at all like a tiled space or a stairwell, with that complicated echo on top of everything. Not only that, but it is a magical space, made by hand with love, using natural local materials, and it is the perfect place for me to record my music. After all, it's where I write most of it, and it's where my Honey and I first met. Unless somebody tells me otherwise, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is the first professional music recording in a cordwood masonry space!

James and I have much in common, including acoustic music, a similarly spiritual way of living in the world and a long-standing love of mead and mead-brewing. My first experience with his recording expertise was when he interviewed me years ago for his excellent blog, Bardic Brews. Back then, he made me feel very much at ease in front of a microphone, and this time was no different, except that it involved more microphones! Then he put in many hours fine-tuning everything for me. The end result is a very good presentation of my and my songwriting at its current best, and I can't say enough about how sweetly he worked with the very raw material. Please check out the music, which is downloadable from most mainstream venues, as Harper Meader's EP, "Honey."

Coming up, I'll talk in detail about some of the songs in particular, and also about why I like Bandcamp. Stay tuned...

Long Time Coming

Check out my (at last!) recording at bandcamp.com

I guess you may have noticed, if you are a regular reader of mine, that I have been absent for way too long. Sorry about that! Here's what's going on...

A long-time friend of mine, James Lindenschmidt of Bardic Brews and Crafted Recordings, offered to help me with some recording. I have been a musician for my whole adult life, playing folk harp, fingerstyle guitar, hammered dulcimer, and an assortment of other instruments, but in the recent past my songwriting went into overdrive, fed by the life changes that came with falling deeply in love. Happily, my musicianship has kept pace with my heart and my writing aspirations, and I have a steadily-growing collection of really good songs to show for it! 

I went into overdrive, consulting with my Honey about which were the best songs to break out with, practicing like mad, making sure I had the words just the way they should be...and new songs kept intruding! But eventually, just a couple of weeks ago, Jim came to Ironwood Hollow, toting all sorts of esoteric equipment, and Honey left us to our own devices. He told me that he has always wanted to try recording in our home, with its very unique acoustics that come from the cordwood masonry, the high ceilings, and the curved walls. 

Long story as short as possible, we had about three hours of good recording time all to ourselves, and in that time we recorded six of my songs. For each of them, I played my solo arrangement and sang at the same time, then went back and recorded a harmony track and a second guitar track in some cases. The one that sticks in my mind the most is when I said, "Jim, let me just hear the tune, and I'll play through the lead guitar, and see if I remember how it goes..." When I was finished, he just said, "Oh yeah, I was recording; that's great. What's next?" 

Six songs of spiritual love recorded in a cordwood masonry meadhall!

It was that kind of session. Jim's knowledge of recording and innate calm made it a pure pleasure. Followed by many hours of his skilled time mixing and mastering, one of the finest gifts I've ever received, this session has turned into an EP of a small sampling of my recent music. (An EP is an extended play, several songs, but not long enough to be called a CD). I have been working my way through the process of making the songs available, now that Jim has declared the tracks finished. Actual CDs are in process, and I'll post details about that when it's all set up. In the meantime, harpermeader.bandcamp.com is where to go to hear them. I hope you will purchase all or some of them for download! Bandcamp offers music affordably, with the option of paying anywhere from a minimum up to what you feel the music is worth. They will appear in the other usual venues shortly (itunes, amazon, etc), as that process does its thing. 

The changes in my life and my heart that my Honey has brought to me are only hinted at in these songs, but I am so pleased to be able to share a bit of that joy with you. There will be more, since I've determined to make songwriting a major part of my future. Stay tuned. Among these songs you will find a steamy celebration of midsummer loving (Magic in the Moonlight), a rousing sailing song (Snapping Sails), the perfect tune for when you're storm-stayed with your love (Snowdrift Love), a partial-capoed pattern-picked epic-love-song for the guitarists among us, with a nod to the great love-poet, Rumi, (The Glassblower's Breath), and more.

I hope that you like my work. My hope is that this project will fund the next recording, and that my love of music, words, spirit, life, and my Honey will become something more than a hobby, that it will bring a piece of that joy that is my life into the homes of many.

Okay, a final note...anywhere else you find my songs, they're likely to cost about the same, but at bandcamp, you get the lyrics for free, and you can hear the whole song right there before you decide to part with a dollar or two. Also, just sayin'...as one of my blog-readers, you know where to find me. If you play, and want to know my chords, or get a hint about the picking patterns that I use, you know where to find me. 

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!