Here ya go CMoon, pardon the wall of text but I love reading and writing. Here's a rule of thumb for how I brew my mead.
Sanitize your carboys normally like how you'd brew beer. People boil their water to sterilize but since honey has antiseptic properties, I just warm it up enough so I can mix the honey well into the water to create the must (wort). Which honeys to use? You want to maybe go to a farmer's market, get their card and ask about buying honey in bulk. People have also gone to Costco and gotten mead in bulk there. Good honeys to use are Orange Blossom and Clover, etc. Ones to stay away from (at least for right now, because they take years to age) Avocado and Eucalyptus. I'm sending you Joe's Ancient Orange Mead recipe which is a great starting one.
Here's a rough measurement.
For a dry mead: 2 pounds per 1 gallon
For a regular mead: 3 pounds per 1 gallon
For a sweet mead: 4 pounds per 1 gallon
I warm the honey containers in hot water so they'll pour easier, then I put some water in the jugs/bottles to rinse them out. I don't boil my mead because I think it destroys the flavor. I tasted mine recently and they weren't infected. But be extra careful about sanitizing all of your equipment, I use Star San and I don't fear the foam, I just pitch onto it, etc. No off flavors. Measure your Original Gravity.
Add yeast nutrient as per directions (this step is vital because honey is nitrogen poor) and/or yeast energizer.
Then pitch your yeast (I like to use Lalvin champagne yeast, I used Red Star Montrechet for my Crimzon Clover mead, but White Labs has their yeast and I'm sure that's great) Put a wet towel soaked in sanitzer over the mouth of the carboy and shake up the carboy up real good to oxygenate it. Then put on your airlock. The mead doesn't get super active like beer (i.e. a very small krausen and no blow off tube needed).
People say to let primary go for 2 weeks, but I like to let it go for 3 or 4 just to make sure. Again, check airlock activity. Then rack to secondary (taste it, it'll be really hot but will taste like a real mead in 5-6 months). At this point you can split your 5 gallon batch into 5 1-gallon jugs with different flavorings/juices/adjuncts to make melomel, pyment, braggot, etc. At this point you need to be very careful about infection since it's secondary and the chance of reinfection is a lot higher, IMHO. If you're using fruit you need a lot of it. Hard candies and schnapps are great, last year one of my mead mentors won with Red Hots that won a blue ribbon. Just be careful of the ratio so you don't overpower the mead. The flavoring should compliment, not obliterate the delicate honey flavors. Remember that this'll restart the fermentation process so let it ferment out before you bottle, if you plan to you can split off the 1 gallon experimental batches when you rack from primary. The longer you wait, the better it will get. The key to mead is patience patience patience. Your group the Maltose Falcons have a lot of great mead makers, they'll be able to talk to you more about mead.
I remember tasting one of the award winning meads at the OC Fair last year. It was like a sip of sunshine from a bottle. I think what we do as homebrewers is alchemy. Magic.
Cheers,
--the F-man
CMoon wrote:Frenetic> Actually I visit OC relatively frequently (there are some great brewers there), and I'm going to the SoCal homebrew festival if you make it.
Funny you mention mead; now that I've moved to brewing in kegs I realized I have about 3 carboys and 3 buckets I could fill up with mead. Sitting on 30 gallons of mead would be nice.
