Does anyone make their own mead?

[mabuzzbee]

Does anyone make their own mead? Does anyone have any suggestions on making mead? I am thinking about trying it and I was wondering if I should buy a kit ?  The kit I am looking at includes the following..

Instructions and Recipes
6 gal poly fermenter /  faucet
Hydrometer
3 oz. yeast energizer
6 oz. acid blend
2 oz. grape tannin
100 Campden Tablets
3 pkgs. Yeast
25 Corks
25 Foil Bottle Seals
25 Bottle labels

According to the company selling the kit the only other thing I will need is bottles?

[Mici]

i'm currently doing "research" mead. 5 different receipes...can't wait to see which will do the best. making mead is like beekeeping, you ask 100 people for the receipe, and guees what, you get 100 different receipes/ways. of course every each and one of them is the best/right/the only 8-)

[Paraplegic Racehorse]

I am an "experimenting" mead-maker for the last two years.

That kit looks wonderful. What're you gonna do with most of the contents? Keep it simple. Get two each of the following:
* glass fermenter (easier to clean than plastic) - 5.5gal and 5.0 gal - 6gals are less manageable for cleaning.
* airlocks and bungs
Get two because you'll want to change fermenters every so often. This is called "racking."
You presumably already have honey, so get some sanitizer and a packet of wine or champaign yeast and you're all set. The rest can wait for bottling time.

Oh, and The Compleat Meadmaker (Ken Schramm) is the most widely recommended book for good reason. Buy it.

[mick]

No mention of how much honey ?

Whats a campden tablet? they any good? might be easier to take a handful of those instead!

[Paraplegic Racehorse]

Wikipedia has this to say about campden tablets:

Campden tablets (potassium or sodium metabisulfite) are a sulphur based product that is used primarily in wine, cider and beer making to kill certain bacteria and to inhibit the growth of most wild yeast: this product is also used to eliminate both free chlorine, and the more stable form, chloramine, from water solutions (i.e., drinking water from municipal sources). Campden tablets allow the amateur brewer to easily measure small quantities of sodium metabisulfite, so it can be used to protect against wild yeast and bacteria without affecting flavour.

I usually go with about three-pounds honey per gallon of added water for a semi-sweet mead, four/gallon for sweet, and 2.5/gal dry. Other people have different tastes than I! Just for kicks, I'm even pouring off a quart out of my current batch to make vinegar with just to try it out. Making wine/beer/mead is fun and worthy of experimentation.

Have a peek at http://www.gotmead.com for more/better information.

[Markalbob]

I've made my own mead a couple times, but it's still aging.  From my own fairly exhaustive research on brewing, here's a few suggestions:


1.  Skip the kit, buy 2 glass carboys.  Also, think seriously about if you want to go 5 gallons, or only one gallon several times, or (to me) a more ideal compromise of a bit more honey and 2 3-gallon batches.  If you go 2 batches of 3 gallons, I"d get a 3rd 3-gallon carboy for racking--you sdon't want to oxidize any more than you have to, so better to rack to a carboy than into a bucket, clean the carboy you racked from, and re-rack into it.  Also, 1 gallon makes about 5 bottles of wine or mead; a 1-gallon batch makes very few bottles if you plan on giving any away plus sampling a few as they age.....

2.  For semi-sweet, many add 3-3.5 lbs honey per gallon, or add a gallon honey (12 lbs) to 4 gallons of apple juice to make a 5-gallon batch.  Technicallt this is a ceyser, but the apple ferments out without adding taste and provides nutrients for the yeast honey alone lacks.

3.  Always add nutrient, honey "sucks" for a yeast environment and you're always fairly close to stressing the yeast--make their ride as pleasant as possible.

4. Avoid champagne yeast if you want sweet mead--it ferments WAY too strong.  If you want a doughy, dry mead, or a sweet mead at 18% alcohol, use it and add more hooney, but if you want something like a "wine", most swear by Cotes de Blancs, Narbonne, or D47 as preferred mead yeasts.  Also, for up to 5 gallons, very few people bother using more than a single packet of yeast.  You can, but it does little to enhance your fermentation, just costs more.

5.  Do not boil, use campden or K meta; boiling honey is popular as a way to sterilize, but burns off most aromatics.

6.  Check the "Gotmead" website for tons and tons of information on meadmaking, including recipes. 

7.  Mead generally takes time--as a newbie, you will be antsy.  I highly recommend on the gotmead site finding "Joe's Ancient Orange" as a quick mead, making something a bit more "refined" at the same time that can age as you play with the ancient orange.....

Just avoid the kit; like beginner beekeeping kits, it's set up to provide "everything" in a one-size approach that actually fits very, very few people optimally.  My personal suggestion for "hardware", excluding the consumables:

* 3 3-gallon carboys

* 3 bungs and 3 airlocks

* racking cane and tubing

* Potassium Metabisulfite or campden

* Yeast nutrient

* Ghostex or similar yeast supplement

* Bottles:  5 wine or 10 beer bottles per gallon

* capper/corker:  Cap beer and champagne bottles (European will not cap w/ standard capper) or cork your wine bottles.

* One-Step Sanitizer for sanitizing bottles, racking cane and tubing, and primary bucket

* Primary bucket fermentor--best to start out as it allows better oxygenation, rack to carboy later......5-gallon buckets easy to find in bakeries, for 3-gallon batches; for 5-6 gallon batches, get a larger bucket from a homebrew shop.

Check around before you decide for certain you want acid blend and/or tannin, as well as for selecting your yeast; that's all part of the "recipe".

Best of luck,
Mark